Mind Mapping Multimedia

Assignment Title: Mind Mapping Multimedia

Uses in the Classroom: 
For this week's assignment we were asked to create a mind map using Gliffy. I chose to do mine on Audrey Hepburn. I'm a big fan of her movies and I think she led a really fascinating life. I tried to keep things in a chronological order and moving down the page while still covering the different aspects of her life.

I thought the site was fairly easy to use though it would have been nice to have a couple tutorials, explanations, or templates. This would be a good site for students to be able to create mind maps of their own, perhaps as a means of brainstorming. I know I have used mind maps many times in the past when working on different projects but it was always done by putting pen to paper. Using this site would definitely help to keep things more organized. Also being able to link to sources instead of having to have lengthy URLs all over the place helped keep the page clean looking.

Issues to Consider: 
I had some difficulty when it came to publishing. The embed option didn't give you a choice for the size and it wound up being really large on my first attempt. I chose to upload a JPG in order to get my Gliffy onto the blog instead so it wouldn't be so huge but now you can't click on the links I put with each picture in order to site where I got the pictures. I was however able to link the photo to the interactive gliffy web page so the links are accessible that way.

Copyright: The photo's used to create my gliffy were mainly found through Wikimedia and are all individually linked to their source on the interactive gliffy web page.

Photo Editing

Assignment Title: Photo Editing

Uses in the Classroom: 
Photo editing could be useful in many different ways in a classroom setting. For my particular job I have used Photoshop to help create and edit images that were then used for training purposes. There are some areas of our student records system that I have needed to further explain to both students and instructors but I was unable to create an example for people to follow without exposing sensitive information. In those cases I have used Photoshop to edit out or change the specific numbers and names to example versions.

As I said in last week's post I am already familiar with the Adobe Photoshop software that was the main focus of this week's assignment. That being said, I've never actually used it to create a GIF before. I think I could use this feature to take my training examples a step further and create a GIF of how to do those things in student records that currently only have a worksheet explanation because screencasts are unable to capture a how-to without exposing personal information.

Issues to Consider: 
Those who are unfamiliar with editing software would likely need a lot of help starting out. I know when I first started out using the Adobe Creative Suite it was sort of assumed that my fellow students and I already knew how to do enough to complete assignments in my studio art courses. I wound up spending a lot of time guessing my way through the software and assignments suffered because I was unable to make Photoshop do what I wanted it to do. Of course that was 7 years ago and tutorials are much more readily available now so newbies might have an easier time starting out.

Copyright: The photo's used to create this GIF are originals from the author of this blog.

Infographic

Assignment Title: Infographic

Uses in the Classroom:
For this week's assignment I used Piktochart to create an infographic regarding changes in the way course and book lists will be compiled. I think this would be a great way to really get people to pay attention to what I need them to do. I feel like more often than not the faculty see my emails, and are so used to doing things one way that they don't entirely pay attention to the changes I might make to a process. In the past I would have written an email explaining this process and not really get a standard response back. Using this infographic to explain the whole process in a quick and compact way, along with a new more user friendly form for them to fill out, I think this semester's book orders will go much more smoothly.

Overall I found this site to be very user friendly . For those who might not have as much experience with technology there were tutorials explaining the different features. There were a variety of templates that could be used to get across all kinds of information, not just instructions along the same lines as mine. The site also gave several great options for publishing/saving  your work. 

Issues to Consider:
As someone who has used Photoshop and Illustrator a lot in the past there were times when I was a little frustrated at not being able to customize the way I would have been able to had I been using those programs. It was also a little bit time consuming, although, when I compare the results of the time spent on this vs. the results of spending the same amount of time on perhaps a power point, I think the results are much more learner friendly when it comes to something in need of a quick but thorough explanation.

Copyright: The two spreadsheet images were created by myself using Excel. The template and all other images are courtesy of Piktochart.

Instructional Video

Assignment Title: Instructional Video

Uses in the Classroom:
For this assignment I used iMovie to make my instructional video. I think in general this technology could be used to teach just about anything. It could be used with screen-casts like I did, or with live action videos and therefore could teach things done on the computer or done by hand. In particular my video will be very useful for answering a number of common questions and showing step by step how to become and be a successful online student at Bay Mills Community College.

Issues to Consider:
Although I am a seasoned Mac user I still had difficulties navigating my way through this software. Some things I thought might/should be easy to find and figure out were actually pretty tricky. Such as having to hit V in order to get the voice over options for the video, which I could not figure out for the life of me. However, once I was able to make my way through some good tutorials things got much better.

Copyright: The websites used in this video are property of Bay Mills Community College and are used with their permission. 

Digital Storytelling

Assignment Title: Digital Storytelling

Uses in the Classroom:
For this assignment I used VoiceThread in order to create my Digital Story. I think VoiceThread would be great to use in the online course setting. Right now a lot of our online instructors already have power points uploaded into their course pages and I think it would be a much more effective teaching tool to combine those power points with VoiceThread as I did with this project. This way instead of having to go through and read slide after slide in PowerPoint an instructor could embed their VoiceThread into their course page and walk students through the weeks lesson in a much more interactive way.

Issues to Consider:
I really did have a hard time thinking of any issues that might arise while using this. One thing I could think of that would probably be an issue is our instructors might have difficulty making presentations using this technology. I myself had a little difficulty in the beginning, thinking I had to just continually record myself and start over any time I messed up. Of course I eventually figured out you can record slide by slide which definitely helped things. It would be nice if there was a more thorough tutorial on how to use VoiceThread when you first start out.

Copyright: The presentation used in the VoiceThread was created by myself, using the Grid template in Microsoft PowerPoint.
The music at the beginning and end of the VoiceThread is Dolphins Galaxia Grand Piano Sample by Ivan Chew / CC BY 3.0

ScreenCasting

Assignment Title: Screencast

Uses in the Classroom: 
Working mainly with online courses, students, and instructors in an asynchronous environment this could come in handy in multiple ways. For this assignment I decided to use Screencast-o-matic to create a screencast of me creating a grade book in Moodle. In the next couple semesters we are looking at trying to get not just our online courses in Moodle but our on campus courses as well. We began by requiring all on campus instructors to put their syllabi online and are now moving on to getting grade books up as well. This video will help me to reach more of the on campus instructors on their own time as opposed to trying to schedule face to face meetings with everyone.

Issues to Consider: 
If an instructor were to get lost or have any questions while making their way throughout this tutorial there aren't really any quick ways to get answers or see if other instructors had questions that might help them as well.

Copyright: The Moodle Course page was an example created by myself on the Bay Mills Community College Fall 2013 Moodle site.

Fotobable Assignment

Assignment Title: Fotobabble

Uses in the Classroom:

Fotobabble could be used in multiple ways in the classroom. Since I do not work in a K-12 classroom I can also see a variety of ways this technology might be used in my job. As the Distance Learning and Online Coordinator I am mainly there to help instructors with their online courses in Moodle.

I could especially see this being used in a Native American language course that was recently developed as an online course. The instructor could use images that represent the word or words they are trying to teach and record themselves saying the word so that the student might better understand the word they are trying to learn. The fotobabble could then be embedded into the course itself so that students don’t need to continually open the link in different windows or having to hit the back button all the time.

Issues to Consider:

One issue that came to mind when playing with this technology was that it could become a little tedious for some. For example if the audio goes on for a long time and the picture is simple and straightforward I could see myself getting bored looking at the same picture. This is why I think the technology would be great for short simple tasks such as learning one word at a time.

Copyright: The photo is an original from the author of this blog.