Sara Inoue

We started off by learning about a tool for color blind people. It calculated the background color and the font color, which then explains what changes were needed for the color blind people to be able to see better. I thought it was fascinating how there are so many tools that I didn’t know about. After listening for a bit, I thought of situations where such tools can be convenient!  Today is the last day to practice for our group presentation. Since we all understood what improvements we needed we decided to go through the presentation and make sure we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. I think it is important to practice at home with your own speech, however I realized how different it is when you actually practice as a group. It allows you to notice new problems of other group members as well as get advice from others.

Today we learned how to make a website using google sites. We are going to make a website for our group presentation about utilizing spaces around our school. To do this we will need to think of ourselves as educational designers and present the information and ideas we have researched about the problems in our school. Once I opened google sites I noticed that it wouldn’t be as hard as I thought it would be. We did a practice website and played around for the first part of the lesson. I thought it was fascinating how all the tools were on the website to make it easier to add other things. For example, there was a map tool and I could search up a place and add a map. I thought that it would be convenient to use it in other classes in the future!

On the first lesson back after our long Summer Holiday we learned about Crowd Sourcing. we started off by reaserching as team about "plagiraism".   It was my first time hearing this vocabulary an I was able to learn the meaning and the ways it was used in our society. As a whole "crowd" our class researched about one thing and put all our results on one page where everybody could see it. However, I noticed several things we need to be careful of since we were reaserching together rather than alone. I had to make sure that what I was about to write wasn't already written by someone else.  We were able to work together with numerous people without actually communicating, but being aware of the situation and making changes by ourselves.

Throughout this whole term I learned and gained knowledge about communication, presentation teamwork and many other things. I remember the first lesson I had with Mr. Paterson I was surprised about numerous things.  For example the first thing he mentioned was that he would not be giving out papers and prints in his class and instead we would be working on computers. This made me very surprised since I hadn’t used computers in class after moving to japan. As many lessons passed I started to realize how convenient it is to not keep sorting out piles of paper. The fact that one computer can change the way we work in class and make various situations more easier had a very positive effect. Mr.paterson taught us the good points and how to make presentations that will be impressive.  The group presentation we gave about utilizing classroom spaces allowed us to find new problems around our school that we would have probably never noticed or thought of because we don’t usually have...

For the first lesson of July our group got our feedback and comments from Mr. Paterson. He mentioned as a group we need more preparation as well as credibility. For the presentation I wasn’t able to say what I prepared smoothly because of my lack of practice. I also need to improve to not say “like” as much. After watching the video I realized that I tend to say “like” when I’m finding the words to express my feelings. I thought this wouldn’t happen if I practiced a lot and get used to presenting.  He told us that we would be presenting again after the summer break and our group has a lot of things to improve and fix. My goal is that when the next time I present I want to be happy with the work I did and satisfied with the work.

In this lesson I found out about many new things. The most interesting part was when mr. paterson meantioned about asking question and greening the listeners attention while presenting. It is said that people’s concentration only lasts for about 8 minutes which I thought was very interesting. The main thing is what we can do to grab their attention and make the audiences be interested in our presentation for the whole time.  What came up on my mind first was that if all the interesting facts are told in the beginning it may wake the audiences up. However they would gradually get bored if there is nothing important to listen as the presentation goes on. So what I thought was that we should add interesting facts and possibly some questions in between other things that are less interesting to wake the audiences up.

 In Wednesday’s class our group stood up at the front and since Yuna was absent the day before she presented her part. After we finished a few other groups also presented and I noticed that most of the presenters took the advice that mr.paterson gave which was to walk whilst talking so that the audiences from both sides of the classroom can have eye contact with the presenter. When they are walking in front it grabbed my attention and it made me think that our group also need to improve on our body movements and the posture we show to our listeners.   By listening to the other groups present it allowed me to find the differences and similarities that every group had amongst them. As mr.paterson said the credibility was very important and our group lacked to have more credibility. What we can do is to have more pride and talk louder to wake up the audience and grab their attention.