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.

Web Conference 9-19

I participated in a web conference with my professor and classmates on Sunday, September 19th. We have had many instances where the video and audio portions are not working correctly. In this particular web conference, I could see several of the participants, but was not able to hear any discussion. It appeared that the entire group was experiencing the same problem, possibly due to some weather issues. The conference was conducted on the chat feature of the program. As in most of our web conferences we focused on answering questions the students had about their assignments. I was surprised at some of the questions. Dr. Abernathy continued to remind students of the time limit and they kept asking if it was ok to go over by a few seconds. While I understand it is the first time many have attempted a task like this, I have worked in radio and television, so I understood the time limit to be a firm limit. It was good to see people collaborating and helping each other out.

PSA on Cyberbullying

As part of my coursework for my graduate class, I participated with a group of fellow students to produce a one minute Public Service Announcement on Cyberbullying.
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Stand Up to Cyberbullying by Janet Armstrong, Priscilla Summers, Charlotte Spencer, Gail Dunn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Our group began the creative process by each of us coming up with a topic and storyline idea. We discussed these through email and decided on cyberbullying. We each contributed a script idea and collaborated to use the best ideas of each. As I had the most experience with video, I prepared the initial shot list and my teammates completed the script. We discussed the availability of equipment and locations as we are spread over the state. We came up with an over all plan and assigned roles for each of us. We determined I should do the actual editing since I had some experience. The video was shot by one team member and the others contributed the voice overs and production documents. We decided on the web delivery format to be YouTube because it is a simple upload from iMovie. One member secured the copyright attribution for our video. We used no copyright material from other sources, so no attribution was necessary.
Our video could be improved by reshooting a few of the segments for clarity and having a more direct action statement. Overall, our team worked together and collaborated very well. Everyone was willing to do their part and tried very hard to make the video a success.