Monday, March 25, 2013
It Is Not Always "Every Man For Themselves"
Working as a group is inevitable. It is not something I like to do within my classes but it is something that I have learned to do. I am not about taking leadership and keeping it but rather taking leadership and sharing it. I created the document and shared it with the rest of my group partners. I enjoyed this group work because it was helpful to see other technologies that my group members came up with. As English majors some of us clung to the technologies that we can use in order to define and look for synonyms, those options that are available to us to help assist in our teaching. Others of us focused on the technologies that allow the students to become creative within the classroom rather than the standard projects. This group work gave me good insight to new ideas that I will be able to use within my classroom and change the way that teaching is done. I was very impressed with how little overlap of technologies we had. Even though overlap was acceptable on this assignment I think that our group did an amazing job on finding as many different technologies as we would. When we did repeat them, we all had different reasons for them. I absolutely believe that this is a document that I will hold onto and use in the future, and as a teach player, share it with other teachers that I would be in contact with.
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I agree with you in that I've learned a lot from all the other members in our group. Compared to other group projects I've done in the past, this was one of the easy-going, successful ones yet. I must say that I appreciate you creating the document and helping me when I didn't receive it. That takes initiative and leadership on both parts. I was surprised at the amount of diversity everyone had. I thought 10 technologies each person was cutting it a little close, but we all managed to come up with ones I would never have thought of. I also want to hold on to this list. Who knows? When we all become teachers (knock on wood), we might look back on this one particular project and say: "Hmmmmm, let me try to incorporate this sometime in the future." Good job!
ReplyDeleteI agree that sometimes group work can be more difficult, especially if everyone has opposite schedules! Like your group, my group was able to share this assignment equally because it was done through Google docs. Group work also provides opportunities to see other opinions and research that they were able to bring to the table! Group work can be a learning experience as well as an experience that helps us learn how to work together.
ReplyDeleteAs I read your blog post, I was unsure of what you meant by “group work;” it seems a little What do you define as “group work?” It seemed as though your group work consisted of reading what other members contributed. I had the same experience with the project. I don't mean to sound aggressive when I ask you this – it's an honest question – but do you consider this group work? Personally, I don't. I think that group work involves an exchange of ideas, a morphing of ideas, and creation of something new; in this project, we only exchanged ideas. Then again, maybe this is group work, but a different kind of group work. Would you use this sort of project in a classroom? If so, how? Personally, I would use this assignment for its product (the spreadsheet) rather than its process (the group work).
ReplyDeleteI like how you emphasized that while you took initiative with the assignment, it still was a group project, with each of us having to do the same amount of outside work in order to complete it. we each brought something a little different, each of us focusing on technologies we could use in our own classrooms for a variety of reasons. It's so easy to just take credit and say "Well, I started everything, I got everyone organized." But the reality is that in a group situation someone has to take the first step in order to begin the work, and being that first person is a commendable but necessary job. It made the project so much more streamlined, because the initiative was already taken and we just had to do our parts. It's how projects work in the real world. There is usually a leader, but the work put in by everyone else should be the same.
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