Week 2 - Presenting and Choosing our Groups

During this week, all the groups from Music and Art presented their PowerPoint on their ideas when combining Phantasmagoria and Gamelan Puppets. While each group was presenting, we were given a marking sheet with all the Criteria’s on and we had to assess each group and write down what they did well and improvements etc. I personally think that my group (Maria, Rana, Yasmeen and I) presented quite well, we didn’t need any notes and we weren’t constantly looking at the screen. We knew our information and we were confident while presenting. In addition to that we had a good balance between written information and pictures. We included a variety of media, such as pictures and videos, this made sure that the students who didn’t understand our ideas vocally, they would’ve understood it better visually. To improve our presentation, we could’ve gone into more detail with the skills that we used in English, Music and Art because we were a bit vague on that part of the presentation. However, we did give examples of our previous work done in these classes. Also while choosing the layout of the PowerPoint we made sure that it would suit the topics we were talking about. So obviously we didn’t choose pink or purple or bright colours because Phantasmagoria is very spooky and horror related and the Gamelan Puppetry is done in the dark with very little lighting, that’s why we chose for black and white and really focused on what pictures we put on the PowerPoint.  

In the second lesson of the week we got into our groups. Surprisingly we got to choose our own groups for the project which we didn’t get to do last term. However, if I have to be completely honest I didn’t really like choosing our group. Firstly, because I couldn’t choose by myself, I had to see if my other team mates were okay with the choice. Secondly, I wanted a mix of boys and girls but a lot of the groups were either only girls or only boys and I really wanted to go with Tereza, who I worked really well last term but there were people in her group which I knew I wasn’t going to work well with. In the end my group (Maria, Yasmeen, Rana and I) teamed up with Aria, Mario and Jackson. I have my doubts on Mario and Jackson because they are best friends but I think that if we give them jobs to do to keep them busy, they shouldn’t cause us any trouble. The only disadvantage that we have is that the only music people in the group are Maria and I and the rest are all Art so Maria and I are going to have to work really hard for the music to be good quality.

We only had around 15 minutes at the end of the lesson to just talk to our group and start sharing ideas, so we aren’t entirely sure if we are going to use a ballad or a story but its most likely we are going to choose Yasmeen’s ballad and turn it into a horror story while changing some parts to make it more interesting and realistic. We also decided that instead of just making it scary, we wanted our story to be targeted at little children as well as families. So we are planning to have a nice ending instead of having a cliff hanger or someone dying like in the original ballad. I am looking forward to working with this group especially because we all have different minds and ways of thinking which will be interesting to see what we come up with.