Group Leadership Project

What tool did your group use to deliver the PD tutorial?  Why?
We decided to create a tutorial on Google Apps for Education (GAFE).  Our group was intrigued by the usefulness of Google Apps and how they can be incorporated into classrooms and school districts.  Our tutorial is composed of three main sections.  The first section is an introduction of GAFE to educators who many not be aware of its capabilities.  The second sections explores what we called the 5 C's of GAFE - curiosity, collaboration, creativity, communication and critical thinking.  We tried to answer the question of how Google Apps can encourage each of the 5 C's in classrooms and through a district by describing some of the Apps and how they could be used.  The third section takes a closer look at using forms within Google Docs and how Flubaroo can be used to help grade student responses.

We decided to use iMovie to put together our final presentation.  We thought that iMovie would be the easiest tool to use that we all had in common.  I had the pleasure of compiling each of our sections and adding the voiceover.  After a big learning curve I found that it was easiest to import small sections of our presentation at a time and complete the associated voiceover.  The biggest problem for me in the end was getting our video under 10 minutes.  It helped that we had three main sections so that I could trim about a minute off each section so no one person's work would be edited more than someone else's.


What did you learn during the development process of the final product?
The most valuable lesson I learned from putting together such a large video was practicing voiceovers.  The more I read the script out loud, the quicker I got with fewer mistakes - I did twist my tongue a couple of times :)  Also, once the video was done I found out that Flubaroo is pronounced flew-ba-roo not flub-a-roo as I thought.  I guess I just had Flubber on the brain!

What would you do differently if you had to develop a similar product again?
I don't think I would change anything with the content of our project.  I would change the way in which our group communicated.  This became a case where technology was not helpful!  We had so many issues with conferencing and chatting that it became distracting to our project.  While we worked well on our individual parts, it was hard to get together to compile our work together so our work fell on one person.

As frustrating as this project became, I learned a lot and I am thankful for that.