17th lesson 16th May 2007 – the presentation of project plans

Lesson Plan:
1. Before the lesson I read trough all the project plans and I added my comments to their documents in Google Docs environment. The teams must correct all shortcomings during the next week.
2. Teams will present their project plans to school (school director, class teacher and subject teacher).
3. All the presentations are recorded and analyzed later.

Project plans comments

The graduation ceremony project plan
1. The project plan must be more specific. For example in project plan you can’t use sentences as: “in the beginning of the ceremony there will play one very good song on background” or “one person will present …” or “something funny and easy to remember”. What is the name of the song? Who is the presenter? What is funny and easy to remember?
2. The decoration of room seam to be in wrong place in schedule.
3. Do you have agreements with speakers and presenters?
4. Describe in details what are the “decorations”?
5. In organization chart you have a person who is responsible of drinks. How can it be possible if you don’t plan to serve drinks during the graduation ceremony?
6. In roll and assignment matrix (RAM) you have catering. This is not correct. In the schedule you don’t plan catering.
7. In risk management part where are listed the countermeasures to each bigger risk it would be nice to repeat again what was the risk. Then the overview is better.

The school year starting ceremony project plan
1. The title of WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) chart is missing.
2. The plan of ceremony preparation is inadequate and incorrect. Lot of the preparation tasks is taking place on same day with ceremony. In this case the unit of the time scale must be hours. This enamels to control can the preparation tasks be completed before the start of the ceremony?
3. Some of the preparation tasks are pointless. E.g. collecting the saplings of the willow from 22th until 25th of June and binding them to bundles two months later at 1th of September! At first it’s unlikely that some of them will collect branches from willow during the mid summer holiday (Estonian national holiday). Secondly why those dried saplings are needed? Are you planning to peat up every student before the school year is starting? Good idea but it’s not going to work.
4. In schedule of the ceremony describe in details who is the singer and what is the song? What musical instruments are needed? Who is the moderator of the ceremony? What is the name of the choir and what is the name of the song. If you spend time and energy to find the choir then it would be wise that they will sing more then only one song.
5. The schedule of the ceremony must be in minutes. Unit as day is not good because the ceremony is so short.
6. In budget you have branches from birch but in schedule you have branches from willow. Witch one is correct? From where do you get those birches? Do you need some license or permit to collect them?

The Summer party project plan
1. You must specify what kind of games you play during the event and what kind of competitions you organize?
2. In organization chart the names of three students are stroked through. Didn’t they really participated in teamwork?
3. The budget is missing from your project plan.
4. The RAM is missing.

The project plans are published in Google Docs:
1. The graduation ceremony – http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfsfprqp_15g6tvsv 
2. The ceremony of the beginning of the school year – http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc9p25cg_17fxbvrt 
3. The summer party – http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcg54shn_16hn93dd 

Those links were sent to the defense committee.
One remark – The URL’s of Google documents are very clumsy and not user friendly. The URL-s of LeMill’s are much better.

The presentation of project plans
I recorded the examination process with my web camera and made photos with. One reason to do that was to test the equipment before the final examination – interview. The other reason was to practice the post production of the video and publish the results in Youtube and in LeMill – to test the LeMill tools. The third goal was to let the student to evaluate their own presentation on video and publish the videos and the results of analyze in Google Docs.
Report
The video recording was successful.

During the presentation the representatives of the school came up with some important last minute changes. E.g. the ceremony of the beginning of the school year moved from Saturday 3th of September to the Sunday 4th oft September and the Summer event moved to Monday 4th of September.

We had some embarrassing moments with students who didn’t participated in teamwork. I asked from them why they did not participate. In the front of the team members the did not know what to say.

Overall rate the lesson – 5.

Comment – unfortunately I did not have time for video post production. Although the students are asking where and when can we see our videos I don’t have time to create and publish them before next school year. Sorry.