power point, and give a presentation in front of the class about our neighborhood in Portland in an appealing but informative way. My group of students was given the historical area of St. Johns in North Portland.

         The St. John's assignment demonstrated my communication techniques through several ways. First, I learned to communicate with the group members by setting deadlines,  planning group roles, times to work on the project, meetings outside of class, and all through various forms of technology (email, text or phone calls). My team collaborated together through writing an essay, power point and oral presentation in front of the class on all of our findings and experience. I felt that our communication was good even though one of the members had contribution issues (unfortunately, that was out of our control). I learned through those communication mistakes how to improve my future group-work projects and feel that I have improved my skills greatly since then.

       Another assignment that displayed my communication skills was the Eco-district project on the South Waterfront of Spring term. Like the Portland Neighborhoods project, our class was separated into groups of four, and assigned one aspect of the new, sustainable area of South Waterfront in Portland. My group was given "Transportation" in the South Waterfront and assigned each member of the group separate as well as collaborative duties for the project. We were given background readings on the area including some from the Portland Plan, conducted an interview of an influential person involved with the transportation in the area, created a poster to present in front of the community at a Portland State University Event (the Sustainability Celebration), wrote a research paper analyzing the area's transportation current infrastructure, lead a group discussion in front of the class on an article posted online (specifically one on Eco-driving), blogged our weekly personal progress to the online D2L website, and created a video presentation that we showed our class for the final. 

          This assignment gave our group the ability to communicate through many forms of verbal and visual communication. We had to create a visually-appealing and informative poster that would attract guests during the Sustainability Celebration and be prepared to talk to any guests with questions about our research. Our video presentation had to fill a time span of twenty minutes and needed to be entertaining as well as educational for the audience. There are pictures from the Sustainability Celebration event, our poster and video presentation below.The transportation paper verbally communicated the information that we learned through our research and our blogs helped us document our experience. Leading the group discussion in class helped with practice in public speaking and engaging the students with the information in the article. Anytime we planned group meetings to work or had questions for one another, my team used email, text and phone calls to get in contact. Overall, I was very proud of my group for the effort by each member contributed and the communication that occurred between members to coordinate roles and times to work. We did an excellent job of communicating our subject, even members who were nervous for publicly speaking rose to the occasion and did an excellent job. I felt that this assignment was a strong and positive way to end three lovely terms with my Portland Freshmen Inquiry Class.

 

























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