Experiencing Group

For SEDU 183 the class was assigned a group research project. For this project we were to find a group of three other people to work with, who had the same major as us. Then, we were instructed to create a topic that is related to our majors.

My group decided to do a research project on the importance of play in Early Childhood Education, and some of the negative effects to the over use of technology.  With our majors being Early Childhood Education this was an important topic to research and discuss.


 Our next instruction was to write a four to six page paper based on our research. My Group decided that there were four different aspects of a child, that effects the development and success of a child, so we agreed that each individual would be in charge of researching and writing about each aspect. This idea was very efficient to writing the paper. 

To achieve this plan we used a website called Google Docs. This website allows a group of people to be linked to a webpage, with the document, and they are able to make changes to the document, view the changes that are made by other group members, and view the document in progress. This is a very effective website for completing group work. One problem my group faced was having the ability to meet as a group in person because of our conflicting schedules. Google Docs gave us the ability to share our ideas without having to find one time that we were all available.

The next assignment for this project was the presentation. My group and I had more of a difficult time preparing for this portion of the project because of our conflicting schedules. Eventually, the whole group was able to meet at the school's library and we began the creation of our presentation. For the presentation we chose to use a website called Prezi.com. This website allows the user to create a presentation similar to PowerPoint, but makes it more interesting by zooming into various spots on the page, rather than just switching slides. At first, we found this website to be difficult to manage, but once we played with it for a few minutes; we were able to create out presentation.

This project was difficult because of the conflicting schedules of all of the group members, but it was untimely a positive experience. I not only learned new websites that I could use later in my education and in my teaching career, but I also learned collaboration. I will have to use collaboration all throughout my teaching career, so this is a very important tool to have. I am glad that I had the opportunity to collaborate with my classmates and create a successful project. 

PowerPoint (Terrific)

On Tuesday September 19th I was assigned to create a Narrative. The point of this Narrative was to introduce what creating a lesson plan would be like. It also allowed me to get used to using the Pennsylvania Department of Education website. This website holds all of the teaching standards for every grade level in the state of Pennsylvania. www.pdesas.org is an important website for teachers in Pennsylvania because it allows teachers to create a lesson plan that is appropriate for both the age and development of their students. My Narrative

Along with the Narrative, I was assigned to create a PowerPoint that would assist with teaching the lesson I created. My lesson plan was for  first-grade students, and they were to write three sentences about a topic that they chose. In order to generate a PowerPoint that not only assisted with the understanding of the lesson, but also allowed the students to learn from interaction with the project, I incorporated a series of links that each student was to fallow. Each link lead to the next set of directions for the short project that they were to finish. In the PowerPoint there was a choice of three different writing prompts and each child was to choose one prompt and write three sentences about it.  When they chose a topic that was interesting to them, the next slide showed some ideas of what they could say. When they were finished with the set of directions from that slide each student was able to move forward for the next set of directions or backwards to read over the topics again. 

Below is an example of the PowerPoint I created. The pencils allowed the student to move to the next slide, the arrows allowed the student to go back one slide, And the links in blue allowed the student to move to the slide that corresponds to the chosen topic. My Power Point 

Having an interactive PowerPoint such as the one that I created, is a great way for students to learn actively and at their own pace. I greatly enjoyed doing this project because it opened my eyes to the available possibilities of active learning when introducing a PowerPoint to the classroom.  Before this project, all I knew about power points was that one can write down bullet points of an idea when presenting a project. Now, I know that one can create links to other slides, or outside sources, and add pictures with animations to make it more interesting and create an interactive lesson around it.