This week we were finally able to get everything back on tack without any setbacks. Everything we did this week went according to plan and that was a real relief after some difficulties in the previous weeks. We were able to interview Mr. Poller this week and we plan to get that episode uploaded on Tuesday. We have also been doing better with our blog posts and getting them posted and with the proper word count. We need to go back to some of our previous blog posts and add words but that's about it. It was also a surprise to us to find out that some teachers and parents have been listening to our podcasts which we didn't really expect. Mr. Poller had mentioned to us that he had been listening to some of our episodes before our interview with him and that was a pleasant surprise to us. We hope that the next few weeks can be smooth sailing for us now that we have the hang of the things that need to happen in order for us to succeed. Our next episode should be interesting as well as none of us have had Mr. Poller as a teacher yet but we may try and get one of our friends to join us because he currently has Mr. Poller as a teacher. It is also crazy to think that we are already half way through the project. It feels like we just started and time really has flown by with this project. One thing that we really improved on this week was to email Mr. Poller the day before we interviewed him to remind him that we were planning on doing it and also just to be clear that it was okay with him. So far I think our project has gone really well and we have adjusted well to some problems that we have faced. I think it was a good project to do all though trying to record the episodes can be a pain in the butt sometimes. We haven't planned on who we are going to interview this upcoming week but we have communicated with some teachers to offer the possibility.
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Week 5 of Genius Hour came with some challenges that we did not plan for but we figured out a solution around it. Our original plan was to interview Mr. Poller for our next episode as we had already set that up with him. We were supposed to interview him during Smart Block on Wednesday so we walked down to his classroom but his door was closed and none of the lights were on. Me, Cam, and Ethan looked at each other and said "You guys think Mr. Ferebee would let us interview him right now?" So we walked down to his classroom but he wasn't there either. Next we walked to Mr. Marrs' classroom but decided instead of interrupting him he would check back in with Mr. Barker first. We told Mr. Barker our situation and he said he would text Mr. Poller to see what was up. It turned out that he was pulled into a last minute STEM meeting that he could not leave. We decided we would try our luck going across the hall to Mrs. Snider's class who also happens to be Cam's mom. She said she would be happy to let us interview her during 3rd period so we could also get some of her student's perspectives on her class as well. The interview went great and the discussion with her students was very helpful. Since neither Cam, Ethan, nor I have her class it was good to get a perspective from a student's view which will help us in our next podcast episode that we will be recording this week.
In response to a comment from last week, the reason our teachers are not in our podcast is because the recording equipment is at Ty's house and we don't have the ability to move it since it is borrowed. Also our podcast is done on a student's perspective of classes for future student's to learn more about what to expect and experience with classes at Davie High. One thing we learned this week is that we need to do follow up emails with our teachers the day before we are planning to interview them to remind them of the interview. Another thing we learned is that sometimes we will run into problems such as scheduling or last minute changes, however, we need to adapt and figure out a solution so that each week we can use our time wisely and move forward with our production schedule. This week we were faced with some unexpected challenges. Our plan was to obviously interview someone and we decided to interview Mr. Robinson since Ty had recently discussed us interviewing him sometime during the week. He said that he would not be able to be interviewed until Thursday during Smart Block so we weren't exactly sure what to do on Wednesday during our Genius Hour time in class. We decided we needed to email some teachers again that did not respond to our first email because we needed more teachers to interview in the upcoming weeks. We also needed to email teachers again because Mr. Barker had made us aware that some teachers had talked to him and were unsure about our intentions with the podcast. We re-emailed several teachers and we got replies from just about every teacher that we did email. We made some plans for the upcoming weeks and that is what we did on Wednesday during our Genius Hour time. On Thursday we were faced with a different challenge. Both us and Mr. Robinson had both forgotten that we had the pep rally on Thursday so there would be no Smart Block during the day. Luckily, Ty had class with Mr. Robinson during fourth period and he some free time during the period, so he was able to interview Mr. Robinson for the upcoming podcast episode. Next week, we plan to interview Mr. Poller and to record the episode for Mr. Robinson's interview. We are already four weeks, almost five weeks, into this project and it does not feel like that at all. We may not be able to record as many episodes as we would like to because we did not realize just how much time this would actually take. That would be the one thing that every member in our group could agree on, we need to work on time management the most. Our interviews, Genius Hour times in class, and podcast recordings go very well but we just need to manage that time better between the three of us. We have definitely improved on communication with teachers throughout these four weeks. When we re-emailed some teachers, that really helped us to get back on track. We definitely hope to improve on our time management skills in the upcoming weeks and work towards completing our project in our timeline.
We have just now finished interviewing Mr. Barker for our first interview. We took a video of the interview and also took notes along with the interview. Now that we had finished our interview all we needed to do was record our first podcast. Our group went to Ty's house to help record our first podcast. We started by setting up where would record with our microphone, table and placement each of us recording. We first reviewed our video to help finalize what we would say for the podcast. We then spent 25 minutes recording our first podcast to post talking about Mr. Barkers classes and personal life. After this we figured out how to upload the post and make a cover for all of our podcasts. Later that week we went on to interview Ms. K. Cam could not be there for the interview due to sickness, but we still filmed and took notes on the interview to help make our second podcast for next week. We plan to record our second episode today and upload it as soon as possible. As we are looking ahead of the schedule, we may have to reduce the amount of episodes by one or two because of the number of weeks we have left. If we still really want to do all ten episodes that we planned on, we may have to interview and record two teachers a week in the future. Another thing we need to stay on top of is our blog posts. Our blog posts feel like another thing that we don't keep up with as well because of how much work interviewing and recording the podcasts can be. We will need to do better on this in the future if we want to stay on top of things. As for some good news, future teachers that we do plan to interview are Mr. Robinson who teaches math, Mrs. Snider who is a English teacher and also Cam's mom, and Mr. Ferebee who teaches science. Another thing that we have to do is do a follow up email to some teachers that did not respond to our first email. Mr. Barker made us aware that some teachers spoke to him and thought that we would just be criticizing their classes the whole time when that is not the point of our project at all. We need to mention to these teachers that the point of our project is to help students choose classes to take in the future and also for us to explore new classes that we may enjoy in the future.
This second week proved to be a lot more challenging than last week by far. At first, we weren't able to interview any of the teachers that we planned on interviewing at first. Luckily, Mr. Barker said we could interview him and we all thought that was a good idea seeing as he could provide us some insight on our interview questions and how to improve through the weeks. We sat down with him during our Genius Hour time in class and did our interview. Ethan and Ty asked the questions while Cam videoed the interview. At the end of the interview, we asked what he thinks we could do better for our future interviews. He said he would recommend someone writing down notes as the interview goes on so we don't have to look back over our video and write notes based on that. We haven't been able to do our first podcast just yet because of uneven schedules and Cam has been sick. We plan on doing it very soon but because of this setback, we may have to cut down how many podcasts we do record and upload. In the upcoming weeks we plan to have better time management and to try and schedule our interviews in advance.
Updated on 11/3/21: The idea of cutting down on the number of podcasts has been becoming a more prevalent option in the past few weeks. Ethan and Cam are currently doing basketball tryouts and then basketball season will start soon so they will become less available as time goes on. This will be one of our biggest challenges going forward as it will be a lot tougher to have our schedules line up. Another thing that we have updated since this blog post has been the way that we interview. We found it a lot easier to just set one of our phones on the table where we are interviewing so Cam doesn't get tired while holding the phone and it also works just as well as if we were to record it normally. |
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December 2021
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