Week 13: Collaborative Unit Reflection

Well, it's week 13 of the semester and Nichole and I are nearly finished with our collaborative unit. Our last step is simply to present our unit to the class via Adobe Sandbox. Yeah! Looking back now, I am very happy with how our collaboration progressed and with our final product.

I'm particularly proud of several things we accomplished with the project.  The first of which is the overall structure and appearance of our wiki.  With all the various pages and links among the pages, it seems like the wiki is fairly easy to navigate.  I'm also proud of the two multimedia aspects of the wiki that we added: the Google Map of Lamphere High School and the Slideshare plugin of my website evaluation PowerPoint.  I think these two aspects give viewers a better visual of our school and our sample lesson. I also like our use of different types of assessment, especially the reflection blogs. I think these will be good ways to get students thinking about the research process will help us teachers see where students need more help.  Lastly, I'm glad that we made several parts of the written opinion due before the final draft was due.  I think this helps students avoid procrastinating and improves the overall quality of the final product.

Despite the many things that went well with our project, we did encounter some challenges along the way.  One of the hardest parts for me was simply trying to visualize what the end product would look like.  This was due in part to the fact that I'm not super familiar with law or how Nichole runs her classes.  I also had difficulty using Turner and Riedling's instructional design process (needs assessment, learner analysis, etc.) because I am so used to doing these things in my head as I plan a unit that I was a little out of practice when it came to writing them out.  Finally, I also had a bit of trouble trying to copy and paste text into the wiki.  Apparently, PBworks doesn't like it when you transfer html code back and forth.  Fortunately, I took the website development class this past summer and was able to fix most of the problems.

Overall, this project has really helped me gain a better idea of how school librarians should approach and execute a collaborative project with classroom teachers.  In particular, I learned that it is very important for both collaborators to be flexible.  For Nichole and I, being flexible meant adjusting to each other's crazy schedules.  Throughout the semester, there were times when I had to cancel our planned meetings and other times when she had to cancel.  Besides being flexible about meeting times, I also think teachers and school librarians should be be flexible when it comes to the actual lesson or unit planning since there are often many ways to teach the same thing.  What is important is not necessarily how concepts are taught, but simply that they are taught and that students are learning.