Group Leadership Project

1. What tool did your group use to deliver the PD tutorial? Why?

Our group chose to create a Screencast-o-matic tutorial on Google Docs as well as its many features including Google Presentation, Spreadsheet, Form, and Drawing. The reasoning behind this decision was because Screencast-o-matic was recommended by my CEP instructor and you did not need to create and account or log in to create a screencast. It allowed you to save in multiple file formats, upload directly to YouTube, and embed your video. We chose to feature Google Docs as the tutorial topic because we felt that so many people do not know about the features and convenience of this cloud computing program, especially in the education world. I, for one, had not heard of this application until taking CEP 810 and now use it on a regular basis, for both professional and personal reasons. I feel as though other teachers could benefit from having access to and knowledge of Google Docs for enhancing their lessons as well as making interaction with colleagues and students easier.

2. What did you learn during the development process of the final product?

Making our professional development tutorial as a group proved to be quite the learning experience. We started our Group Leadership Project by brainstorming what type of tutorial we wanted to create by holding web conference using the application Vyew, which was new to all of us. The actual web conference went fairly smooth and we decided on Google Docs for our tutorial. However, figuring out how to record, save, and upload a screen cast of this conference was challenging. I volunteered to be in charge of this aspect of the project and eventually (a week later!) pieced together our Brainstorm video using the hosting feature of screencast.com. Next, we created a storyboard for our tutorial video using none other than Google Documents, which Megan kindly set up for us. We decided upon a logical arrangement of splitting up the work since we wanted to include 4 features of Google Docs: Megan was going to create the portion for Documents, Kevin went with Presentations, Laura with Spreadsheets and Forms, and I took on Drawings. We met 4 times during the course of this project via Vyew and sent countless e-mails and Angel discussion posts back and forth to discuss our progress and what we needed to work on next. During this time, we worked well as a team and completed our assignments for part A and B on time. When working on putting together our final product, Laura graciously agreed to glue together all 4 of our tutorials into one video. This presented a few difficulties because the final video’s time length was much longer than was required and because of that it could only be uploaded if we separated it into two separate videos. With time dwindling down, we had to make some decisions to cut down on part of our intended parts to the tutorial. Because our main focus was on Google Documents, we had Laura drop the additional features of Presentations, Spreadsheets, Forms, and Drawings out of our final tutorial. However, because my part was one that was left off, I included the link to our original two videos for further learning (See
Original Tutorial Part 2 below for Google Drawing).

3. What would you do differently if you had to develop a similar product again?

When all was said and done, the arrangement for our tutorial could have been made in a more effect way. Instead of each of us creating our own videos, it would have been nice for one person to be the narrator and facilitator of the screen cast. That way, we would not have to scramble at the end to make cuts from each others’ videos and essentially change our initial focus for the tutorial. It also would sound more polished and professional if our video had one voice as opposed to 4 voices.

Final Tutorial Version

Original Tutorial Part 1
Original Tutorial Part 2

Link to Part A: Brainstorm

Link to Part B: Storyboard