Week 12 Reflection

This week we used the Quality Matrix Rubric to assess our website we created for teachers. The website is an online training course for teachers to complete before their students enter Survivalcraft. The rubric was very informative. Before I go into details about the rubric, I want to talk about the process of this whole project. First I'm skeptical at doing projects with a large group. The reason is it's out of my hands whether the material gets completed and how well it gets completed. Having said that, the online training weekly site the Oltak team created is phenomenal! We have a few areas to improve on, but I was very pleased at all the work and time my colleagues used to work on the project.

This project took about 2 weeks to create and many hours to complete. I know I was on my computer 4-5 hours each day working on just my section. It's amazing how long it takes to create a successful training on MinecraftEdu tools. I created tutorial videos, screenshots of each tool and wrote a description and challenge teachers would have to complete to show they had understood my portion of the training and the content.

When I finished with my portion, I looked over other peers areas. I helped Mia and reviewed her work, after she asked me to. She did a great job. We had a little difficulty with the design of forms, but other than that everything worked out fine. During this week, we were contacted by a teacher who said when they started the training (my portion) they finished the controls page and then it stopped and didn't know where to go next. My idea was for teachers to complete each section, log into Google Community and complete the challenge. Then they would have to go back to the website and scroll down to the next section. I purposely left tabs to the next section out of my training, so teachers wouldn't scroll through the whole thing and not complete the challenges. After I received the comment from the teacher, I changed my thought process and added tabs to each section that would help guide teachers and know what was coming up next for their training. On my last section I noticed that it would stop and teachers probably wouldn't know where to go... even though it's a drop down menu at the top of our website. So, I wrote instructions and explained how they finished my training and to click on the LOTF or The Maze Runner tab to start their next training.

The process for this training was pretty intense and hectic. Again we were putting stuff together at the last minute and did a peer review with the rubric after the website address had been forwarded to teachers to start the training. I think if we would have created this website months ago and worked on it throughout the course we wouldn't have spent every waking week day we had and weekends to finish it. Also, if we would have done the peer review ahead of time, the controls tab and areas that need work on would have been spotted, instead of having one of the teachers point it out for us.

I think it makes us look disorganized and a professional website when teachers who are doing the training are the ones finding our mistake. It's important in the future, to review our work before submitting it to the personal completing the training.

For the rubric, I liked having a checklist to go by when creating our training. I think we should have gone through the rubric as a class (in detail) before creating the website and outlined areas that might not have pertained to us or tweaked for our training website. We created an online course, but not one that has assignments teachers turn in to be graded. We have challenges and assessments when teachers upload their completed challenge explanation to the Google Community.

During our meeting last night, we all assessed the website from the rubric and then were given certain areas to talk about and how we graded them. One thing I noticed is the assessment and survey page was not finished. When I went back to review the other sections of the website, I noticed the cover page for the assessment page was blank and it was available to teachers to view, so I quickly wrote a getting started section, which wasn't even my part to work on. This comes back to working in a large group. We rely on everyone to do their part. If a section can't get done on time or something happens, or theres a misunderstanding...etc communication needs to occur within the group. An email or hangout needed to have occurred for all of us to know we needed to pitch in and help get the rest of the sections completed. When someone doesn't complete their section, it brings more work to the rest of the group and stress to make sure every detail is intact in the whole project by the deadline. Also, when the website was given to the teachers to complete and some of the sections are missing it makes the whole team look bad and not efficient with their work.

While going through the rubric we noticed some objectives didn't have the same language, so we are changing it to make sure it all sounds the same "I will be able to..." We also noticed that some sections didn't have objectives and they needed to be added. Also, the guides needed to have the same outline. So Mia and Matthew are going to meet and revamp their guides to were they are designed and sound the same. I think it's important to do this throughout the whole website. Everyone had a different section, but the teachers taking the training don't know how the website was completed. If one section looks crystal clean and makes sense, then another section doesn't... it doesn't look good on Oltak.

I think overall our team did an outstanding job on the website. We have a few areas that need work and hopefully not all of the teachers have taking the training. We should be able to correct the errors and have a very successful training website for teachers to take currently and in the future.