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.