Group Leadership Project: Part A - Brainstorm

Having agreed upon an original time to meet our group met at first using an online meeting tool that Lisa selected, I believe from the list that was provided in the Lab.  We found almost immediately that we were having problems getting set up and logged-on to.  Lisa picked a different meeting tool, Vyew, and we moved the meeting to that site.  Once we ironed out some technology problems, feedback, and getting everyone talking so we could hear we began our brainstorming meeting.  I captured what you see below using Jing and quickly discovered that it only picked up my voice, though you can faintly hear the others talking.  This is what the meeting looked like once we got going.  Please excuse the creepy breathing sounds.  :)



Things moved pretty quickly once we were up and running.  We chose to focus on Smart Boards as our presentation topic as we all have one in our classroom.  At first, and to some extent now, I  am not thrilled with the choice.  I do not think Smart Boards are particularly great tools as they don't integrate very well into my students centered teaching style.  I agreed to the topic in the hope that I would be able to learn more about what others were doing with them and why they felt that they were so great.  We talked very briefly about just that, what my other group members were doing with theirs.  They threw out ideas "whats that thing you do? A vortex?"  and I asked some clarifying questions to try to get a better idea about what they were talking about.  (Note, I am the only one form my group that does not teach in the same school.)  The summary of their ides sounded good and I left with the impression that we would have a good amount of interesting material to discuss and I felt certain I would learn some new things that I could use in my own classroom.  We then went on to discuss who would be doing what portion of the project.

We settled on using a PowerPoint in conjunction with Slideshare to make our presentation.  It was decided that I would tackle the intro.  Lisa would deal with some of the basics of the Smart Board, and Jenna and Laura would each put together a piece on what they were doing that was unique in their classrooms.  I don't recall the exact timeline at this point, but as I recall it was about 4-5 days out.  We made no plans at that time for a specific date to reconvene.

As I mentioned earlier we used the Vyew site to host our conference.  It was easy to get to the meeting and once we got all of our equipment working together, the meeting went well enough.  We didn't spend a lot of time playing with all of the features of the site as we were already pressed for time having spent 30 minutes trying to get it all working.  I did go back into an empty room (part of their preview of the site) later to play around with some of the tools.  The equation editor was a neat feature that I discovered during this second pass, and it is of particular interest to me as conveying math in symbols is often not well integrated into the web based technologies I have used previously.  We did as a group make use of the desktop sharing feature while looking at the requirements for this project.  Other big advantages, it worked, which was better than where we started.  The biggest disadvantage was that it did not allow us to record the session.  (My group scheduled a make-up session (which I missed) with Adobe Connect and it seems as though they didn't mange to get that feature to work with it either.  The second disadvantage was the amount of time taken from our meeting by dealing with getting everyone connected and able to hear and see each other.  We would have probably been able to brainstorm far more quickly had we just used chat feature of Google Docs and made notes in the document..  This is what I have done for the two previous group projects I have worked on and it has performed more than effectively.

I am sure that having gone through this once it would be far easier to use in the future.  It is defiantly not a tool I would use again knowing that I was pressed for time, or if it were the first time that a majority of participants would be using it.  Could not even begin to imagine what this would have been like if it were three teenagers and a teacher trying to get this set up.  :)