Year End Reflection

  • What are some things you have learned and/or tasks you have accomplished this year?
    This year the work that I had completed in tech team was mostly in first semester. We did spoken words, the red surge, the move4mana assembly, and a couple of other events.
  • What aspects of your group project/task were successful? Explain why.
    Our group was successful because we all knew what we were doing and were able to set up our streams quickly.
  • What aspects of your group project/task were challenging? Explain why.
    Some aspects that were challenging was commitment for group members. Many times I would be stuck doing the stream by myself or with Jesse such as the Red Surge as it was on a weekend and everyone else was able to find an excuse.
  • What steps did you take to overcome these challenges / what adjustments did you need to make?
    For these challenges I just ended up having to take on more work then I originally wanted to. It wasn’t a big deal but its hard to commit yourself to a 6 hour day of volunteering.
  • As Riverside continues to immerse itself into innovation and technology, and distance remote learning continuing to be a possibility, what do you think Riverside can do to provide support and help for teachers and students? How can the Tech Team be more effective? (Provide specific examples)
    I think the best thing Riverside can do for technology is to get better Wifi. 9 times out of 10 the issues I had with technology at school were due to a slow connection or wifi connection being not great.

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.

Tech Team Project

For this year the new ideas for the stream team is to spend a lot more time in preparation for the events we need to stream. We want to be able to have intermission slides and if it is a sporting event we want to show the score on stream.

b) Answer the following questions:

– What problems might we run into?

Some problems we may run into are issues with sound and issues with connection and dropping frames while streaming. As well as issues with battery charge. These issues are unfortunately out of a control a lot of the time but there are ways to work around some of them. Such as streaming from areas with a strong connection, and lowering the quality of the stream to avoid dropping frames. On top of these issues from last year we have ran into issues with the laptop crashing and needing updates.

– What skills do we need to complete this project? How can we attain these skills?

Being able to setup for a stream and being able to start the stream using OBS. Other skills may also include an ability for Photoshop so that we can make intermission slides.

c) Create a brief timeline of key things that need to happen to ensure successful completion of your project. What happens next?

We set up obs on the laptop, do a test stream with the camera, and be ready to stream anything that is needed to be stream. We also need to check for updates on the laptop in a day advance before the stream.

DiVi Review Assignment

What are the strengths?

I think some of the strengths of the divi builder is that it gives a lot more creativity to the blogs and allows us to format it a lot better. For example this blog that I am doing right now I have made 3 different columns to better organize the post. I also like the amount of options it gives for each column, I could add a picture if I want or text or even put in a line of code if I wanted.

What are the weaknesses?

I think that some of the weaknesses are in its difficulty when it comes to using it. I was trying to edit my about me page and ended up putting in a whole different website in it. I also don’t like how its make the blogs more complicated if we were to add this as a necessity for students to use.

How can this plugin be used in a classroom setting to enhance student learning? Would you use it and/or recommend it?

I think this plugin should only be used in classrooms that have students that are good at technology such as IT classes. It enhances blogs but for what students at our school currently need to do it just makes it more complicated. I don’t recommend it.

All in all Divi Builder is a really great way to format your blog if you have prior experiences in using website builders but if not it just adds clutter and complications to edublog.

Tech Team Year End Reflection

a) Describe your project. What did you do? How did you do 

My groups project was all about streaming school events like the spoken words. We also had to make an outline of how to stream stuff which was recently completed.

b) What problems did you run into? Were you able to solve these challenges? How did you solve these challenges? Is there anything you would do differently?

We ran into a few problems such as missing cables or issues with the camera. The Grade 9/10 of semester 2 spoken word wasn’t streamed due to these issues. We fixed these issues for the Grade 11/12 part of spoken words how ever. These issues were solved by charging the camera and gathering the missing cables. Differently I would like to have a checklist to fill out when ever we finish streaming events so that we don’t lose cables or anything important.

c)  What did you learn? Were you able to learn new skills or strengthen previous ones?

I didn’t learn anything new but I think I strengthened some of my skills with software such as the elgato one we used to stream.

d)

Impact: How might your project positively impact the social and emotional well being of students/our school? What can be done to increase the impact of this idea on the school?

I think that streaming events has a massive impact on our school because it allows us to archive events as well as students or teachers being able to watch the events live.

Desirability: What could you change to make your project more desirable to students, teachers, administrators, parents or the community?

I think that making the stream more advertised would add some more desirability to it.

Integratability: What would you change to make this idea easier to integrate into a school setting?

I think to integrate the streams I would just advertise them more often to teachers or students.

Feasability: Looking back what would you change what would you keep?

Looking back I think I would keep majority of it because it worked out really well the last time we streamed.

e) What did you learn from being a part of this project?

I learned how to problem solve quickly and how to have patience with certain issues.

Tech Team Innovation

What aspects of Tech Team are successful? Explain why.

I think that our individual groups are successful. Our social media team does a great job and is a massive part of Riverside. The stream team was able to stream the spoken words well. I’m excited to see what the wall team is doing. I haven’t seen much of what the creation team has done but I am sure that it is good.

What aspects of Tech Team are challenging? Explain why.

I think that the most challenging part of tech team is the blog posts. Some of the questions such as explaining your projects is difficult for certain teams because we don’t have big projects and just have little projects.

What support does our school need from the Tech Team moving forward? Explain why.

I think that we need to be able to deal with wifi issues a lot better moving forwards. I have experienced not being able to get on the wifi and it makes being in class a lot harder when you can’t open the teachers blog or one note.

What can we do to improve our support for our school?

Some form of training or tutorial for how to fix certain issues would help. I often find that when I am helping people it is more just trial and error then actually knowing how to fix the problem.

 

Research

From my research I found that many tech teams have IT desks and often do teacher workshops to teach technology to teach the teachers with technology. I think that doing workshops would work really well at riverside because it would allow us to make sure all of our teachers are comfortable with technology, which would make learning easier.

Tech Team Reflection #1

So far this semester I have learnt more about how to stream using a capture card and a camera as well as some slight sound stuff. I also was able to stream Block C of the Grade 11/12s Spoken Words and fix the stream when it began dropping 90% of its frames.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTUg7X7wt3U

What aspects of your work are successful? Explain why.

Some of the aspects of streaming that was successful was being able to stream spoken words and being able to archive it onto the school youtube account.

What aspects of your work are challenging? Explain why.

Some of the more challenging parts of the streaming is the issues with sound as no one really understands what is causing the issue with the feedback.

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

We adjusted the obs settings until it was as good as possible despite it still being not very clear.

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

The only thing I would improve with the streaming is potentially getting a laptop with more power as the current one is pretty bad.

 

Group Project Tech Team

So for the stream team are new idea is to use OBS for streaming instead of the one that was used last year and so far it has worked out a lot better.

b) Answer the following questions:

– What problems might we run into?

Some problems we may run into are issues with sound and issues with connection and dropping frames while streaming. As well as issues with battery charge. These issues are unfortunately out of a control a lot of the time but there are ways to work around some of them. Such as streaming from areas with a strong connection, and lowering the quality of the stream to avoid dropping frames.

– What skills do we need to complete this project? How can we attain these skills?

Being able to setup for a stream and being able to start the stream using OBS.

c) Create a brief timeline of key things that need to happen to ensure successful completion of your project. What happens next?

We set up obs on the laptop, do a test stream with the camera, and be ready to stream anything that is needed to be stream.

TechTeamEdublog

A) I use the plugins Custom CSS, Calendar , and Compflight.

B) The strengths of the Custom CSS allows me to customize my blog more, for example I have turned my font into comic sans. The calendar is nice because it allows you to have a calendar on your blog so if you need to know the day you can just check there. Compflight is very useful because it allows you to insert any images you need without having to go to google images as well as putting the image as small, medium, large, or full size.

Fat Man on Computer Robin Hutton via Compfight

C) Some of the weaknesses of the Custom CSS is that if you do something and forget how to fix it, your blog could be stuck like that until you get help, for example I don’t remember how to change my font back. The calendar doesn’t really have many weaknesses other then that it isn’t very interactive. Compflights only weaknesses is that it has a limited amount of images in it.

D) Out of all of these I would say that Compflight is the most useful for classes as it makes creating a blog post that requires generic images a lot easier. I also think that Custom CSS is helpful as it allows students to customize their blogs more.