I've finished my part of the project. Larisa is just starting to put in her pages on the website (which are Safety, Cross-curricular links, ukulele tutorial and half of the repertoire page), but hopefully it will be live by tonight. I'll make a blog post with a link to the website when it's all done. The last thing I did was write up the whole page called More Maker Movement.
Once Larisa finishes, all that's left is a final check for spelling and grammar and checking all of the interactive bits of the website work.
Yesterday (14/06/20), Larisa set up a Zoom call with Phil Nanlohy where we were able to ask him lots of questions about safety and how we could potentially put this project into schools. He gave us lots of insight, and if this project is ever implemented at a school, the knowledge we gained from him would be invaluable. However, I think that this was organised too late in the project. In our videos and tutorials we did not go through various ways of how to make it safe in a classroom. Larisa is currently working on a page for safety which I think will definitely be valuable, but I think it would have been better to show all the safety steps in a video. The safety requirements also change depending on the set up of the classroom, the tools available at the school and what age the students are. He also gave us some wonderful insights in how to engage primary teachers in the Maker Movement. They key is to relate the learning to numeracy and literacy, as 70% of the curriculum in NSW is dedicated to these fields. One really valuable piece of advice Phil made is to really think through what is teacher prep and what is student made in the project. What can the teacher do before class to remove any particularly dangerous steps or have the project finished in an appropriate time frame. Its good to find a balance so the student still feels like they have ownership over the project.
Like any good design or maker movement student, I thought I should finish off with a little evaluation and reflection. I have loved this subject, because we got to learn about so many different things. We also got the option to look further into technologies and pedagogies that interested us. I have kept mostly up to date with all my blog posts on the weekly content and was able to extend my learning in quite a few of the weeks. Establishing a PLN over twitter has also been very fun. I have loved engaging with my peers through this (particularly during isolation), and it also been a great way to keep up with what everyone else is doing on their projects and learning.
Now onto the project. I've loved it! Having the freedom to choose whatever project I liked was so refreshing, and I got to use and refine some skills I have that I haven't used since high school and also develop some new ones. The project also encompassed a wide range of skills and technologies that we have learnt this semester. I personally have really loved creating the website. Learning to use Wix has been really great, and putting the website together has felt creative and fun. (The only issue is there are a few problems with saving at times...) Working with Larisa has also been great, and has allowed the website, resources and instrument designs to be of a much higher standard than if we were working by ourselves. I knew that this was going to be a big project, and I did not want to leave any of it to the last minute. I have been working on it very consistently since Larisa and I had the first idea which I hope is reflected in the consistency of my blogs. This also allowed me time to have fun and experiment with lots of different things, even if they didn't end up in the final product. Doing it early also allowed lots of time for things to go wrong, which they did, but I had the time to fix them and finish before the due date. Larisa and I do work a little bit differently in this regard, as she tends not to finish tasks as early as I do, but we have constantly communicated and we have worked together really well (our Facebook messenger is basically spammed everyday by this project). The instruments play really well and I think they really could be made in a classroom and I hope I get to do this is in my own teaching when I graduate! If I could do this project again I would change two things:
I would have had the conversation with Phil earlier. It was so valuable and I think we could have done it more justice. However, we were only working with what we had due to Covid19, so we don't actually own all the tools needed to make each step safe. I really want to work on this in the future though, so we have a general safety plan for each instrument if they're ever built in a classroom.
I would have liked to learn more about video recording and editing to make our videos look a little more professional. While I was working on time, I did only have a limited amount of time to edit both videos. I would have liked to spend more time learning more techniques to boost this part of the project.
Overall, I am very pleased with the final result. There were only two of us working on it, and I am very pleased with the output we managed. Now all that's left is the Presentation of Learning, I hope everyone likes it!
I'm itching to post our live website... it's soon, it's soon, it's soon.