Group Leadership Project

Our groups final presentation, a screencast of a Google Presentation, is available on youtube at the following here.

Our group used Google Presentation to make a slideshow that featured mostly images that acted as a guide for the eventual screencast done by Elise. We organized our script in a Google Document and also did our storyboard as a Google Presentation, making our project quite Google-centric in its setup and eventual finished format. We used a screencast because as a group we figured that doing a tutorial through a screencast was the easiest and most informative method available for us to use without going to deeply into video. Screencasts are easy to produce and there are many free creators available on the internet, so the technology worked in our group very well.

I learned a lot about Google Sites during my development of the final part of this project. I had used Sites once or twice in the past for CEP 811, yet I was by no means fully proficient with the software. I challenged myself by making a few websites by myself and editing a few templates, and found that Sites was easy to use yet difficult to tutorialize because it is such a powerful and in-depth program compared to the other Google Docs. Since I had limited time in our presentation, I really had to search for features that would be useful for teachers as opposed to concentrating on doing a full tutorial of Sites itself. I really got to know my way around the program well due to that fact, and I learned some great things such as the Google Docs embedding feature and collaborative features that allows for others to edit a created web site as well. I would also say that overall our group communication was pretty good and it was a learning experience keeping in contact and communicating with all of the group members. Our group was well organized and everything went pretty smoothly.

If I had to do a similar project again, I don;t think that I would change that much. We used Google Presenter to do our presentation portion, which was great because of the collaborative features. Everyone could see what each other was doing, which was great for editing and creating the best possible product. Google products are especially great for that aspect. We also had a few chat discussions within the docs themselves, which is another feature that was incredibly cool because we could all follow along as work was being done.One thing that I would do differently is to change the main method of communication from email to something else. Email is a great method of communication but the organization of it isn't the greatest. Having a sort of discussion forum like the one on Angel (but not Angels) would be preferable. All in all the project went smoothly, I enjoyed working with my group members, and that translated into a good experience overall.