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.