Week 4 Reflections 3

Working through the activities this week has taught me something about forward planning. You really need to have a complete idea of what you are doing before you start attempting to utilise any of these tools. You also need to have a full understanding of the tools functions before beginning. Until now I've been experimenting with a lot of the tools, playing with the features and seeing what I can make with them.
That did not go so well this week, as I made 2 videos of which only one was barely passable, a 8 minute podcast that I tried to do in one sitting and ended up swearing in the middle of and the only original photos I could find were of my old dog.

But that is all part of the learning experience I guess, especially when dealing with new materials you aren't familiar with. And I had no idea how uneducated in multimedia devices I was until beginning these activities.

I've used photo editing software before but that has usually just been to fix contrast, blurriness, red eye...the usual. I never thought that making images with a lower resolution was such a useful tool to have at my disposal, even uploading to this blog the load times were noticeably different. I have two images below that have been modified using the tool paint.net. The first has had a bit of contrast adjusted but mostly it's just been reduced from a 3.8Mb pic to a 160kb one. See if you can tell which is which. Pro tip, I had to delete then reload the images because I couldn't tell which was which at first either.





















This next image had some cropping and fixing up done to it to get a better image out. And once again reduced from a 3.9Mb picture to a 128kb image. Massive reductions all around with very little loss in detail. This will make uploading images to social media a much faster affair. From a teaching perspective this will clearly be a timesaver when making digital learning activities for students.

Science is a very image intensive subject. Many of the concepts make very little sense unless you can see them demonstrated pictorially. Be this in biology, astrology or physics, a picture says a thousand words, and still a thousand less than it would take to accurately describe many scientific phenomenon without pictorial support. Also given that I don't like the sound of my voice, I imagine that still images will be a constant throughout my teaching as my preference for the three tools presented this week.However they still only provided a visual aspect which means in order to benefit from the convergence of multimodal teaching, they are best presented with a lecture.


















Oh, and his name is Mushu if anyone was wondering.



Podcasts or audio files are another type of digital tool for introducing an auditory stimuli into the learning environment. As a teaching tool it can be used to record a lesson for review by the students at a latter time if they wish, much like we do with the blackboard collaborate sessions. It is also an effective way of delivering short bursts of information that perhaps require some pronunciation for a better understanding. It does not just have to be speech either. Even as I sit in my home typing this up I can hear a peculiar animal outside, though I'm too slow to record it this time, a short audio recording of a sound can be used as a pre-class appetiser to invoke the students interest and curiosity.

Even the students can present assessment in a podcast form. It provides another medium for them to present their ideas which (from personal experience of trying to make a podcast) demonstrates a substantial time commitment to the content being learned. Further it would be easier to mark, you are able to listen to your students work while doing other things.
However this technology is in itself insufficient to evoke real learning from the students. Personally I find it difficult to focus on auditory information without some form of guiding visual stimuli and as such, cannot see me using this tool very much in my teaching career.



Now just to make a liar of me, I'm going to present my perceptions of digital videos as a teaching tool in podcast form using the Audioboom app on my phone. Hoping this links below

listen to ‘Dig media in teaching’ on audioBoom

I also did a bit of a SWOT analysis for digital videos. I've done a PMI previously, this one is a bit more involved and in depth I find.

Internal
Strengths	Weaknesses
1.      Triggers multiple senses at once 2.      Provides a range of possible stimuli to present to students. 3.      Breaks away from traditional learning paradigms and brings a sense of vibrancy into the classroom.	1.      Depressingly time consuming 2.      Constrained by certain formatting 3.      Not interactive 4.      Time consuming needs to mentioned twice
External
Opportunities	Threats
1.      Students can demonstrate their own perceptions of content. 2.      Opens the floor to more diverse teaching methods, possibly taking students (virtually) out of the class and into the world. 3.      Can be observed repeatedly outside of class time.	1.      Poor formatting can ruin an otherwise well thought out piece. 2.      Depending on the nature of content presented, accessibility by outside world can be a problem.

I found the video creation a great deal more difficult than it possibly needed to be. Still after my first video flunked I needed to come up with another idea to present. I used a great deal of time this week fixing up my lawnmower so with the smell of oil and petrol staining my hands, I've opted to make a short instructional video on the functions of a 2 stroke motor..enjoy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCBXLbiDs74&feature=youtu.be

I made this with the voice recorder on my phone and Windows Movie Maker. For some reason wikipages did not want to accept the video, despite giving me the green tick after upload so i just made it into a YouTube video. Next time I may just make the video with the YouTube editor.

And that's me done, this has been an interesting week, hopefully I can come to better grips with these tools in the future as I can see beneficial uses for all of them.


Referencing:

C. Fadel, C. Lemke, (2008) Multimodal Learning Through Media:
What the Research Says, Metiri group, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Meris Stansbury (2008) Analysis: How multimedia can improve learning, 
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2008/03/26/analysis-how-multimedia-can-improve-learning/?

SWOT template from:
http://www.whatmakesagoodleader.com/swot_analysis_template.html