A Reflection On Our First Presentation

After four and a half weeks our first PBL is done! It has been a wild experience. Before this class I had no idea what PBL stood for, let alone how to present one, and yet here I am, one PBL for the portfolio and one more on the way. When I was sitting with Allison, Nick and Andrew, our togas tastefully tossed over our shoulders, I had no idea what to expect. I had no prior knowledge about what other people had planned, so I was, as I believe we all were, hoping for the best and praying to the gods of academia that we were on track. In the end, it seemed we did a great job. We all played our parts, the website looked great, our skit went smoothly, and our PPT was a big success (I promise there was sound! It's there!). Judging from our celebrity judging panel (aka our professors) I believe we hit all the points we were supposed to, covered the right material and our presentation did what they wanted it to do.
I must say though, it has been a long and frustrating road to get to this enormous, but temporary, sigh of relief. The research was really fun and interesting. I am a huge history buff, especially anything to do with ancient Greece or Rome, so this was a great opportunity for me to learn a ton of new information. While gathering and siphoning the information was very do-able, thinking of a way to teach kids this information took a lot from us. Our group, seems to be, a very straight-forward, PPT wizard, do-it-by-the-book group. We have a CM, an AET, a business major, and a Spanish major. However, that doesn't mean we aren't creative, we just had to get our heads wrapped around the kid idea. In the end, we came up with the jeopardy idea. From there, the jeopardy idea became a skit; from there it morphed into teacher's tool for students, and finally it blossomed into a joining website and link to the game. In the end, our idea came out strong and I believe it showed in our presentation. Here is the link to our website from our PBL. On there you will find all of our information and our Jeopardy PowerPoint, as well as a teacher's template to create their own.
As a group, we worked cohesively and had, as Andrew would say, team camaraderie. Everyone contributed enormously and we got all our parts fastened together right on time. We pulled through the dry stretches and buckled down when it came to crunch time. It was the best group project experience I've ever been a part of bar none.
It was fun watching the other groups present, particularly seeing how they went about playing to kids. The first group to go was focused on the Coliseum. It was a good presentation and gave a lot of good information, but like the professors told us all, there was no focus on the PBL (the idea of a teaching aid or a way to impassion kids). The second group was us, so I’ll skip that. The third group’s topic was roman roads and bridges. They put on a nice presentation / teaching skit and each one of them played a different part (one was the army captain who was responsible for laying the roads, one was a historian) and each explained the roman road system from their point of view. They ended their skit with a quiz which involved cake. The fourth group presented the PBL with the back story that the kids they were presenting to were on a cruise heading for Rome and Ostia Antiqua (their focus point). They gave information on a lot of different topics such as history, culture, etc but it all revolved around a tourism idea. They even handed out a folder with pictures, a post card and a CD that would teach us basic Italian phrases. The last group created a game very similar to Cranium that focused on the Roman Forum and its buildings. Of all the groups, I believe this one was the most dead-on. They played to the kids idea, it was both fun and educational, and the game itself could be catered to any age group. Overall, the presentations were fun to experience because it gave us all an idea of where each team headed and to give us ideas to explore in the next assignment, as well as areas to improve upon.
Where to next? What do these scheming professors have in store for us now? Only next week's class will tell. And from the way they keep smiling I have a feeling it may be a doozy.

When In Rome... Play Jeopardy

Below is a link to an online file sharing website that I have uploaded our jeopardy game for all to see! It is open to everyone so all you have to do is copy and then paste this link into your navigation toolbar. When you get to the site you can then download our group's Jeopardy game from our first PBL! Enjoy!

http://www.4shared.com/file/68764355/b6062949/Jeopardy.html

Reflection On The Past Four Weeks

We're sitting in the Langsam Library on main campus, putting finishing touches to our first PBL assignment, and I thought I should look back on the last four weeks of this class. It started off great, we got our assignment, gathered all our information. We were ready to rock out a great powerpoint presentation. Then we reread the assignment and realizied we were going in the wrong direction, we were supposed to be playing this to kids. That set us back a bit, it took us a while to create a new direction, a new idea of how to display all the information we had learned. In the end, we came up with an idea that we believe will be both informational and fun: a jeopardy skit. We'd dress up in togas, answer questions on our topic, and then play up the SNL side of jeopardy during the final jeopardy question. Our focus group would be high school kids, ages 14 to 18. That way we could present the techinical information we had, without boring them or overwhelming them. Our group really liked this idea, so we plowed ahead. So here we are, less than 72 hours from our presentation. I'm nervous, but then again I'm always nervous when it comes to presentations, and I'm confident in our group and our idea. We'll see how it goes.