Semester Reflection

This semester my groups main focus has been on preparing better for streams as we have run into some issues with the stream this year.

What aspects of your work are successful? Explain why.

The red surge tournament was our most successful stream because we used a score keeping plugin as well as using the logos from teams to make the stream look professional.

What aspects of your work is challenging? Explain why.

The challenging parts of streaming is our issues with audio and the wifi. More often then not we have had to stream off of the wifi resulting in very poor stream quality. During the spoken words we ran into issues with audio as no one around had the knowledge of how to connect the mic to the stream.

What steps did you take to overcome these challenges / what adjustments did you need to make?

For the audio issue we ended up using the camera microphone which lead to the adjustment of realizing that there is a hot mic so we have to be careful with what is said as it can end up on stream.

Is there anything you can do improve? (with your approach to the project, or altering the project)

We just got a new laptop so hopefully our next streams will run smoother and I am hopeful that next spoken word we can figure out the audio.

As Riverside continues to immerse itself into innovation and technology, what do you think Riverside can do to provide support and help for teachers and students?

As far as support goes I think it is best for Riverside to keep things simple and not overwhelm everyone with the maker space. I think that is useful and has its place but forcing it upon students and classroom will just lead to more confusion.

Do you have any feedback or suggestions, as we move forward, that could help the Tech Team meet the needs of our school and staff / be more effective?

I think that Tech Team is ran well but I do think that there is still a lack of skills among us. I think that for the pro-d day that we have to support with there should be some form of training to help with people who are unsure of what they are doing.

Tech Team Micro:bits

  1. The lights used by the microbits.
  2. The lights can be useful in many ways. I could see them being useful in the arts classes a lot for more 3 dimensional projects. They could also be used by classes or clubs that host events as a way to do some small amounts of lighting.
  3. I don’t have any pictures of the code I did but it was fairly simple and just used the pins with variables to set it to an on/off switch using the buttons.
  4. I think that realistically MicroBits best use is in IT classes as a way to introduce coding as a change to using Scratch.