Wow, what a week this has been! My team (Kim and Pete) decided to teach 'Moodle' (a course management system) by using MovieMaker. But, we ran into a lot of challenges trying to do this. Kim and I work off PCs and Pete uses a MAC. The three of us split up the work: I would find the key features of Moodle and their relevance to education, then pass that info to Kim, who would write up the script for Pete; then he would use MovieMaker to record the presentation. None of us have ever used either of these programs before and had no idea that we'd run into platform problems and not being able to download software. We all downloaded Moodle, and each of us for saw something completely different! Pete ended up staying up until 3:00 am one morning just trying to download all of Moodle's many features. I even had problems seeing the screen shots that Kim uploaded to the dropbox because they had a double extension and they couldn't be open.
This project was definitely an experience; and an example of how everything that can go wrong with technology, DID. I think this is the problem with using technology no one is familiar with---we run into problems and we don't really know how to go about fixing them. And my team did start a little late so that also limited the amount of time we had to figure all of this out. If I had to do it all over again I don't know if I wouldn't still choose Moodle because without ever having used it, I still wouldn't know what issues I might encounter, but I think I would've suggested doing the actual work differently so that we were all on the same page (literally and figuratively).
Unfortunately, I'd have to say that I didn't learn anything from this assignment--not even how to use another technology--since we all did different aspects of it. Isn't hindsight always 20/20?
tm
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