Dear PPU students,

we hope that all is well and that you are learning a lot !

Please remember to post your first 600 word reflection document by the end of this week  (week 44) ! ( See Fronter for details). This will allow the others in your group to place their comments/reflections on your experiences.

Best wishes – Agnes and James

This week both of my English classes have started working on a group-based digital presentation project on South Africa. The competence aims I have chosen to focus on for this are «communicating through digital media» and  «present and converse on relevant and interdiciplinary topics».

The teaching plan involves choosing to either make a film or a photostory of roughly three minutes length. These films would then be uploaded to itslearning and from there put on youtube from an account administred by the teacher.They have two full school sessions to work on this project in addition to working at home. Further, they had to choose between four different assignments to base their film or photostory on. The assignments are:

1. Present the Boer War.
2. Contrast the South Africa of today and the South Africa during the period of apartheid (1948-1989).
3. Present the life and work of Nelson Mandela.
4. Make a timeline of South African history.

Working in groups of three or four and having access to mobile phones, laptops, library resources and software for movie editing and photostory (windows software) they got going pretty quickly.

The challenges so far include, but are not restricted to:
-Legal/privacy issues with uploading film and pictures by/with pupils on a public website.
-Challenges in working on the project outside of school as students live in different places and have a full schedule with activities after school.
-Groups organized by pupils sometimes cause unwanted work-ethic developing in some of the groups.
– Apart from assignment two, none of the assignments give room for reflection, and thus effectively stops students from getting a top grade.

The legal/privacy issue I have planned to handle by setting up the youtube-account to restrict viewing access and comments entirely for anyone but the pupils themselves. But there is also a chance I will drop youtube from this project entirely after reviewing the films. If that is the case then I will make a point out of explaining to them how their movies could have been a great educational resource for other students, and how youtube is not just a website to watch silly cats or music videos. Another alternative would be censoring videos that gave away pupil identities.

Time is always an issue, and for one of my two classes more so than the other as this Friday is a teacher’s planning day and they miss out on their second English session of the week. As for handling the distance between pupils when working from home I have suggested facebook, twitter, skype and e-mails to communicate and send media files back and forth for editing. This seems largely to have helped, and one girl even told me she had finally got permission to make a facebook account from her parents if she used it for school-work.

I should have picked groups myself. While I can see clearly now that they have started working that many groups are doing very well, there are a few that fall a bit behind. To circumvent this problem I have spent a bit more time with these groups in order to guide them onto the right track and to speed up their work.

Because I realized the assignments should have been better and allowing more from the students, I will not be grading them, but giving comments and feedback to each group through itslearning.

Next week we’ll see what we end up with and I hope I get to add a great success to this blog.

Stian