CandiceN_TIGS Reflection of Flatclassroom Project

[CandiceN_TIGS]

From about April this year the year eleven Information Processes and Technology class at TIGS have been working on a project called the Flat Classroom Project. This project involved the year eleven students to work together with other students from other schools all over the country and work together in teams. The way we interacted with other students is through the flat classroom ning each group had a different topic and my group’s topic was Mobile and Ubiquitous (M&U).
The Flat Classroom project required participants to join the Flat Classroom ning (mentioned above) and the Wiki. The Wiki is the place where students went to when they needed to know how to do something (e.g. upload a video) as the wiki provided us with guidelines and help for the project. The ning is a site that we used where you can leave comments for your team members; invite your team members to be your friend. The ning could also be used like MSN or other chartrooms as you could also chat on the ning with other members. This was just to list a few of the ning’s functions .There was also the RSS feeds but unfortunately I didn’t use them at all so I can’t say anything about them.
Throughout this project I have found both the ning and wiki to be very useful and have used them very heavily. The reasons I found the Flat Classroom ning useful is because the ning (with the functions it has that I have mentioned above) has made it very easy to get in contact with my teammates for an introduction at the start of the project and whenever one of us in the team needed help. Communicating by leaving comments was a major part of this assessment task as it wasn’t very easy to talk to our teams as we all lived in many different countries. Unfortunately while doing this project two schools dropped out and one of the schools that dropped out was the school that a member of my team went to. This left my group one short. As I have mentioned I mainly used the ning for leaving comments for my team members to get in contact with them or just to keep in touch.
The reasons I found the wiki very useful is because like I have mentioned the wiki gave us guidelines for the project. There were videos of how to do things such as uploading a video on to the ning. These videos on the ning were also very useful as they were very helpful and being able to see it done helped me when I actually went and did the task.
While doing this project, from time to time we received e mails from our teacher. I found this very helpful as personally the e mails mainly being about recommendations of how to do the assessment and where we could improve on it helped me to put hard effort in to the reminder for when the different due dates for the different sections of the project were becoming close. This also helped me as it made me be able to organise approximately how much time I am going to spend on each section (so I have it completed by the due date) and gave me a reminder of due date when they were approaching. We also got positive feedback from other students doing the Flat Classroom Project and the effect this had on me is that it made me feel like my work was being appreciated and acknowledged.
One of the requirements of this task was that the student makes a multimedia artifact about their topic and subtopic (how a particular area e.g. Arts Entertainment and Leisure). My topic as I stated above was Mobile and Ubiquitous and My Subtopic was how Education had impacted Mobile and Ubiquitous. For my multimedia artifact I decided that I will be doing two interviews to find out the answer to the question of how has education impacted Mobile and Ubiquitous. Out of the two interviews one interview was going to be an informative interview and the other interview was going to be an interview with a vampire. I decided to do an interview with a vampire to add humour to my multimedia artifact so the viewer would want to keep watching.
While making my Multimedia Artifact I had to overcome many problems as can be expected with video making. The problems I had to overcome included the fact that my first interview which was the informative interview was not the same file type as my other video clips. Since it wasn’t the same type of file Windows Movie Maker wouldn’t let me import it. To make Windows Movie Maker let me import the file I went to www.zamzar.com and converted the file type. After doing this Windows Movie Maker let me import the clip but whenever I played that particular clip Windows Movie Player always became unresponsive and froze. To overcome this I decided to take that interview out and replaced it with the outsourced video that was done for my by Abdulaziz. After this I just had to make the movie and publish it to the ning. Once the movie was made I went on to the ning to publish it there but it said that the ning was currently unavailable. I easily overcame this problem by going on to the ning a few hours later. When the ning was working again I added my video to the ning and it took awhile as my internet at home is currently very slow but this didn’t matter too much.
Though I am very happy with the way a multimedia artifact turned out in the end if I could do some things differently I would. These things include minor things such as some mistakes I made in the dialogue and maybe adding more information about how Mobile and Ubiquitous has impacted upon education. On the whole I learnt a lot about video editing. Things I learned included how to actually use Windows Movie Maker and though editing videos is very fun it can also be very time consuming as well. Due to the many problems I had to overcome in making my video the majority of my time outside of school was taken up by me trying to fix the problems. As time consuming as it can be making a video is very fun and I would like it very much if we got another chance to make a video again in the IPT course it would be very good.
Overall the whole Flat Classroom Project has been a very time consuming but fun project that I am really thankful to Mr Madsen, my teacher for giving us the chance to do a project such as this one. This project gave participants many skills such as collaboration and communication skills as these two things were very necessary to complete this project. It has also given us a chance to learn how to do things such as make videos by requiring the students to make a outsourced video for and like I have said a Multimedia Artifact. I have really enjoyed working with all my team mates and hope if we ever get the chance to do a project like this again that I can work with them for a second time.