Video Documenting My Group's Experience With Our Placement

Video: The Journey of the Lab Skills Seminar Lecturers

Pretty early on into our placement, my group and I decided that we should make a video documenting our experiences in our placement.  We thought about the most interesting way we could make the video and decided we were going to do a fake interview documenting how much the placement is not going to teach us anything, with counter-shots of how in reality, the placement is actually teaching us a lot.  The interview is what we say (jokingly) what we expected it to be, while the counter-shots is the complete opposite of what has happened.  This style is kind of what The Office does in their episodes, thus the film was made with a bit of humour in mind.  The 40 minute video does detail a lot of our actual responsibilities, and our opinions of them.  This video took over 5 hours of shooting and 10 hours of editing, and we are very happy with the resulting video.  It nicely represents everything that we have done for our placement, and summarizes nicely what we have learned.

The major things from the video are: teamwork, our presentation skills, and the criticism we have received from students.

Natalia and Taleen during the "interview."

Although us four are all doing the same position and work on the slides; the team is actually split into half because it's two of us presenting on the Friday, while the other two are presenting on Tuesday.  The two teams, as you can see from the video, are Mario and I, and Taleen and Natalia.  (Pictures of the group split in half)  Even though we don't all present together, we do feel like we are one big team.

Mario and I during our "interview."

To say that we worked well as a group is an understatement.  We worked like we were one big family and that meant that we were all willing to work together on our responsibilities and we were glad to pitch in for someone if someone else did not have time to finish what they're responsible for.  Also, our strengths and weaknesses seemed to complement each other.  While Mario is very detailed oriented, I tend to look at the big picture.  Natalia is more realistic in terms of the work that we can do, and she tries her hardest to find concessions from what the students expect from the slides, and what we can actually do, rather than, for example, Mario wanting to give students EVERYTHING they requested (such as doing dry runs in the ARC, which is impossible because we cannot bring glassware into that room), but Natalia was more realistic with what we can do and suggested we do dry runs on the Powerpoint slides.  Taleen is more like comedic relief in our group, but she does offer great ideas that the rest of the group wouldn't dream to think of (such as the scene in the movie where she reacts to the surveys that she had gotten from the students, that was her idea on her to express how one may react to poor surveys).  With all of our strengths put together, we ended up with amazing slides to give to students, as well as creative ways to lecture and teach the students the concepts.  Also, all of our personalities are quite different, adding more flavour to our lab skills seminars and allows for the content to be expressed in totally different ways.

The team "not working well with each other."

Our presentation skills were also a key part of the video.  Although the views in the interview were made in jest, the views that I had about presenting were kind of true before I started this placement.  Before the placement began, in my head, I imagined myself to be a relatively confident public speaker and thought that this placement would be a breeze and that I wouldn't improve THAT much in terms of public speaking.  But, as shown in the counter-shots, I did mess up pretty badly in the first few lectures that I did, and the counter-shot gave a pretty accurate illustration on how the very first LSS actually came out.  But I'm glad to say that that part of the video was just me acting, because at the end of the placement, I feel extremely confident with my public speaking and my presentation skills and I'm glad that I had the opportunity to do this placement to improve my presentation skills.

The video also features our reactions to the student surveys.  Although we said that we didn't really care about the results of the survey, it was actually half true.  I didn't take too many of the criticism the students had for us personally, but Mario took it worse than I had.  He kept obsessing about the results of the survey, and how the students were right and kept going and going...  I personally agreed with what the students had said about our first presentation, but I didn't think that it needed to redefine what we had been doing.  All the poor surveys mean to me is that we needed to improve a lot for me to be satisfied with the way we were lecturing.  I took their opinions with a grain of salt because most of the time, the surveys that we get are usually done by students who wants to complain about things.  The students who were actually satisfied with what we were doing typically do not just come up to us and tell us we were doing a good job.