Reflection on GREAT15

If this experience with preparing for GREAT15 has taught me anything, it’s that reflecting on the choices you made can only improve your teaching, writing, and process. That being said, it’s time now to reflect on my GREAT15 experience to explore the positives, the surprises, and ways of improvement.

The positives:

• Organization of the Process: The developments leading to GREAT15 all contributed to a successful conference session. Most especially, all of the feedback that I received from peers was extremely beneficial since they were able to point out the areas in my lesson that were either good, needed to be improved, or needed to just be cut. For example, the very first presentation named all three of the frameworks I used when creating my 8th grade ELA unit plan. My peers helped me to narrow down that information so that I was able to determine the heart and soul of my presentation and make my ideas clear.

• Pace: Practicing really did make perfect. Over the three days of practice, my presentation today was the best timing and clarity wise. Because I was comfortable with the material, my voice was more dynamic compared to my first teaching. There were moments where my speed either got slower or got faster, and I fluctuated my voice.

• The technology: Teaching blendspace to the class was a success and I didn’t encounter any glitches. It was a technology that not many of the participants had worked with and, if they had, I was able to gain their insight on how they used blendspace. For example, I learned that blendspace can be used through edmodo, which means that students don’t have to have an email to log-in to that space-- they can create through edmodo.

The surprises:

• When McKenzie and I arrived at our room, we found out that a group was having a meeting in the room. They quickly gathered their things and didn’t take up too much of our time. This was just surprising to me because of how much McKenzie and I prepared. We planned for everything to be perfect, and in the end I had to remind myself that I can only control so much of the situation and just roll with what whatever else happened.

• I was surprised at how so few of them had actually interacted with blendspace. I thought that it was a common technology, but because it wasn’t I was able to change my presentation to allow them to work individually instead of in pairs. I continued with the pair discussions, but they didn’t create a blendspace in pairs.

• The feedback from Dan suggested that I needed to, “try spending less time on the teaching of how to use Blendspace and allow [them] to discover.” The reason he said that was because he would have liked to have gone through more of my questions that I was planning on asking and which I chose to skip over for lack of time. I’m surprised by this comment because I would have thought he’d suggest to me that I had spent too much time talking about my research. When I told him that, he said that he enjoyed the research aspect and that it was important for me to include that information because the technology choices that I made were dependent on the research.

The feedback:

• Tori told me that, “She was excited into looking more into blendspace to fit into an elementary classroom.”

• Something that I was very aware of during the planning sessions was the lack of conversation happening between participants. I felt like a talking head and not a facilitator. One great piece of advice he gave was that knowing the sweet spot for presentations is through practicing or presenting at other places-- that the more often you present, the more you will be aware of talking too much vs. having the participants talk too much. Chris suggested that if he were to change anything about my presentation, it’s that I should be more aware of the power of discussion.

• Bri told me that she loved it all! She liked the ideas that I had presented, and saw the different possibilities with blendspace.