Sara Inoue

Today we started off by Mr.Paterson explains about mapping the room. At first when i saw it written on the board I had no idea what it meant, however later on as he spoke I found out that mapping the room means to move around the room according to the topic the speaker is talking about. For example, for every spot in the room there is a certain topic that the speaker talks about. Which means that the speaker has a reason to move around the classroom. This allows them to have eye contact with people from different sides of the classroom and be able to send the message to everyone.  After gaining the knowledge of the new technique, our group started to work on our brochure. We had some trouble wether we should make it on google docs or power point. Then we found out that the website “canva” is good for making brochures. We are planning to include basic informations, benefits of our group research and many more other facts!

Today we had our presentation. Our group was the last to present and even though we had the most time to prepare, our group could’ve done better and presented with much better quality content and skills. After watching the video, I could tell that I was very nervous because of the “like” and “um” and I didn’t have much eye contact with the people and kept looking at the screen. These small gestures might not seem that big of a problem. However,  people who are listening to the presentation notice small things and having credibility and not being nervous are some of the things I need to work on. Since we could have done so much better on our presentation, we have to do our best on our website and brochure.

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.