Week 9 Reflection - All Stars

How did you and your partner divided the work? Did that work out? What were the pros and cons of working with a partner at a distance?

First I would like to say thank you to my partners (Andrea Payne & Sean Telles) who did a remarkable job in our All Stars project. We initially emailed each other on what platform we should use to communicate and collaborate with each other and most importantly what subject and grade level we were targeting. After several dry runs through emails, moodle discussions, and google docs we ended up using Google Wave. However it was through the combination of 'traditional' email and google wave that we decided on the grade level and the specific social studies content we want to focus on.

Through Google Wave, we were able to brainstorm ideas as an ALL STAR team. We never really assigned specific tasks or work to each other, but that's part of the ALL STAR team dynamics. We worked together as if we known each other for years. Andrea and I did the initial leg work and Sean made the final touches and transfer it to the Wiki Page. We have tons of great ideas but were limited as we want to stick to the 5th grade level as most of the other ideas were too complex even for middle school students. As you can see from our final curriculum unit (All Stars) we integrated few of web 2.0 tools that 5th grade students are able to use and understand such as NING, Google Earth, SketchUp, and YouTube.

Throughout the course of these two weeks, we mostly communicated through Google Wave and only once we set up a time to have a 3 way call to each other through Skype (we didn't want to use our minutes.. hehehe). That worked perfectly as we talked to have the final finishing touches to our All Star curriculum unit. One of the pros of working at a distance is that we can research and do our own task at our own pace as long we were able to accomplish our final curriculum unit. As for the con, well..hmmm.. digging deep for a con and the only think I can come up with is that there might be the factor of waiting for people to respond to your wave/email which can also happened in any traditional classroom group projects.

Overall, I love our end result of our project. We worked great as a team and I would have never asked for a better team mate. Thanks Andrea and Sean!