Artefact #2 - MDDE610 group project

Artifact #2 - MDDE610 group project

The MDDE610 group project was where we had to develop a presentation and deliver it on the topic of an educational technology. In our group, there were 6 individuals from varying backgrounds. I found this experience to be very invaluable in my knowledge development and teamwork capabilities. The reflection will describe these experiences and the invaluable lessons learned. 

Reflection

Before I started the MDE program, I didn’t know what kind of students would be enrolled in the program, such as, where they were located, what their career background looked like, what level in their career they were, their age, etc. As I got deeper into the program and took various courses and worked in different groups, I began to get a clearer picture of the diversity of my fellow students. In the MDDE610 course group project, my group members’ backgrounds really summed it up. Our group consisted of a teacher; a manager for an ESL program at a college; an IT manager for a college; a business owner for education delivery; and a new teaching graduate. In my opinion, our team brought a lot of experiences from different sectors and backgrounds. All of my group members were people with families, so they brought a lot of organization skills to the table. Communication was very critical and the execution of effective communication was perhaps the best I had seen in all of my group project experiences in the M. Ed. program. We utilized Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs) to share documents; Skype for meetings, one person always took meeting minutes, and the agenda was communicated prior to each meeting. In essence, the group was well organized and communication was usually very effective (3.1, 3.3, 3.4).

The other valuable lesson I learned from this project was working with such a large group of people and the importance of documenting our meeting minutes. Our group operated with formal meetings and the next tasks for each group member were documented. In addition, the group experience highlighted each individual’s strengths and everyone learned how tech-savvy each of their group members was. Our meetings initially started off with Skype, and eventually we started using Elluminate Live as our tool for collaboration, which was the same tool we used to deliver the presentation. We also used Google Drive to share documentations, and email was used to inform all members of upcoming meetings and to provide summaries of each meeting (1.8, 1.9, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.7, 6.3, 6.5).

I found this course to be really intense as it involved analysis of a lot of technologies, and the challenge of working in a group of 6 people was also quiet difficult but nonetheless very valuable (6.5). Prior to this course, I would look at learning technologies a little differently and would generalize them into categories like K-12; higher education; or for both sectors (1.4, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9). Our group selected Edmodo as a tool to analyze as part of the group project (4.6, 4.8, 3.5). Initially, I figured that Edmodo was a K-12 market technology because of how the company chose to market it, however, after we had gotten deeper in our analysis, we realized that the design, functionality, and interface of Edmodo can be used for different types of learners, irrespective of their age or education sector (3.5). This allowed us to understand the importance of thorough analysis and reviewing the technologies for their features, and not for how the majority of the user’s used them. The biggest lesson learned from this was that technologies can be applied to various situations. Technologies are tools that have as much creative potential as the person using it.