Mathew Morgan's blog post

link to my podcast

 

All three of us in our group contributed to each and every aspect of this project by giving our honest opinions and guidance for each other in an encouraging manner. We all used our expertise to our advantage to create our podcast. This allowed for “smooth-sailing” with little to no disputes about the way we should make our podcast.

 We forwarded ideas of where we should go and in the end we democratically decided to go to Plantasia which I was in favour of.  According to DCELLS (2007), children gain their most powerful understanding of their natural environment through exploring it for themselves, this lead to me initiating the idea of going to Plantasia because it is a creative environment with opportunities for a lot of scientific inquiry. This thinking is backed up by Oliver (2010) who says that “creative science is about delivering science in an interesting and fun way”.  We then decided through group discussion to have a video and photographic montage of our trip to Plantasia in the background with audio of how an out of classroom environment can develop a child's scientific and innovation skills followed. By working democratically it allowed us each to contribute our ideas in a fair environment.

 

To organise myself I used Adair’s eight Leadership Functions that are required to achieve success in a group (2011). Following this, I used SMART targets to get a clear picture of what we needed to do to create a good podcast. Whilst at Plantasia we each had our own roles, my individual roles were photography and research gathering. Although at the end of creation, only one photo was used in the video all photographs were sent to group members to allow them to use them in their blogs.  

 

Throughout Plantasia I also gathered interesting notes on how Plantasia is a good out of classroom learning environment and what use it would be to school children. These notes were all later used in our podcast. On top of this I collected relevant leaflets from Plantasia that were helpful in us getting a broader understanding of this out of classroom learning environment. In Plantasia we also all tried to see the place through the eyes of children this lead to us picking up valuable information and experience that made us understand actually how good Plantasia is at developing a child’s scientific skills.

Leader of video editing was Gavin, whilst I was giving encouraging helpful pointers to him (as effective team work requires supporting/ encouraging one another) (University of Reading, 2015),  I  decided to further my role as research leader and gathered more information on scientific and innovative inquiry by finding a number of key books, journals and websites. This lead to us finding many works supporting our team view on out of classroom learning.

As we now had finally gathered all information and video, as a team we set about creating our script for the podcast. I felt this was one of my strengths so took up a co-leader role in writing what had to be included in our talk. My involvement in this led to a fair distribution of airtime for all three group members as well as making sure that all aspects of the assignment were met.

It was very refreshing working with this group.

Bibliography

Adair, J. (2011) John Adair’s 100 Greatest Ideas for Smart Decision Making. United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/John_Adair_s_100_Greatest_Ideas_for_Smar.html?id=ynVZCsZxfegC (Accessed: 18 February 2015).

DCELLS (2007) Out of classroom learning. http://wales.gov.uk/dcells/publications/publications/guidanceandinformation/outofclassroomlearning/outofclassroomlearninge.pdf?lang=en (Accessed: 18 February 2015) Harlen, W. (2006) The ASE Guide to Primary Science Education. United Kingdom: Association for Science Education.

Obe, W. H., Qualter, A. and Harlen, W. (2009) The teaching of science in primary schools. 5th edn. United Kingdom: David Fulton Publishers Ltd.

Oliver, A. (2010) Creative teaching science, Abingdon: Routledge Ovens, P. and Wenham, M. (2009) Understanding primary science: science knowledge for teaching. 3rd edn. United Kingdom: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Plantasia (no date) Plantasia. Swansea - Plantasia. Available at: http://www.swansea.gov.uk/plantasia (Accessed: 17 February 2015).

Sherrington, R. (1995) The ASE primary science teachers’ handbook. United Kingdom: Nelson Thornes Ltd. University of Reading, (2015) Effective group work. http://www.reading.ac.uk/internal/studyadvice/StudyResources/Seminars/sta-groupwork.aspx