Service Learning - December 1st

This week in service learning we had a lot of fun with the teachers and students. The teachers have been very interested in Skype and the school finally got web cams, so we helped them install them and get the program up and running. In our prep session before going to the school, my co-manager and I taught our students how to install and use Skype. The biggest obstacle while doing this was the middle school's bandwidth. Skype needs a good internet connection in order to run and play audio/video well, but the schools network seemed to struggle when using Skype. However, when we did get it working the middle school students, along with the teachers, were very enthusiastic and entertained by using Skype between classrooms. The school was limited to only two web cams, but fortunately all of the people in my program brought their laptops so they were able to lend them to the students to let them see what Skype was all about.

Service Learning - November 24th

This week in service learning was the culmination of all of our tutorials and presentations that we have made. These presentations were mentioned and linked to in my post on my November 3rd. My students presented their work to the class of the teachers that they have been working about. The original intention was to do this in the beginning of the semester so that the students could use these tool in there course projects. Unfortunately, things did not work out that way and it was pushed back to this later date. The good news though is that the teachers really liked the presentations and the students seemed to have a positive response to the material presented. The blogger tutorial that I created will be used by one of the teachers once the permission slips were received.

End of Semester Reflection - November 16

On November3rd, we held our end of semester reflection. During this session we gathered all our students from the different days of service and looked back at all that we achieved, along with the failures of this new Service Learning Program. First, the head managers of all of service learning held a presentation that covered some impressive facts about this semester's service learning such as how it is the largest student program and campus. A slide show was then played that consisted of photos of students at their service learning locations along with their community partners. Quotes of Bentley students in the program were also integrated into the presentation that showed how service learning impacts both Bentley students and the community partners.
After the head managers presentation we broke off into our separate service learning groups. Within our cluster challenge group we asked each student to say something they learned about Web 2.0. Each student surprisingly had unique things to talk about. Some of which i hadn't even heard of before. Despite the many problems throughout this semester it was very gratifying to know that our students were able to take something away from the program. After that exercise we broke the class up into groups and had them write down a few positive and negative things that we later discussed and kept for use to improve the program next semester. Overall this semester went really well so far and we still have 2 more days of service left!