Group Leadership Project: Final

For our Group Leadership Project, we chose to create a professional development tutorial for others in the educational field on the use of Glogster EDU, a free Web 2.0 tool. You can find the final product at the following link:
http://voicethread.com/?#q.b2163294.i11535717


Question 1: What tool did your group use to deliver the PD tutorial? Why?
Our professional development tutorial is a two part slidecast which was created with the use of  VoiceThread. The first part of this tutorial introduces the viewer to Glogster EDU and explains why a teacher would choose to use this tool in their classroom. The second part of the tutorial then takes the viewer through a simple step-by-step process in how to create a glog (an online poster with media capabilities) using Glogster. We chose to use VoiceThread because one of our team members was very familiar with its capabilities and because it was supposed to be easily compatible with other media tools. This was an important feature as each of the two parts would be created by different people and not all of us were familiar with VoiceThread. Originally, we had intended to create the second part as a screencast video tutorial but we had trouble finding a free web tool that VoiceThread would accept, even Camtasia Studio didn't work! Ultimately, the group member who ended up recording the second part decided to do it as a slidecast using Photostory because he was most comfortable with this tool. It would then be linked together with the first part using VoiceThread.


Question 2: What did you learn during the development process of the final product?
I learned how to use a couple of new tools - AnyMeeting as a conferencing tool and Camtasia Studio as a screencasting tool. I also learned about the importance of developing a storyboard to help in the production process of the project. I had never done a storyboard before nor did I know what one was. However, I now know that the storyboard serves as a sort of "blueprint" to show how illustrations or pictures tie in with the script.


Question 3: What would you do differently if you had to develop a similar product again?
Although we encountered multiple road blocks during several phases of this project, most of those problems stemmed from group members having different background experiences with using the many web tools out there and, of course, the compatibility problems. Given the timeline we had to work with, I don't think we could have done anything differently to avoid these problems. We were in constant communications with each other - helping out where ever we could, lending advice to one another, and helping to make group decisions. I do believe that some of our problems started right at the beginning during our brainstorming session. Because of the difficulty we were having with the tool we used, being able to effectively communicate each person's thinking was a struggle and actually created some confusion at the beginning of the project which ate up some of our time.