Teacher+Reflection

Reflections on H21 Entry-- Eleanor Joyce
This was the first exposure to Prezi for most of my students and me so it was a challenge for us to make this project work.. As we worked through the ins and outs of the program I was reminded that you present the students with a challenge they embrace it and figure things out. I was amazed to see them work together and watch the leaders emerge who were able to solve the problems and teach new skills to their classmates.

I will continue to challenge students with new approaches to learning and will repeat this assignment. In the future I will make some changes such as: · Requiring them to find one political cartoon that reflects one of the concepts in the guiding question. · Spending more time on current events. Most of the Discussion Forum posts provided correct connections to happenings in the world in 2010-2011 but a few groups had difficulty seeing the relationship between events in 1898 and 2010-2011.
 * Encouraging students to draw/create images in Paint or other draw program

When students evaluated their projects and their group dynamics in their reflections they shared ideas about how to be more successful that I will share with future classes.

A great feature of collaborating and using Prezi simultaneously was students who were absent and at home could join their group during class time. While each student could be as creative as he/she desired within their assigned frame, students had to work together to create the path and write the reflection. Students could also view where their collaborators were working on the canvass by the presence of the avatars named 1, 2, 3 and 4. If a student wondered into the frame of another student, he/she was made aware there was a "guest" in their Prezi space. .

We all enjoyed this project and learned about
 * working collaboratively in real-time
 * making connections between the past and present
 * solving problems in a collaborative setting
 * being creative
 * solving problems and depending on others to help solve problems
 * developing higher-level thinking skills
 * citing references in MLA format as well
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">finding new approaches to developing leadership..