Monthly Archives: June 2015

Web-Based Multimedia Design

Why Join a Community?

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Summer Update

It’s summer, and one of the tasks I undertake is retyping the list of usernames and passwords for all the online places I frequent.  I update twice a year now…and today is the day!  I have added so many new “tools” and communities.  Do I need to access yet another?  It depends on what I want to learn, so perhaps.  Is it possible, however, that I have yet to fully explore communities to which I already belong, that within this trove I’ve cached, there lie the resources that could help me with my multimedia montage project (MMP)?  “Yes!” is the resounding answer.

I have joined our class community on google+ and added Teachercast Educational Broadcasting and PBL (Project-Based Learning) as well.  Then I scour my go-to places list to find that Pinterest has edudemic with a collection specifically devoted to web-design that looks promising for a newbie like me.  In addition, edweb, a familiar landscape, has amazing resources in communities such as “Game-Based Learning” and “Creating Multimedia Stories” that I might never have discovered were it not required that I go looking.

The course I will be finishing in the next two weeks, “Introduction to Teaching with Digital Tools,” has familiarized me with ADDIE to a degree.  Today, as I was looking at LDC.org, I realize that the way the design of lessons is outlined follows the principles of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation in a simplified form.  Now I am seeing design principles everywhere.  (This morning my yoga teacher had asked, “Has anyone ever had the experience of watching a movie for the 10th time and seeing or hearing something for the first time?  You were at a different place the other nine times…Now you are here!”)  And so I am!

Because I intend the audience for the MMP to be my seventh and eighth grade book clubs, and envision going through the steps with the model text that they will be going through, all of Jeff Bradbury’s help, particularly technical, will be invaluable.  I want to have my students using the skills that they already use in their extra-curricular lives (Walker, Jameson & Ryan as cited in Sharpe, Beetham & de Frietas, 2010, p. 213) in the structure of our learning environment.

The book clubs will be addressing the essential question,”What Is Justice?” through their study of different texts. (I see “driving” question on the PBL site, and think they may be similar, but am too ignorant yet to answer definitively.) The texts they will choose from, predominantly novels, explore different responses to injustice.  Their “Take-Away” projects are what I want to address through the MMP.  The website will display the work of the students and allow them the freedom of presentation options, the how.  To a large extent, they will also select the content, what they choose to examine.  As Walker, Jameson, and Ryan asserted, “There is significant value in learners bringing to their academic studies these habits of selecting and appropriating materials, seeing and creating new patterns of meaning, and sharing information in creative ways” (as cited in Sharpe et al. p. 217).  The students will be building understanding, not just for themselves, but to share with the larger community, those who did not read the same text.  Furthermore, the essential question is being used across the eighth grade disciplines throughout the year.  Hopefully the work, and the methodology, regardless of the class in which it happens, will transfer.  I know I will be teaching for that.

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Introduction

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“Create a podcast,” the introduction to the new course, “Web-Based Multimedia Design” says.  “I encourage you to shake things up a bit!”  Oh, my gosh.  I am so “beyond my comfort zone” that I can’t even access the Google+ community to which I am to post the podcast, so I will post it here, as evidence that I have completed it and hope I can access the community soon.  In addition, I have created an Animoto video—nothing particularly brilliant.  What am I going for?  Survival, and as the gracious professor reassures, former students say this course has caused them to see the world differently.  Isn’t that at the heart of true learning?

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Week Four: And There’s More

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Have to include a link to fellow blogger that covers the development of podcasting and vlogging.  Why?  Because I just received an email from the professor of the next course I am taking this summer—“Web-Based Multi-Media Design,” and these two formats figure prominently.

When I was in New Orleans, my son mentioned Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, particularly the podcasts about how WWI shaped the America we know today.  I told myself that I’d listen to the 6+ hours over the summer, and I will.  I certainly intend to check these other sites as well.  After hearing about Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine showing at the White House, I know I want to listen to the youth blogger about LGBT issues, too.  He might definitely appeal to my younger (eighth grade) students; I’ll have to check it out!  (Isn’t learning great?)

online course work, summer study

Insights in Week Three

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This week finds us blogging as part of the class requirements, and I think about the blogging requirements I  ask of my students.  I also recall my first mortifying technology class over a decade ago when I was beginning my Masters degree at Rutgers.  I sat in the darkest recesses of the computer lab and cried through several sessions.  I had never been the least capable student, or at least had never personally felt that way, but that class gave me that feeling.  It was humbling, and at the same time, one of the most important experiences of my graduate school career.  I swore I would hold that self-doubt and second-guessing about my own ability and recall it whenever I questioned a student’s aptitude in the classes I would teach.  Time passes, though, and the power of immediacy diminishes.

Yesterday when I reviewed the assignments in this week’s module, I thought again about how tricky it is to teach when everyone is in a different place along the continuum.  (I greatly appreciate our professor’s introductory survey to gain an understanding of our expertise and use of technology and realize that I need to do the same.) When I began my graduate studies, I knew nothing about technology– hence the lab meltdowns.  Now after several years of pledging to upgrade my awareness and proficiency with digital tools, I’m gaining confidence, but much of this is still not natural for me.  In fact, I just tried to post to the Padlet—yes I signed up when it was “Wallwisher”—but I still hadn’t used it, and found myself stymied.  I read the “help” but doubt that my link will show the page.  ARGH!  Frustration, my old friend.  Hear me, fellow students, I am no stranger to gnashing-of-teeth!  A truth about technology use: one has to find tools that will actually maximize performance.  The goal is to learn, not to mystify.

That brings me to my own students, many of whom have never used any of the tools I introduce and espouse during their semester in 151 despite the fact that the majority of them qualify as digital natives.  Having made the assumption that my college students would be familiar and adept with all the tools I use as a matter of course, the irony that that is not the case because working with technology is not a genetic trait but must be taught as the linked video asserts resonates.  I have had stunned 20-year-olds say they never expected someone like me (translate: OLD!) to be so “up on the technology.”  Furthermore, for many of them, the idea that I would want to see all their work in Drive, so I could comment before they submit a draft was more than they had bargained for.  They resist the power of tool.

When a new semester begins next fall, I hope to be working with a fellow adjunct who has expressed enthusiasm, or at least a willingness, for our two classes to blog together.  I am excited about this.  Another aspect of technology integration is that colleagues must also be willing to share.  With all the opportunities for collaboration that new technology affords, it is astounding that I am not aware of them on my campus.  If I stay with this level of teaching for another decade or so, and if the Common Core endures, I wonder if my future students, as well as my colleagues, will be as prepared as the standards envision.  I hope so!

online course work, summer study

Forever Present: Online Courses

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In a New Orleans cafe, yes, but Rutgers Online portal is front-and-center!

 

I took my two remaining “personal days,” and paid for two additional days, to visit my son in New Orleans.  While this was a much-needed vacation, coursework traveled with me, making it time away, but not without  work.  This is the boon and bane of learning online.  I am not unfamiliar with the electronic omnipresence, the work that can always be viewed in Google Drive if students have remembered to put it in their shared folders.  Never, however, have I been on the “student” end of it.

Today, upon my return to the comfort of my own desk, my environs, I experience more than a single moment of panic.  When a professor posts a video urging students to be completely aware of the intense workload that they will have to bear, I am not immune to panic…and so, I succumbed.  PANIC and self-doubt inundated me.  Can I do this?  What do I need to do first?  Do I have time?  Can I do this and my regular job?  Fortunately my familiarity with this self-doubt, and my track record of success where academics is concerned, balanced the terror.  I countered with my insecurity with positive self-talk and now think I can, a lot like the little engine that could.  But for several moments there, I was forced to think like my students must think when confronted with a set of tasks that either in sheer volume seem impossible or in their complexity and newness pose a daunting challenge.

The OCC handbook provides guidelines for students and suggests that a student will likely spend an additional hour and a half for each hour spent in class.  With an in-class schedule requiring 2 1/2 hours, that means an average of about 4 hours outside of class.  We, the members of the online class I am taking now have been told that the class demands approximately 15 committed hours each week.  I can safely say now that 15 hours will not suffice for me.  Do I think I am the exception, that I am less capable than others?  No, but I know, based on the time spent thus far gaining a grasp of Module 2, that 15 hours is a conservative number.

In an insightful blog post, Linda Aragoni discusses the mistake that writers, as well as everyone else, commonly make in underestimating the time it will take to get something accomplished.  She suggests that those of us who teach writers need to divide writing tasks into five manageable “stages,” so students can look at the actual time spent at each stage in order to become more accurate at budgeting time overall.  I know that I always take more time than others require.  Writing is an elaborate and difficult process for me at any time, and this time the subject and its delivery demand more of me than usual.  This will be a case of, “If something can go wrong, it will.”  I’ll keep you posted.