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Module 4 Journal Entry David Thornburg articles/sound clips I enjoyed these tremendously. I had never read him before – he’s a good writer and I liked his perspective. Too bad he’s not still writing for them. I downloaded all the clips that had MP3s to my computer and I’ve listened to about half of them. I like being able to do that. I’ve listened to books on tape before and enjoyed that but this is also interesting. I think it was unfortunate that so many people chose the same articles to read/review. There were so many to choose from and even when I read/listened to older ones, they were not dated to a point of inaccuracy. Next time you should ask students to choose ones that have not been done by somebody else. That will encourage a better discussion. I do enjoy the viewpoints of many other students and they often bring up points I hadn’t thought of and very often perspectives I never get to see. Multiple intelligence reading – by Armstrong I was glad to finally learn what is meant by MI. It’s one of those phrases thrown around in the academic world and everyone acts like they know what it means, but I didn’t really know. I had thought it was like learning style differences and I was glad that the author spent quite a bit of time explaining the differences and specifying the eight criteria used to determine the different intelligences. One thing that did confuse me though, was that as a teacher we are expected to work on and enhance the areas of intelligence that we are weaker and need strengthening. That makes sense to me because I could definitely define the areas of strength and weakness in myself. But as far as teaching students, we should gear our teaching to different intelligences in order to ensure understanding. Nothing was written about strengthening the weaknesses in students and ensuring that by teaching to all intelligences, all students get strengthened in all intelligences – ones they are strong in and ones they are weak in. I would have difficulty designing activities to some of the intelligences – the recommendation to work with other teachers or ask for help from some of the specialist teachers (art, music, tech. ed., etc.) was really useful. WebQuests integrating multimedia I was surprised by how many WebQuests I found that purported to use multimedia presentations, but in actuality, having students output a presentation was an option, along with other options, and little or no guidance or activities were geared around it. I think it would be a much more effective WebQuest if the activities lead up to the final product in a contributory fashion. I think students need a lot of guidance to put together the many pieces of creating effective presentations. It seems many teachers have students putting text on slides with a few graphics and that’s the extent of it. I liked the way the Gilded Age WebQuest structured having teams of students working on each segment of the final presentation. They had to work on their section but ensure that it fit into the overall product. Defining the product as a documentary would work and could be used for many kinds of subjects. I liked the way the Lightning project utilized sound in its presentation and it offered some excellent links. I thought many of the other WebQuests that the other students found were excellent. Everyone seemed to look hard for good ones that they could and would really use. Linear presentation using eZediaMX This was a very interesting project. Some of the tasks the Lesley courses request surprise me and this was one of them – it would never occur to me to have students learn a new product but I agree with you that it’s a valuable skill to be able to learn, review and recommend a variety of technology tools. I was quite surprised by the negative responses of everyone – I had a great time. I don’t often take the time to explore, download and learn new products. Occasionally I have to for my job, but this was more “just for fun” and because it was for my class, I had to do it. I thought it was valuable and informative. The product I reviewed was eZediaMX. I reviewed the pdf tutorial first – a “getting started” kind of document. Then I looked at several of the video tutorials. Then I played around and then I went back to the video tutorials to fill in some holes that I didn’t have – like adding the video. I also used the reference. It was a pdf also. The video tutorials were really useful but most didn’t have any sound – I thought that was weird. If they had a narration, it would have been better, but I learned a lot from them and found it a quick and easy way to get familiar with a new program fast. Initially it threw me starting with a totally blank screen – I didn’t know where to start. It forced me to write out my plans on a storyboard and figure out where I wanted to use the multimedia effects. Some of the things I added as I went along because after viewing it, I thought it was dull. I wanted to put some music or sound early on but knew that I would be talking to the class with the presentation and didn’t want the sound in the way so I saved it for the end. But I did add a sound to each of the buttons so they would “click” as I pressed them. That helped. I tried to put an animated GIF in but it wouldn’t work and I couldn’t find any information about it in the manual or the tech. forum. I guess they just don’t work. The one thing I really missed was a graphic/clipart/photo library. It took a really long time to search around and find reasonable graphics. Then when the animated GIF didn’t work and I had to go find another one I really thought about how I have to spend more time building a graphic library. Some of the search tools help but the search criteria isn’t selective enough. Most graphics files don’t have “keywords” associated and you wonder why some come up at all. There were some basic features that I was surprised weren’t there, i.e. toolbars for text formatting and toolbar customization. Some basic image editing capabilities like cropping, rotating, etc. Maybe they were there and I couldn’t find them, but I ended up doing a lot of graphic work outside of the program and re-importing the graphic file. On the advanced side, there were several special effects that I was surprised and pleased to see like having a graphic follow a path. I had done that in Flash before – some of the features and layout of this program really reminded me of Flash but this one was easier to use (maybe because I’d already been exposed to some of these concepts). Some special effects were cool and easy to use like the graphics transitions. Some were more difficult to use and had so many steps to them that it quickly got complicated to use them (like rollovers). I think it’s great they are building these kinds of effects in and over time they will get easier to use. I was surprised (and annoyed) that it wouldn’t import a .wmv. Why aren’t programs better at this – is it philosophical or technical? I think it’s holding people back from getting comfortable with multimedia – there are still too many formats and too many problems with things like codecs. I wish they’d standardize. It was nice when the web standardized on gifs and jpgs and now there are pngs. I hope that doesn’t start going crazy with so many different formats again. Standards are nice. One thing I really liked about this program was the capabilities of branching anywhere. You had asked for a linear presentation so I didn’t play a lot with the branching, but I know with web pages, I end up branching all over the place and building some “branches” into entire new units. It’s interesting to see how things grow sometimes. The possibilities of non-linear presentations fascinate me and I’d love to see what students do with that. I think this tool has a lot of flexibility and offers more opportunities for creativity. Without any templates, you would have to spend more time teaching about graphic design and colors and fonts and readability and layout but I think it would be better for students to not fall into the “select a template, type text, paste pictures, add transitions, save, done” routine. Note - Since I used this eZedia program to create my linear multimedia presentation, the result is a proprietary file format and I could never view the work after the 30 day trial ran out.
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