Group Project Completed!

This was a challenging project for our group, but in the end I think we've created an excellent construction of what we feel is important about Community and Collaboration. We created a website called Professional Learning Communities and we addressed this quite academically, which doesn't really surprise me, given our group members: Denise, Deborah, Sarah and Allison. We're a rather committed (in a good sense), knowledgeable group interested in learning and committing to doing our share and following timelines.

The assignment began exploring the larger issue of Connections and my part was about the Social Networking connections that students are making as Net Generation learners. Somehow our title then morphed into Professional Learning Communities, but I hope my part still fits okay. Social Networks are Learning Communities, especially if teachers use some of the recommended ones like http://www.iearn.org or http://www.takingitglobal.org.

Anyway, it was too late as things went on to discuss the change with the group, so I'm living with it as it is...an excellent resource that I know that I'll use in the future.

We had a few aggravations with issues like browser problems. For some reason when you view the site you may see ? marks instead of "quotation". This, in addition to the ads on the page, finally helped me decide to use iWeb rather than Freewebs. There are a lot of great features in Freewebs, but the browswer issues were problem.
You can check it out at http://www.freewebs.com/seeirwin/ if you like.


I wondered too, whether I should have volunteered to take on the technical side of things on the website, although Sarah did a fantastic job and she volunteered to take it on early on in the project. It was hard to help without a login to the site, and I would have done some things a little differently, for example, linking our audio and video using the template links for media to avoid them looking just like another weblink.

My proofreading could have been done a bit better as well. In my hurry to make the content deadline, I neglected to proof my work well enough, which led to a headache for Sarah I think.
The onslaught of email for her must have been frustrating from the 3 of us and some messages were missed which created some confusion. Next time I would proof better and suggest revisions by section and more communication (probably IM would be best) between the writer and the web editor.

All and all a successful project, and a great learning experience!