Week 5 Reflection

Again, what a week! This past week went way better than last week and feel like I accomplished a lot; especially considering how much time and effort I put into the produsage assignment.

Last week I mentioned how I felt like I had only grazed the surface on the tools we are learning in this class. So this past week I made it my goal to choose a couple tools that I had learned about and tried to get a better understanding of them. I solely focused on Listly, Powtoon, and Storify since I was using two of them for my produsage assignment. After a week of playing with these tools and creating instruction with them, I no longer feel like I have a novice understanding of them, but an intermediate understanding and could easily implement them as an instructor. I still have a bit more I want to learn about these tools, but I'll work of that next week! :)

Emaze-ing Presentation Tool

I came across the online presentation tool Emaze by accident and think it's a tool you too should check out!

What caught my eye is how versatile this application is. As you can see by the image below, you have the choice to create a presentation, website, blog, e-card, or photo album.

Once you choose what you want to create, Emaze has pre-made templates you can choose from or if you're gutsy you can start from scratch.

I decided to create a powerpoint-like presentation and used the images and information from my Listly curation about mountain biking in Tallahassee 101 because I wanted to play around with the tool and not focus too much on the information being added. If you look at the below image, you'll notice a similar interface to powerpoint. 

PROS:

• over 40 templates
• you can import a powerpoint
• you can upload your own images or search for free use images
• you can include hyperlinks
• automatic spell check
• sharing capabilities to major social media platforms
• you can download your presentation
• you can do a lot with the free version

CONS:

• presentations are public if using free version
• doesn't automatically save work
• not everything on slide is editable
• does not support collaboration

Here's what I made in 15 minutes. I could have used more bells and whistles, but I just wanted a general understanding of this app so I could add it to my Instructional Designer toolbelt. Later this week I'm planning on creating a quiz with Emaze through the presentation format. Let me know what you think!

Produsage Assignment Complete!! :)

As a former teacher, I initially had a hard time trying to retrain my brain to design a lesson plan where students are producers instead of consumers. My brain is still trying to fight back after years of teacher training saying to teach otherwise, but I will say I'm quite pleased with the final result.

In my previous post, I stated that learners would use a blog to write about what they learned about creating instructional videos and embed their video within their post. Since then (albeit three days ago) I revised my plan. So instead of using blogs, I'll be using Canvas as my course's main platform. I chose Canvas since it was an easy way to have all my instructor material in one place and wanted to create a realistic online course assignment.

Here's a quick overview of my produsage assignment:

For my instructional design produsage project, students will be in an online ISLT course called EME5000-Designing Media Environments (a fake course I made up) and will be learning about the principles of effective multimedia learning. The overall goal of this lesson will be for students to apply their knowledge of the principles of effective multimedia learning and to create a short instructional video using the online tool, PowToon. After their video is created and uploaded to YouTube, they will add their video to our class's Listly to coproduce a list of videos that adhere to these principles.

To access my lovely creation you'll need the following:
(1) A Canvas account. The URL to my course is https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/1185081.

(2) My class Listly:

Examples of Instructional Videos Using Principles of Effective Multimedia

This is a list of videos students from EME5000-Designing Media Environments created that implement principles of effective multimedia use.

Produsage Assignment (in progress)

I'm still working on my produsage assignment, but I wanted to share what my final project will entail. 

The assignment

Students will read two articles: 

• Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52. 
• Mayer, R. E. (2003). Elements of a science of e-learning. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 29(3), 297-313.

From these articles, they will synthesize and create a list of principles of effective multimedia learning. 

Using Powtoon, students will then use these principles to create an instructional video on the principles of effective multimedia learning and upload it to YouTube. 

Finally, on their blog they will write about what they learned about creating effective instructional videos and embed their video within their post. 

Here's an example I made of an example of an instructional video:


Please feel free to make any suggestions! Thanks!

Week 4 Reflection

This week I feel like I am just beginning to get in the swing of things with this course! It's unfortunate, yet fortunate, that we only have two weeks left. I feel like I've learned so much thus far, but still have only skimmed the surface. I think part of the problem is that I've been focusing on particular topics each week for my blog posts and never get the opportunity to go into greater depth with the tools I'm sharing. It makes me think of the adage, Jack of all trades, master of none. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to be familiar with a wide variety of things, especially when it comes to tools in the field of instructional design, but I do think it's important to have a fews tools on your belt that you're knowledgeable and competent in using.



P.S. Here's a link to my voicethread for our knowledge sharing and tracking assignment:

Storify vs. List.ly

Earlier this week I used List.ly to curate a list for an upcoming assignment and one commenter said they thought Storify was better. So...I decided to see if they were right!

My goal was to use the same information that I used for my List.ly post by using Storify. Below you can see what the finished product looks like and compare it to my List.ly one.

Now one of the main features of Storify is its ability to include social media posts, but I didn't use this feature because I was using the same information from my List.ly post. What I quickly noticed was how easy it is to use. I created my storify in under five minutes! The main difference that I noticed was the access I had to social media content that I could include in my story and the inability to upload your own images/videos. I researched why Storify doesn't allow you to do that and found out it's because of copyright issues and they want to make sure whatever is used can be attributed to the owner or host site. Since I couldn't include my own pics like I did in for my list.ly post, I just searched for relevant images and gifs to include.

Ultimately, I think the two tools are like apples and oranges. List.ly is great for creating lists for others to add to and update, while Storify is more focused on locating public content and creating a story with it.

PROS:

• fairly easy to use
• simply drag and drop what you want in your story
• its interface has access to linking different types of media (e.g., giphy, twitter, instagram, facebook, URLs, youtube, copyright free media, and more)
• you can search for copyright free media:

CONS:

• you can't directly add your own images unless you're a storify enterprise user...However, you can go around it by uploading your images to a copy image sharing site like imgur.com and the simply copy and paste the URL. 

Arghhh....Piratepad vs. Google Docs

To preface this post, I will admit prior to testing out piratepad I've been a huge fan of Google Docs and always use it when working on group projects. However, I tried to go into comparing the two without bias. 

Piratepad

Piratepad is a free online writing tool that allows you to write collaboratively in real time. No account is necessary to use it and each edit a user makes is shown in a color associated with their name. To work with others, all you have to do is simply click on "invite other users" and they'll be sent the url. 

PROS:

• it's free
• multiple users can edit in real time
• you can import/export your work
• you can turn your work into a read-only version
• you can save your work and come back to it later
• you can download you work as HTML, plain text, Word Doc, or PDF
• users can chat on a side bar

CONS:

• the color from all of the users could potentially be very distracting
• if you're not constantly saving your work and someone deletes something without prior approval, it's lost
• if you lose your Internet connection, you lose access to the program

Google Docs

Like Piratepad, Google Docs is a free online collaborative writing tool. Basically it's like microsoft office suite and it enables you to create and share your work online in real time. 

PROS:

• free to use
• it's format is comparable to Microsoft Word
• Google offers a Drive app for Chrome and a Drive desktop program, which provides offline access to all Drive files (including files in Docs)
• all files you edit in Google Docs automatically save to Google Drive every time you make a change
• documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time.

CONS:

• there are potential security risks with using Google Docs since your work is stored on the Google server
• Google Docs requires an initial sign up as well as a sign in process that must be done every time you want to use the service

Other online collaborative writing tools:

• LibreOffice
• Etherpad
• Cryptpad
• Notion
• Airborn os
• firepad