Night at the Virtual Museum...

Week 5 seems to be the week in the term where I get most run-down and stressed. This is my fifth piece of assessment due within the last week, and it's no wonder that I'm behind on course work! I rocked up to class yesterday tired and a little worried, because I didn't even know what the topic was about. I seriously hate being behind, it makes me anxious! There was no need to be though, because the fabulous Mim paired us up to work on this week's task.

Brent (of William Wallace Inspired Theory fame) and I worked on PowerPoints this week. But not just any PowerPoint! Thanks to the brilliant Brent, who had worked ahead and found some genius templates, we were able to create a virtual museum! I was genuinely so happy about this. Only last week I had been brainstorming ideas on using video at the redefinition level, and I had actually thought 'I would love to do a virtual history museum'. I Googled a few things to try and work out how you could do it with video, but hadn't found what I was looking for, so I had to change my example. This week, to my surprise and delight, I was handed the answer on a silver platter! The digital gods must have heard my prayers.

Virtual museums are now my new favourite thing (has anyone noticed a recurring theme here? I just realised how many 'favourite things' I have!). I'm looking forward to using them in my prac this year, I think they are a marvellous way of challenging technical abilities, asking students to find solid information, making students think twice about the way that they organise the information, and allowing creativity in presentation. I know, because those were the key challenges that I was faced with yesterday! I was quite lucky because I had Brent to give me a rundown of how the PowerPoint template worked, and also because I have a fair amount of experience in PowerPoint, even though I'd not used a template like that before. Even still, we had technical difficulties towards the end; because I had moved some of the text and shape boxes out of the way to rewrite text, and obviously not put them back in the same place, the room links weren't working correctly when we went into presentation mode. I had to quickly try and readjust the alignment by trial and error to get them all working correctly before we presented. It was good to have another technical stretch this week, I am still loving the amount of practical information and ideas we are getting in this course. I think this is the most helpful course I've done in my time at uni so far! 

In terms of reflecting critically on yesterday's lesson, I've put a few notes down in dot point, mainly because my head is only working at about a 50% capacity right now and it seems the easiest way! 

* Working in pairs was good. I tend to prefer individual work because I'm quite independent, but yesterday I was so grateful to have guru Brent by my side. It made the whole task really easy, and we work well as a team because we have great rapport. 

* In having each of us complete the same task, but with different methods, and then each team presenting their work, I actually felt like I could comfortably jump on to either Prezi or Thinglink and know what I was doing. 

* Working collaboratively brought more ideas to the table than I would have had alone, and in presenting it to the others I was more aware of presenting a high standard of information because I wanted to give them the best understanding that I could. 

*An activity like this doesn't just expand your digital capabilities, but pushes your teamwork, empathy, understanding, cooperation, confidence (needed for presenting to a class), standards (achieving a high level because it's not just your own knowledge you have to worry about) and time management. 

I look forward to each of these lessons. I love the subject, I love the practical ideas we get, I love our class and I love the wonderful Mim who teaches it all to us! I know it's a lot of love, but I feel it's all justified. This class continues to make me grow as a person and as an educator, and that makes me so very happy.