Neverending Technology

   We are being strongly encouraged at school to use Twitter. I had been a hold out, not because I don't see the value in tweeting, but because of some serious time constraints lately. I did finally give in and sign up today. I can be found on Twitter at @nmstechteach. Join me there and we can tweet away.

LU-Teaching with Technology web conference 3/3/11

Tonight I sat in on the course web conference for my Teaching with Technology class. For the most part the web conferences are interesting and it is a good way for the online students to ask questions of the professor and clarify assignments. Tonight I did not comment, just followed the conversation. As the conference was ending it occurred to me that we all missed an opportunity to share some ideas about various activities involving technology that we are considering using to solve a particular scenario for the class assignment. While we talked about the lesson design and asked about how many activities to include, only one participant asked about any specific activity involving technology. This could have been an excellent opportunity for all of us to brainstorm some ideas and share some resource ideas, but I think we really missed a golden opportunity. We became trapped as our classroom students do in worrying about what was required to fulfill the assignment and not so much about what we could learn from each other.

Conflicting accounts

I have in the past used my school email account to access my blog account. Our school district now has a new partnership with Google and this blog has been switched over to my gmail account as accessing it through my district account is no longer possible. This appears to have caused some issues with people being able to access my posts. If you are encountering any issues, please post a comment so that I can work towards getting my blog back up and running smoothly.
While I understand the district's desire to maintain our professional accounts and to provide us linked services, this particular glitch in communication has caused multiple issues so far. As a requirement for my graduate course I am preparing with teammates a Google Document and a group project page. Since my computer defaults to the school district I can not even post a link without it resulting in anyone trying to use the link to view the project page being redirected to the school district access portal. I am hopeful that this is an issue that can be resolved in the future.

Reflection - LU EDLD5366 Digital Graphics and Animation

The course began with a lesson in basic design principles. While these were familiar to me and normally incorporated into the lessons I teach to my Journalism students, they were a good reminder and provided good concrete examples I could use with my students.  According to Yearwood (2009), “Repetition means using the same element or attribute in more than one place in the design.” Alignment is defined as, “the attribute of arranging every element in a design to conform to some kind of horizontal and vertical visual relationship with other elements in the design.” Looking over the examples provided of repetition and alignment provided useful tools to share with my students as they develop the school yearbook and need to create multiple layouts incorporating alignment and repetition to ensure consistency throughout the yearbook.

We designed a personal logo. This was an interesting challenge as there are so many different elements in my teaching career: an English as a Second Language department chair, a technology teacher, a music teacher, and a language arts teacher. Using the concepts of repetition and contrast I designed my personal logo as three rivers running between the letters of my name in various shades of blue and converging in the distance as my professional responsibilities do.  One of the most interesting parts of the assignment was gathering input from friends, family members and acquaintances to see what words emerged to describe me. The activity came from the LeaLea blog that was one of the assigned readings. While understanding the nature of graphic design, I had not previously considered the personal aspect that should be incorporated into a logo to make it meaningful.

The third week had us move into animation, a skill I had never attempted before. It was surprisingly easy to create an animation using Stykz. This skill will be useful to incorporate as I move into teaching webmastering in the next semester. My students will enjoy learning to use the basic animation tools and will likely go far beyond the sample I created for my project. Our readings on Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy gave a new outlook to the traditional taxonomy view and a framework for allowing us to more readily determine cognitive levels for the projects we use with students.

The newsletter assignment was a simple assignment for me as I have been producing newsletters for various organizations for a number of years.  Creating a digital newsletter using the design principles from the first week’s assignment allowed me to more readily produce a finished product for a local non-profit organization.

Each of the assignments in this course expanded on my previous knowledge and offered pieces that I can readily incorporate in my personal work as well as in the classes with my students. The discussion board and conversations helped me see things from other perspectives and expand my personal thinking. Because I learn best by using technology, the assignments worked well with my personal learning style and illustrated the importance of using the same type of approaches with my students, allowing them time to experiment with technologies and assignments to learn what works best for them. I would like to do further investigation into digital animation as I believe this will capture not only my own interest, but also that of my students. Animation offers possibilities for many subject areas and does not need to be complicated to illustrate key learning points.

Yearwood, J., (2009). Basic Design Principles. Retrieved from https://lamar.epiclms.net/Learn/Player.aspx?enrollmentid=1578712

Alcantra, L. (2005-2010).  The Art of Self-Branding Part One. Weblog post retrieved  from http://www.lealea.net/blog/comments/the-art-of-self-branding-part-one

Churches, A.  (2008). Bloom’s Taxonomy Blooms Digitally. From Tech & Learning.  Retrieved  from http://www.techlearning.com/article/8670

LU-Animation

My course assignment this week was to create a simple animation. This was something I had never tried before. It was not difficult to do, but it was fun. I used a program I had not seen before called Stykz. Hopefully my short animation will appear correctly below.

EDLD 5366 The Lisbon Bible

One of my graduate assignments was to review some ancient manuscripts and analyze them for the principles of graphic design. One of the first things I noticed about the Lisbon Bible is the use of repitition. The book is beautifully designed. The calligraphy is fantastic. The cover is repeated gold stars and a circular pattern. The interior pages have a variety of floral patterns around the text, but while the patterns themselves are different, their placement, general style, and borders are repetitive. Alignment is also important in this text as the columns are consistent in length and width throughout the pages. In most cases the top and bottom borders match and the width of the floral border around the text is the same. Contrast is achieved by use of different colors in the borders and border text on many of the pages. Proximity is achieved because each passage flows to the next with no effort. The larger colored text areas are centered within the text to allow the reader to examine them and move smoothly back to the text. The artist for this bible used the gold borders to constrain the text areas and give emphasis and importance to the text included inside. The use of the floral borders also seemed to indicate the importance of the text to the author.

EDLD 5365 Course Reflection

This course was titled Multimedia and Video Technology. I went into this course comfortable with the content due to my Broadcast Journalism background. I anticipated creating a video with a storyboard and editing it. This proved to be the case with the course. I felt my expectations and the course outcomes aligned very well. The course also included a few pieces I had not anticipated such as file compression issues and attempting to collaborate on a video without ever being in the same location as my partners.
These outcomes are very relevant to what I do in my daily work. As the Desktop Publishing teacher, I deal with students using all forms of media. Learning about other editing software available and working with files in other formats will help me guide my students.
The only outcome I feel I did not achieve was not being able to get a few shots I would have liked to have for our PSA video. This was complicated by the collaboration factor as we all strived to complete our back to school organization and beginning of teaching classes while finding time to work together on our class projects. I think the collaboration proved invaluable however as our ideas came together as we worked and each of us was able to pick up some of the load for the others as we each experienced some obstacles in our time.
I learned that I have a good understanding of the technical aspects of video production, but still need to master more of the html coding for things such as posting a Creative Commons license on my work. I need to be able to trust my partners to provide solid work because they never let me down.