Publication 1

Based on data collected during this pedagogical experiment – using the social bookmarking and tagging in learning for knowledge creation and management is created the first publication – Knowledge building with social bookmarks and tags

19th lesson 26th May 2007 (90 minutes) – exam

The duration of the lesson is 90 minutes. Together with two brakes the maximum time for exam is 110 minutes. In the class there are 18 students. I expect that 16 of them participate on exam. It means that for each student I can spend 5 or 7 minutes. The average duration for exam per each student is 6 minutes – 5 minutes for interview and 1 minute for process management.

Because the time for exam is so short and because I have so many issues to investigate the exam process must be well prepared and planed.

Goal of the exam – interview:
1. To find out does students know how to use the tagcloud method for knowledge construction and information visualization?
2. To investigate does the tagcloud method helps them to build the knowledge? Do they have deeper knowledge in project management field thanks to the tagcloud.

Comment: The first goal can be checked based on exam recordings. The second question stays without answer because it’s impossible to declare is the deeper knowledge thanks to tag cloud or because of some other activities and methods we used during the course?

Unfortunately I cant control the wider scope of learning experiment – do teacher prefer tagcloud or concept map for project management knowledge construction and what effect this preference? The reduce of the scope was effected by lack of the time. We did not had time to create concept map of project management.

During the exam I try to find out:
1. Can the students handle the tagcloud?
2. Can they find the answers to the simple questions about project management wit just watching and browsing the tags in tagcloud (without opening the content related to the tags and reading it)?
3. Can they find answers to the complicated questions related with project management field by finding the relevant tags, opening the content related to the tags and reading the content?

During the exam it’s important to monitor:
1. How reasonable is the behavior of the students? To they know what are they doing or they don’t have any glue.
2. How much time they spent for finding the answers (time in seconds, number of the mouse clicks, number of the hints provided by the teacher)?

For collecting this information it’s vise to record the student’s behavior and the activity on computer screen. Later this information will be analyzed.

Preparation of the exam
1. Get overview of student’s tagclouds (how many bookmarks, tags, groups). Print this information on paper. This will be the starting information in exam.
2. Create and print out the schedule of the exam – student names and starting times. The examination order will be based on number of the tags.
3. Recharge the battery of the video camera.
4. Format 3 mini DVD’s for video recording.
5. Download, install and practice with screen recorder (CaptureWiz).
6. Purchase the computer mouse and plug it with laptop computer. During the exam only one computer is needed. For this purpose the teacher’s laptop will be enough. To increase the students performance, the mouse (instead of touch bad) will be used.
7. Check the availability of the ordinary classroom and the internet connection in this room. Also the lights in this room are important because of video recording.
8. Set up the room and equipment (tables and chairs).

Software development idea: During the overview of the students tagcloud it appeared that its very easy to get overview how any bookmarks student has but the number of tags is not presented. New learning environment should give statistics about how many tags are there (per student and total). This can be the basis for quantitative analyze and evaluation.

During the testing of the equipment and software it appeared that there can be some problems with screen recorder software. The recording will be in AVI file format. The full screen size recording will create very large files. The free size of hard disk is not enough. Second problem is the duration of file recording. This will shorten the time that can be spent for interviews. For reducing the file size and saving time:
1. The frame rate of the recording was changed to 1 fps.
2. The size of the computer screen was changed to 800*600 pixels.
3. The size of the recording area was set to 800*408 – del.icio.us web page in IE browser without browser buttons and address area (hopefully this does not affect the quality of stored data).
4. The sound is not recorded.
5. Still the image quality should be average or higher. Otherwise its not possible to read the recorded information visually.
6. For 90 minute long recording the free size of HDD is approximately 300 MB. This is acceptable. For saving the 5 minutes long recording the saving time is 25 seconds. This is not very good. It means, that the saving must be done during some other activities – e.g. when students are leaving or entering to room. It ads some extra pressure and stress for exam management.

Environment
For exam are needed:
1. Classroom – ordinary room no 225.
2. Computer – only one computer is needed – teachers laptop. Teachers personal laptop is preferred because then there is no need to ask permission for software installation (only administrator can install the software to the school computers).
3. Computer mouse – Teacher’s computer does not have mouse. For increasing the speed students performance the mouse is needed.
4. Internet connection. Preferably connection wit cable. All content is in Internet.
5. Video camera – teacher’s personal camera for recording the student’s behavior. Camera records videos to mini DVD’s.
6. Screen recording software – for recording the activities on screen.
7. VLE’s del.icio.us, Google Docs, LeMill.

If Internet connection or del.icio.us veb site is down then the exam will be canceled.

Procedure
1. For time saving reasons the del.icio.us environment will be opened before the beginning of Exam. Login is done under teacher’s name. Students can browse their personal tagcloud through network functionality.
2. Students are asked to give to their tagcloud the view what is most suitable to them (claud or list, ordered by alphabet or frequency, filtered by tag frequency or not, grouped or not). Students must explain why they prefer that kind of view? Before each new student the view of the tagcloud must be traditional. Comment – I did not have time to do that. So students so the view of the previous user. :(. Software Development idea: The default view button would be nice to have.
3. One question about tags – What tag (except project and project management) is the best characteristic to the project management field? Why this word is important in project management field? The goal is to check is this choose affected by the size of the tag (most frequently used tag)? I expect that they will choose the most frequently mentioned keyword. Beforehand I will predict what word they will use, and then I can analyze the differences.
4. One question about grouping the tags. What was the logic behind the grouping the tags? Where did you get the names for the groups? Why those tags belong to that group? If the tags are not grouped, then why.
5. Two questions from project management field. First question is easier and the second one harder. Those questions are below.
6. Feedback questions:
a. How do you like learning method where you have to describe the content by separated words? Maybe you prefer some other method e.g. longer sentences, graphical pictures, ect.
b. How did you prepared for examination? (I did not do anything, I was reading the content, I was adding the tags, I was correcting the tags, I was grouping the tags)
c. How much time did you spent for preparing to examination (in hours)?
7. If time allows then from some students I will ask how successful was the teamwork? What problems accursed during the teamwork? Why the team kicked you of? Did you managed to go back to the team? What was the problem during the project manager selection?

The main goal of this exam is to collect information about usefulness of the tagcloud during the knowledge creation process. unfortunately the educational roll of the exam is very small. E.g. it would be very good to let other students to see fellow student presentation. Then they can learn on this experience. The other solution is team exam or interview. In this case smarter students can teach dumber ones. But the main goal was to investigate the students personal knowledge not the knowledge of team.

Alternative questions about tagcloud:
1. How the students understand the meaning of tagcloud?
a. Why this word is bigger then others?
b. Why this word is smaller than others?
c. What word is most important in your tagcloud and why?
2. Does students understand different ways to present the tags?
a. Why you prefer to present tags in cloud/list?
b. Why you prefer to sort tags in alphabetical/frequency order?
c. Why you prefer to present only the most popular/all tags?
d. Why you prefer to present the tags in grouped/not grouped way?
3. How the students see the connections between tags?
a. What was the logic behind the grouping the tags?
b. Why those tags belong to this group?
4. Does tagcloud method suits to student?
a. How do you like the method to describe the content of the material with separated words?
b. Do you prefer some other method?
5. How the skill of using the tagcloud and the scope of the knowledge is affected by the student preparation to the exam?
a. How did you prepared for examination?
b. How much time did you spent for preparation?

Questions about project management subject
To find out how deep is the students knowledge the questions have different difficulty levels. To simplify this process the taxonomy of Bloom was selected. It’s important to mention, et Bloom’s taxonomy is only used for grouping the questions not for measuring the students performance.

1. student know – list, define and recognize “things”
2. student understand – summarize, describe with own words
3. student can use – implement, use, change, solve
4. student can analyze – sort, see the differences, compare, create systematical order.
5. student can synthesize – combine, integrate, restructure, create
6. student can evaluate – decide, choose, test, measure

Knowledge
What is project?
What type of project do you know?
Is the marriage project?
Are the weddings the project?
What type project is the participation at ferry?
What type project is the development of the AIDS vaccine?
What are the phases of project life cycle?
What is the project scope management?
What is the project time management?
What is the project cost management?
What is the project human resources management?
What is the project risk management?
What are the project stakeholders?
List the techniques for generating the ideas.
What is the SMART rule?
What is the project charter?
What is the WBS?
What is the Gantt chart?
What is the budget?
What describes the organizational chart?
What is the RAM?
What is the SWOT analyze?
What is the risk matrix?
List the risk response strategies.
How to find the response actions to the risks?
What is the probability?

Understanding
What are the common characteristics of the projects?
Why are the common goals of the project in contradiction?
What important event is between the project planning and the project execution phases?
What type organization is your project team?
Who are the project stakeholders?
Describe the brainstorm method.
Describe the 635 method
Why is important that the project scope is measurable?
Why is important to divide project scope in to smaller deliverables?
What is the meaning of the arrow between two bars in Gantt chart?
How to collect information about risks?
Why is important to describe the risks with their probability and affect?
Why is important to present progress reports during the project execution?
If during the project execution tasks begin later or last longer then planed it acquires the shift of the all schedule. Why the shifted tasks must move back to their original places ASAP?
Why is recommended to organize meetings before noon?
What is the normal reporting schedule for project?

Implementation
It’s not possible to check the implementation skills with short questions.

Analyze
From what the project are born?
What is the first phase of the project?
What is the difference between project scope and quality?
What is the difference between project process and project deliverable quality?
What is the difference between the project cost and price?
What is the difference between fixed and variable cost?
What is the difference between avoiding and reducing the risks?
What is the difference between backup and fall back plans?

Synthesis
What are the problems of your project?
What are the fixed costs of your project?
What are the variable costs of your project?
Ask relevant question from teacher – Comment: we did not had time to do that.

Evaluation
What kind of characteristics you have – important to the project manager?
What important rolls in your team are not covered?
What rolls in your team are not important?

Before the exam I browse through all the tagclouds of the students and selected questions suitable to them. It helps reduce the time spent. Its also important that tags help students to find answers to my questions. Then I can control is the tag cloud helpful or not?

The first (simpler) question is related with specific tags that are in student’s tagcloud. I expect that they can find the tag and answer to my question. The second question is much more difficult. Tags in tagcloud do not refer directly to the answer. The answer can be found with the help of the tagcloud.

18th lesson 21th May 2007 (45 minutes) – repeating for examination

Goal of the lesson – to repeat the learned topics and to get ready for examination.

Topics:
1. Building the structure for tagcloud.
2. Creation of concept map of project management subject.

For motivating the students I seed that he goal of the lesson is to create crib for examination. For me the goal was investigate how they can arrange the information of project management field? Also to find out do they prefer tag cloud or concept map.

Reorganizing the tagcloud
At first I will present them what are the opportunities in del.icio.us for reorganize the tagcloud (grouping the tags, sort based ob alphabetical order or on frequency of the tag, filters based on tags frequency). Students are asked to define the titles for the tag groups. They can collect ideas from the content of learning resources.

Concept map
There is two ways how to create concept maps:
1. Draw down what are the most important concepts in project management field? How those concepts are related with each other? What are the central issues of the concept map. During this process teacher can’t provide the concept names or relations between them.
2. Based on your tagcloud the names of the groups of the tags are the most important concepts in the project management field. Draw a map based on this information.
Not sure jet in what order those topics should be presented. One solution is to let them at first to draw the concept map and then group the tags in tagcloud based on concept map information. The other solution is to get overview of the project management subject using the tagcloud and grouping them. Concept map will be drawn later based on tagcloud information.

I prefer the second strategy – first grouping the tags and then creation of concept map. This is also better solution from technical point of view – grouping the tags is easier and shorter task then creation of concept map. If we start from concept map it’s possible, that some of the students do not reach to the task of the grouping of the tags.

During the examination I would like to investigate to they prefer tagcloud or concept map and why?

Both of the exercises must be finished as home tasks.  The structured tagcloud and the concept map must be compatible with each other. This is also good method for preparing for the exam. The concept map will be published in Google Docs environment.
Report
This lesson was totally different from the lesson plan.

Most of the students were missing. Only 7 students from 17 were participating. The reason is that this lesson was one extra session – not on the regular weekday and last lesson of this day. Probably some of the students forgot the lesson. Some of them did not feel the need to participate. Pity.

Most of the time was spent to the introducing the method of grouping the tags. This was totally new for the students but they seamed to be interested. The other time consuming activity was the enrichment of the tagcloud. This started spontaneously. I did not plan that. Some of the students find out that their tagcloud is not so rich as is some other student’s tagcloud. They started to view the content and adding the new bookmarks and tags. Finally they understood that tagcloud can be useful during the exam. They also started to correct the tags – eliminate the synonyms and to correct some orthographical mistakes.

The grouping of the tags proceeded very slowly and painfully. Students at this age do not have skills for systematization. They asked me to provide the names for the groups and to define what tags belong under this group. I did not want to do that. I created only one example and then asked them to proceed. I also gave them some hints – remember what the phases of project life cycle are? I think that this was not very vise thing to do. It would be interesting to see, how many students are affected from this hint?

We did not have time for concept mapping at all. Very sad. About 45 extra minutes were needed. Actually it would be better to have this lesson on regular time wit the duration 90 minutes and exam on next week but what can you do. I’m away from Estonia on next week.

Overall rate to lesson 3.

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.

16th lesson 9th May 2007

Plan:
1. The topic of the lesson is project execution and control. Methods and techniques. Unfortunately this topic does not affect students practically at this moment. They have to execute their project later on summer.
2. Review and correction of existing project plan.

Report:
Just few minutes before the beginning of the lesson I got project plans drafts from all of the teams. Positive is, that they had done something. Negative is that most of those project plans are created during the lesson. They try to avoid the homework.

During the project plan review and correction process we had lot of problems with internet connection and with Google Docs environment. It’s very painful to integrate previously created small Google documents in to bigger document. Sometimes the copy-paste function forgets the format of text and table. Students were in anguish. I feel sorry for that. Maybe it’s wise to create the master document in Google Docs that has only references to existing subdocuments.

The presentation of topic of project execution was successful. At least half of the students worked actively. They answered to relevantly to my questions and also raised additional questions. Very good!

Overall rate to lesson 5-. I’m a bit sick.

15th lesson plan 2th May 2007

Because of the rabble in the Tallinn (the statue of the unknown solder) and my increasing workload (deadline for university IT bachelor thesis and the work in defense committee) I did not had time to plan the lesson.

The goal of the lesson is to create integrated project plan. Students must report what is already done and what is missing. The must share the tasks who is responsible for creating missing parts of project plan and who must review the existing ones. The result must be published in Google Docs environment as one larger file.

I plan to develop the structure of project plan in front of the students’ eyes. I will ask from them what is the first page of project plane … what is the last part of project plane? For addition to this list we will add two fields that define the status of the parts of the project plan (is this part of the project plan already done, missing or need to revise?) and who is responsible for creation or revision of problematic chapter.

On next lesson they can continue with creation of the final project plan. End result must be published in Google Docs and the layout of the document must be nice.

Additional idea – the structure of the document must not be a list. It can be concept map
Comment – unfortunately we did not have time for that.

The time is running to short. The final interview (examination) should be preferably on additional day. I must start to organize the project plan presentation session – ask school director Luule and class teacher Helju to this event.

Overall rate to lesson 4.

14th lesson report 25th April 2007

One student succeeded to find the answers to my questions with help of the tagcloud. Hooray!!!
Divide the team work in to three separated parts was not necessary. I gave overview of all content during the 30 minutes. Oral lection was split in to smaller parts with additional questions. The rest of the time (60 minutes) was spent for joint (all subparts together) teamwork. They planed their time quite effectively.

Overall rate to lesson 5.

14th lesson plan 25th April 2007

Computer lab

I skipped the topic of Project Information Management. It’s a bit boring to the secondary school level students and not very important in their project planes. The topic of this lesson is Project Risk Management – how to recognize dangerous events, analyze them and plan contra reactions.

The goal of the lesson is to get familiar with risk management methods and to list the events that can jeopardize project scope.

Research goal is to control can they find answers to questions through tagcloud.

During the lesson I controlled student’s previous knowledge. The learning material contains some questions related to issues that are studied earlier. For example what are the methods for generating ideas? I expect that they can find the answers based on their personal tagcloud. The goal is to control can the student find the answers through the tagcloud? This is one important skill for successful examination.

Before that I had to change the formulation of the questions until they are compatible with previous content (initially the terminology was different). I also checked beforehand does students have relevant tags? For generation of ideas students used following tags: brain, brainstorm, alternatives, CNB, ideas, project, project management. The most frequent tag was ideas (the content about generating ideas was tagged by 9 students, the tag “ideas” was used 6 times). I expect that some of the students can find the correct answer.

During the investigation of the tagcloud I discovered that while clicking on tag “ideas” I can get long list of bookmarks. Most of them are not related with this course. Not even related with project management. Software development idea: user (student or teacher) can filter the list of bookmarks. He can see choose between content of this course (specified by the time and the list of the students), this subject (running course and all previous courses) or all materials tagged with this keyword. In some level the interdisciplinary view is good but I believe students are mostly interest about their own (bookmarked and tagged by them) content.

It seams that del.icio.us is not suitable learning environment for use in several similar sources. For the first run the functionality of the del.icio.us is enough and simplicity is perfect but in the future it can be problematic. E.g.:

How to bind structure of course with timeline? The latest content is on the top of the list. What happens’ if teacher change the planes of the lesson? The saving date will be changed and the order of documents will be wrong. To start everything again under new username? 10 usernames all together! maybe is possible to hide existing bookmarks. To make them personal bookmarks? Is this possible when somebody is tagged it already?
How to separate new group from existing one? New study group can see tags created by previous group. In some level it can be educational but it is the risk that students simply copy the tags without thinking.

I would like to find answers to those questions and test the del.icio.us in parallel courses (same content, different groups).

In this lesson students had to publish larger document in Google Docs – to copy three different parts together to same document. This is important exercise before creation of final integrated project plan.

13th lesson report 18th April 2007

The goal of the lesson is to get overview of the human management methods, to repeat the functions of CmapTools (for creating the organization chart). This is important for developing skills for concept map creation. Create more complicated document in Google Docs (chart, table and text in one document). This is important exercise before creation of final integrated project plan.

It’s also important to observe how they share tasks and how they work together.

The list of the issues was short:

human resources
organization chart
RAM

But to provide them as a lection was boring. That’s why I tried to present the text materials shortly – 30 minutes. I tried to activate students with additional questions but only one student was answering. I even asked here to not answer anymore but she did not hold here self down.

It’s harder from week to week to keep them away from RATE. In some computers the RATE is blocked but in others don’t (probably it depends on operation system). One other social networking portal named Orkut is also very popular. Maybe I can create some interesting tasks using the RATE and Orkut.

The creation of organization chart in CmapTool environment was very interesting to them. Most of all they liked to input personal photos to organization chart. Although to add picture to the background of the chart nodes is not very user friendly task. At first user must copy the images in to Cmap catalogue. Then s/he can add them to chart by formatting the nodes. The size of the image will affect the size of the node. That’s why user must resize or crop it beforehand. Students graphical design skills are pore. Maybe they are not interested of this field. I helped them a lot in cutting and resizing the images. Maybe now they can see why graphical design is important and cool.

The RAM (responsibility and assignments matrix) was created in Google Spreadsheet. Surprisingly it’s not possible to upload images (organization chart) to Google Spreadsheet. Students had to copy the table from Spreadsheet environment to Google text document environment. During this procedure the design of table was lost. Actually this was my mistake because I did not know that.

Practical tasks bring more activity among students. During the teamwork I observed them.

The team of the graduation ceremony worked in two separated subgroups. One (two girls) was creating the RAM table, the other one (a boy and a girl) created organization chart. The secong group almost started to fight about one photo. The boy clamed that he don’t have photo in the internet that is good enough to publish in the org chart. The girl was angry because they spend to much time by searching suitable image. she wanted to finish the task and to go home. In the end they added the image of one bottle instead of the boy’s face (in the project he was responsible for beverages). Because of the arguing they did not had time to change the size of the chart (the size is too big) and they did not combine the chart and the table together.

In the team of the 1th September ceremony only one girl was working. Others (3 girls and 1 boy) just washed here how she is working. I tried to motivate them to create the RAM table separately. The girls opened the Google Spreadsheet but did not input any data on it. Hopeless! Maybe the project manager is too strong and other members are too week. Project manager seed once that she don’t want others to do anything because she can do anything faster and with better quality. Surprisingly only this group finished on time and did all as needed (table and the chart were in same document). They finished work before others and that’s why it was possible to give advise to them – how to reduce the size of image and how to combine chart and table together.

In the team of summer party project two girls worked together behind the one computer. Other team members (one girl and one boy) did nothing. I asked them many times to start the work. Once they clam that they are looking for photos for org chart. In other cases they promised to start the work write now. The group finished only the organization chart. They did not have time for RAM table.

The grade they earn for teamwork should be affected by the work they do in the teams. I must explain the rules on next lesson.

Grading rules – the final mark of the school semester depends on three components:

summary result of teamwork – project plan
summary result of individual tasks – exercises and tagging
the grade of final examination – individual interview.

The final grade of teamwork will form in following way:

At first all team members will earn same grade.
In the end of the semester team will make self assessment. Who has participated more actively can have better result and who was lazy will have smallest grade then average team member. The self assessment is teamwork. All group members must accept the validation results.
If the result of the team self assessment is not acceptable to the teacher then those result will be basis for discussion in final examination (who did what in the team?)

Thanks to illustrated organization charts its so simple to relate students with there names.

Lesson was very interesting although a bit chaotic and nervous. I prefer not to manage such kind of chaos in every lesson. I wonder how the students liked the lesson. Feedback questionnaire would be good idea.

Overall rate to lesson 5

Comments: We did not had time for feedback questionnaire and self evaluation.

12th lesson report 11th April 2007

Computer lab (non-virtual)

The goal of the lesson – to get know the financial management methods and to develop practical skills for creating the project budget in Google spreadsheet environment.

Content for tagging and the exercises for solving:
text about the cost planning
text about the budget
exercise about creating the budget
text about the cash flow table and the S-chart
teamwork about creation of the project budget.

The exercise was individual task. It contains different incomes and the outcomes of one fake person in unsorted way. Students’ task was to separate incomes and outcomes, input them with quantity and price figures into table and calculate totals and earning. The structure of table was presented as picture. The earning in the budget was negative. Students had to reduce outcomes to find balance between incomes and outcomes. The goal of the last action was to explain the importance of equations in budget table and to control the existence of computer based calculations.

The environment for budget creation was Google Spreadsheet but some of the students preferred MS Excel. I asked them tu publish the results in Google in any case. During the copying the content from Excel to Google the equations were lost. Only the answers were copied.

I did not haw much time to practice the features of Google Spreadsheet. I had to improvise during the lesson. Students need lot of help because they are not familiar with spreadsheet calculation.

The creation of the project budget was teamwork. One team finished before the end of the lesson. One finished on time and the team of the graduation ceremony project staid for longer.

During the lesson students started to watch pictures in the RATE portal. I tried to keep them on right track but some of them sill preferred not to work. I was tied and students were reckless.

The result of tagging was normal – 13 students were presented, 9 of them tagged the content and 6 of them tagged OK. 10 students out of 13 finished and published the personal budget (individual exercise) in Google. 2 teams out of 3 published the project budget (teamwork). Surprisingly the team who finished before others did not published the budget.

Comment – the budget was missing even in the final plan.

Overall rate to lesson – 4 because I felt my self uncomfortable in Google Spreadsheet.