Reflection

Throughout the year, I've been benefitting from what we learn in this class. Beginning with the classroom renovation project in the first semester, multiple tasks made me grow as an individual learner. Although we only had one class every week, each lesson was meaningful and fruitful in terms of quantities of gains.
The most significant thing I learnt in this class is the importance of communication in a group work. Recently, the world and IB requires students to work collaboratively with others and the ability to communicate with others in order to accomplish something is neccesary. In this class, we were assigned a big group project each semester as if it's for our improvement of communication skills and as a results, after overcoming many obstacles related to teamwork, I gained an ability to collaborate with team members. For example, I used to fully rely on a member who is good at presentation, but now, I can be an independent leader who is able to coordinate plans of progress and manage project. I believe hese improvements in my attitude and skills all originates from the effort, which I put in the projects and not necessary self-motivated.
So I would like to thank mrpaterson for giving us an opportunities to improve group work skills, which are crucial all the way through a life.

Lesson 12

Today was the first class of English Expression in 2018 because Mr Paterson was absent in the previous class. As we made new groups in the previous group, today turned out to be the day to start a new project with new team members(though two of them, Shotaro and Joseph were my former teammates in the first and the second semester). I was quite relieved that Monika who is one of the most hard-working student in our grade, especially in English subject and highly skilled at managing groupwork. Unfortunately, a boy-only group never function so it was lucky to have such a efficient teammate.
In this semester, we were assigned to create something to teach people about Creative Commons, which Mr Paterson tought us last year. After a brief discussions, we decided to make presentation slides, brochure, infographics and videos that teach about Creative Commons of images. Although we first gave music to a candidate as Monika engages in music activity and she is a semi-pro and we thought her experiences would somehow be helpful in understanding Creative Commons of music, we chose to teach about images because it's probably the most widely used form of artistic creation and people including us don't even know how to reference those. Then, we decided roles of each member and I was assigned to make a video. We also decided due date for the first draft, which is 20th of February.
Today, I was surprised by how quickly Monika organized everything for us, such as making team's document to share ideas and sharing roles to each member. So I'm expecting to make something presentable in this term.

Lesson 11: Presentation

Today was the last day to take the class in this term and we had a final group to present. They were overall very clear and persuasive all the way through the presentation. However, I found it boring that they also featured color therapy and nature therapy, which almost all the groups used. I simply thought that they did not make a progress at all in terms of creativity and imagination. Their ideas were monotonous because it just looked so much like the ones, which many people came up with last term. So in conclusion, their presentation was not that exciting even though their speaking and interaction were substantial.
After the presentation, each team were called one by one and talled their grades. My grade was a bit lower than what I expected, but I thought it was adequate considering the fact that I kept fidgeting while presenting and stammered too much. I think that's all because of lack of preparation and communication inside the group so I would like to try to improve those skills next term.

Lesson 10: Presentation

Today, it was our turn to present the classroom project. After two groups presented their project, our group name was called. I was not that nervous because I was rather excited to present and desperate to finish the assignment as fast as possible. Although the previous groups did an excellent well-structured presentation, it didn't put so much pressure on me so I think I was able to present in a relatively good condition. However, even in that good condition we had exposed many mistakes and lack of preparation in front of the audiences.
There are several things that we did well in the presentation. One thing that should be highly evaluated in our presentation is that it included a lot of dopamine-generators, which are jokes, gestures or words that make audiences laugh in order to attract their attention. Luckily, most of the audiences laughed a lot during the presentation. It might have been just ridicule or derision, but it's important that they were motivated to at least listen to our presentation. It was unexpectedly lucky that my little mistakes and misstatement somehow triggered a laugh. Considering the fact that so many of the audiences laughed during the presentation, I can be confident that our presentation somehow, even if not intentionally, became an entertainment.
Compared to the  number of things that we did well in the presentation, there are too many points to reflect. The main point is the lack of preparation. None of us perfectly prepared for the presentation and about a half of what we said during the presentation was ad-lib. I did not count how many times I mumbled and said 'uh' or 'ah', but I'm pretty sure that it was hard to fully understand what I said and that's virtually all because of lack of preparation. To improve, I believe it's necessary to rehearse and make points clear in advance.
Lastly, it was such a dissapointment that my presentation skill and English has dropped dramatically. Even though my English was never good, it was shocking to watch my own speaking in video and realize how awful it is and how much I lost in just one year of life in Japan. I think I need fundamental change in attitude towards English-speaking and opportunities to learn English within everyday life.

Lesson 9: Presentation

Today was the presentation day and we had 3 groups presenting. The first group was talking about music room and how to improve it. I did not quite get the point of rennovating the music room because I do not think music room is that important and we have no problem using the room. They basically raised bad points of the room and some solutions, but none of them take music class so their arguments seemed a little unconvincing.
One thing that I learned from their presentation is that it was a bad idea talking while standing behind the desk with a computer on top of it.
Next group was really good and communicated well. Their claims were clear all the way through the presentation and explanation was clear overall. I thought the idea of putting ball pool was ridiculous, but other ideas such as round desks and wheel chairs were mind blowing. What I liked about the group was their way of talking and interaction with the audiences. They had some dopamine generators and visual tools in the presentation, which kept me listening to them. They were all confident and communicated very well.
The last group has done the best work. Although their idea was not that creative, but they made it seem innovative and somehow attractive by emphasizing the key points of the ideas. Their intreraction with the audiences was also good, especially Shion and Monika. They used gestures efficiently at the right time.I'm hoping to communicate with the audiences as this group.

Lesson 8: Preparation

Today was simply a preparation day for the presentation of the project. As our progress over the last 2 months was extremely limited, we had to clarify what's already done and what has to be done by next Tuesday and it turned out that the only thing done at the moment is logo. We basically made no progress over the last 2 months so we just divided the work and decided when to work together.
Then, we went to the science room for inspection and interviewed Mr. Nagatomo, a physics teacher. He claimed that the science room is too messy and should have more proper storage for equipments. He also complained the room cannot be completely dark and he has trouble conducting experiments that need darkness. His complaints were new to us and i think it could give us a clue to improve the room.
After the interview, we moved onto discussion on the video. I wanted to create catchy video so I suggested putting funny introduction of the team members like in a music video, but it was denied. Finally, we just took a video of blackboard animation, which I suggested.

Lesson 7: Decipacito

Today, we listend to various language versions of Despacito. Decipacito is the most viewed video on youtube hitting 4 billion views and will soon reach 5 billion. Although it was released only 6 months ago, it immediately passed the record of "Gangnam style". According to Mr.Paterson's analysis, the video became so viral because of its staging and casting. A lesson we could learn from the video and the spread of it is that no one knows what's going to be popular and everything has a chance to be globally famous and viral. I also became a fan of the song and listen to it over and over again even though I rarely listen to music. I thought we can get tips to create attractive video from this video, which we can use for the project. I am actually a video editor for the group so I'm hoping to possibly make a great video that can attract people's attention.
Based on the plans we made in the last lesson, we started bringing some ideas of renovation. We decided which chairs to replace old chairs without backrest, which is the main progress in today's lesson.