Blog Prompt #5: Personal Project Reaction

Throughout the duration of the PEDs project, I made many contributions. I researched possible PEDs to use in the classroom and helped my group decide which kind of technology would be best to use for the class. Then, I helped write and edit the initial proposal and thought of some questions for the survey. When we went to the class to run the activity, I helped individual students in the class who were confused as to what to do or how to enter the online activity. After running the activity, I assisted with writing the project report.

I think our PEDs project was a success in the moment that we ran the activity, but not in the long-term. Our goal was to improve student engagement and their understanding of the topic (exponential functions.) The activity we introduced was a useful tool that we thought the students would be interested in and continue to use in order to enhance their understanding of the concept. The majority of the class was engaged in the activity and seemed to understand the concept easily, but it did not seem likely that they would be interested in doing the activity later, on their own. Therefore, I don’t think the activity will benefit their overall learning experience in the class.

If I could go back in time and change something about our PEDs project, I would make sure we communicated more with the teacher of the class we worked with (Mr. Daoud). There were a lot of misunderstandings when negotiating a day to go to the class and run the activity. There were many occasions when we thought we were supposed to go to the class, but realized that he was not expecting us to come on that day. Also, on the first attempt to run the activity, we realized that the class hadn’t learned enough about the topic to understand the activity, so we were unable to do it on that day. If we had explained everything to the teacher clearly, in the beginning, we would not have had these issues.

For next year’s IDC class, this project could be improved by reducing the amount of members in each group. In my group, there were six members, which made it difficult for everyone to make equal contributions and participate in all the activities. There were many times when one or two members of the group didn’t have anything to do, as only a few people were required to work on the task. There should not be more than four people in each group, so that everyone can be productive all the time, and no one will be left out. This is my only suggestion for improving the project, as every other aspect seemed to work well.

Blog Prompt #1: PEDs Project Reaction

This is a great project, in my opinion, because we get to help teachers and students view technology in a new way and introduce new forms of it to enhance student’s learning experiences in the classroom. I like how we get to work together as a team and are able to share our ideas, as well as get insight from others’ ideas. Working on this project as a team improves our teamwork skills, and the planning aspect of the project helps us improve our time management skills. These are good skills to work on, as we can apply them to other projects we do in this class, as well as tasks in other classes.

Something that bothers me is that the large size of my group may not be ideal for this particular project. My group has seven members and each task has only been assigned to a few members. The rest of the members have to wait for certain tasks to be completed before they can work on their assigned task. At times I feel like people in my group (including myself) do not get a chance to contribute because the task currently being worked on only provides work for two or three people, and the other five or six members do not have anything to work on. This issue is specific to my group, though, as the other groups only have four or five members, so they most likely do not have this problem.

Some of my roles in the group are to help create the diagnostic survey, research possible apps and choose an idea for the activity, as well as participate in introducing the app to the class, along with the other members of my group. So far, I have only helped create the diagnostic survey, because my group has not started working on the other tasks yet.

I am not sure what to expect the outcome of the project to be, but I hope that the teachers and students will have a better understanding of how PEDs can be useful in the classroom, and that they will continue to use the technology  we introduce and share it with other teachers and students. My group and I are planning to work very hard on this project and I am confident that our hard work will make a difference.