ET 513 Week 16 “e-Learning Strategies for F2F Classrooms”

Wow, it’s been a fast 16 weeks! This class was exceptionally useful, and I look forward to applying the Multimedia Principles to my future presentations & updating some of my old presentations! I will have a busy summer!

Below is my final assignment.

This class has been super useful for me in terms of learning the Multimedia Principles and then attempting to implement the Principles all while learning some new technology tools. I always love when I create projects for my grad class that I can use in the classes that I teach. I have used several of the artifacts for this class in my face to face (F2F) classroom.

I teach in a F2F suburban public high school. My classroom has a set of Chromebooks, so in my projects for this class I tried to use tools that my students could use on the Chromebooks. I am looking forward to implementing both some of the Multimedia Principles in my own presentations, and using some tools.

In particular, I plan to update my presentations using the Multimedia Principles. I have slowly started to do this.

Here is an example of my Google Slide Presentation on Newton’s Laws prior to learning about the MultiMedia Principles. As you can see, I broke almost all of the principles; so many words and so many slides! Since taking this class, I have broken the presentation into several shorter presentations (Segmenting Principle). Additionally, I have added images (Multi Media Principle) and reduced the amount of words on each page (Modality Principle), where I do have words I try to reduce the amount of words. I have updated my speaker notes & the speaker notes are used with the images (Redundancy principle). See Below links to presentations. I am considering adding narration for a fully flipped environment. 

Updated Presentations by topic: What is a Force?, The Three Laws (these are the first two updated presentations).

The thing that I am most excited about trying is using the narration tools  that I learned about to create Flipped Presentations.  I would like to try creating some narrated presentations either with Prezi or using my SmartBoard recorder. I have been looking for a way to record presentations, and am so glad that I finally figured out that I can record from the SmartBoard. This will be particularly useful in terms of solving Physics problems. For last week’s assignment, I created a faded worked example on how to solve horizontally launched projectile problems. It was very timely, as I  am using it this week in my classes!

Last, but not least, I will introduce some of these tools to my students, and will hopefully have them create some multimedia presentations as well. I usually have them create a couple presentations throughout the year, but I think I may add narration to at least one! I currently use Google Classroom, and post all of my assignments, presentations, worksheets, etc, but I am still trying to figure out the best way to organize the information so as not to overwhelm students. I find the Google Classroom feed can sometimes seem very long for students who are searching for old assignments (I do use the topic tool, but still lots of information for students!). The last student project that I would like to try is the creation of website for students to showcase their learning. I most likely will use Google Sites since we are a Google Classroom school and it will be easy in terms of sign on, etc.

This class was very useful in terms of learning how to improve my presentations & how to use some new tools. I am looking forward to implementing what I have learned. I think I will have a busy summer creating & updating my presentations!

Old Presentation

Updated Presentation (broken into several shorter presentations, here is the first and second in a series on Forces)

ET 513 Project #8 Worked Example ScreenCast

I was so excited for this project, as I have been trying to figure out how to create a video for a flipped classroom. I have been talking with IT at my school and other teachers, but none of us knew that we could record using our Smart Boards! Sounds unbelievable, but it is true!

Dr Hall suggested that it was very easy to record on a Smart Board, so like many when trying to find out how to do something, I “googled” how to use the Smart Board recorder. It is incredibly easy. I ended up creating a Google Slide presentation, and used that as my screen cast.

The hardest part was limiting the text to only what is necessary! I had a script, but found I kept ad libbing as I was solving the problems. This took a few takes, but finally I think I had it. I did find one physics error in the narration at about 2:20, and I mentioned that in the comments on You Tube. For my topic, I chose to solve three horizontally launched projectile problems, which can be quite time consuming. The finished product is about 20 minutes, longer than I would like, but it again, solving projectile problems take TIME to solve these problems. I included a link to the original Google Slide presentation as my transcript is in the “notes” section. I also had You Tube add the closed captions, but there are some errors in translating form my Boston accent to the closed captions. Again, I “googled”how to fix the closed captions, and it was relatively quick!

I realize that on my last solved problem, I must NOT have hit play, and I  do not read the problem, just give the students a chance to solve & then do a quick explanation if needed.

While creating this video was relatively easy, I think that I will need to practice to get “good” at these, but I will definitely make more of these videos; they are prefect for Physics, as it requires practice to solve problems. I have been looking for a way to create videos for “flipping my class”, and there are several good websites Flipping Physics and Kahn Academy, but I have read that students prefer videos in their teachers’ voice. So I   plan to create a series of videos going forward (now that I know how!). I will use this video in the next couple of weeks, and get feedback from my students. I will still give my students the links for Flipping Physics & Kahn Academy if they would like to use those for a review, but will also have my own toolkit of videos!

Here is a link to the original Google Slide Presentation, the transcript is in the notes section for each page.

ET 513 Project #7 Static Google Slide Presentation on ch11

This week we read from chapters 10 & 11 from E learning and the Science of Instruction by Clark & Mayer. Chapter ten discusses the segmenting & pretraining principles which state that is better to “chunk” information. To me, this goes hand in hand with the Coherence Principle or “less is more” idea. Pretraining suggest that students should learn vocabulary, names,  ideas, etc. before learning how to apply the information.

I enjoyed creating the Google Slide Presentation, and trying to apply all the Multimedia Principles that we have learned about. For me, the hard part is always finding good images to include & limiting the amount of text on the screen. Below is my Google Slide Presentation on ch 11.

Here is also a view only link to my presentation.

ET 513 Project #6 Digital Story

Over the past couple of weeks, we read about the Personalization Principle, which states that Multi Media Presentations should use conversational style language and virtual coaches to help students feel connected to the learning.

We also learned about Digital Stories. According to Wikipedia,  digital storytelling is an emerging term, a form of storytelling that uses digital tools to enable “ordinary people” to tell their stories in an “emotionally and compelling form.”  According to University of Houston, “Digital storytelling at its most basic core is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. There are a wealth of other terms used to describe this practice…; but in general, they all revolve around the idea of combining the art of telling stories with a variety of multimedia, including graphics, audio, video, and Web publishing.”

For my Digital Story this week, I decided to step away from Physics, and create a digital story about the Gals for Cal Triathlon team, a team which means the world to me. I next needed to decide what tool to use. I think that finding the right tool is always one of the hardest parts of my Ed Tech projects. There are so many from which to choose, and I always want to try tools that I think are simple to use, and are tools that my students could potentially use. We have Chromebooks at our school, so I tried to use tools that were Chromebook friendly.

I chose Emaze for the presentation. I tried to adhere to the Personalization principle by using a conversational style. No need for a virtual coach in the story (although I could use a triathlon virtual coach!) I think it is an easy to use tool, and it allows for audio uploads. I downloaded music through Sound Cloud for the music. For the spoken narration, I tried several options such as the Chrome Extension Simple Audio Recorder, my iphone, and more, but the files were in the wrong format. I finally settled on Vocaroo because it is so easy to create and download the audio files with Vocaroo. The quality is not as good as some others, but the ease of use far outweighs the negatives!

Creating the slide show and audio was a fun process. I kept running into problems with timing and some of the audio was not playing correctly. I eventually worked it out, and below is the link to the Gals for Cal, The Reason I Tri. I could not get the embed code to work in WordPress, below are links.

Here is the autoplay link to my Emaze.  (or with link manual start and ability to page forward)

Here is a link to the transcript.

Click on the image to go to the Emaze Presentation

References

What is Digital Story Telling, (2017), University Of Houston, Education, Retrieved from http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/page.cfm?id=27&cid=27