Baking A Cake

                I was a member of the history group for our class assignment.  This group’s job was to research the history of Optimist Park and put the information into an easily accessible format.  This allowed for the website group to put our historical information onto the neighborhood’s website for everyone to see.  I specifically was in charge of finding important people who impacted Optimist Park in a big way.  I read articles from the Charlotte Observer in order to accomplish this and talked to Miss Simuel who also gave me some names of people she remembered as having an influence.  I looked at what these individuals’ jobs were and how they would have impacted the neighborhood. Then, I found pictures of them online and incorporated that into my group’s power point.  I also was the one who emailed the power point to the website group which I sent to several accounts in order to make sure our power point was received.

                I thought my group worked well during the class time given to us.  We were able to set up a game plan and divide the tasks up.  The division was mostly helpful in splitting up the workload and allowing team members to be able to research on their own schedule but it had downfalls too.  Our out of class meeting in the library was also successful.  The library’s resources are very useful and informative.  I found success working on research during the allotted class time.  That class time allowed me to get things accomplished without having to use my own time which has to be given to other classes as well as this one.

                The main issue that I ran into during this project was communication.  Part of my group’s assignment involved collaboration with the website group.  We needed to know how they were setting up the website in order for us to decide how we were going to present our historical findings.  Communication between the two groups was severely lacking which made us not find out what the website group needed from us until a week before the event.  This left both groups rushing to put things together making everything more stressful and chaotic than it should have been.  In the future, class groups should communicate with one another outside of class and on earlier occasions.  Moodle provides a list of students enrolled in each class along with their email addresses.  It is made accessible for communication purposes and should be utilized in the future.

                My group accomplished a significant amount.  We discovered a lot of exciting information about Optimist Park and how it came to be.  I found several important figures that were involved in the neighborhood itself and Habitat for Humanity.  Miss Simuel gave me a huge list of names in which I could not cover all of.  There are names not researched or photographed in our presentation that future classes could work on giving them a foundation to start with.