Technology Journey: Animation and audio

During the last two weeks, my technology journey has taken me down the road of using animation and audio to enhance student experiences. Prior to this journey, my experience with animation was limited and I had no exposure to creating/using audio. As a result, the beginning of this journey was filled with a small amount of apprehension and a large amount of excitement.

The text book readings provided an introduction to the technical aspects, capabilities, and the positive and negative ways to use audio and animation in web pages. In addition to establishing a base to ultimately complete the required assignments, the readings spurred creative thought for using these tools to enhance lessons, differentiate instruction, and student assessments. The tutorials from Atomic Learning were pragmatic and assisted me in acquiring tools to create animations in PowerPoint and create an audio file using Audacity.

The balance sheet is a critical financial statement for businesses. An understanding of the balance sheet requires students to understand the basic accounting equations. To bring interest and depth to this concept, I used several animation functions in PowerPoint. The PowerPoint animation functions were easy to navigate. After a short period of time I was able to use motion and colors to capture the meaning of the accounting equation.

While there are many ways to communicate with students and their families, and I intend to use several different communication tools, a class website offers a convenient and efficient way to connect with students and families. I plan to create and use websites for each of my future classes. A section of the website will allow families to see and hear me.

I used a digital camera to take a photo of me and created an audio file using audacity. The audio file contained my educational, career, and personal background. The audio file also contained my vision for the class, expectations for me and the students, and ways for parents to participate in their children’s learning community. The audacity user interface made it easy to compile an audio file.

The original file was created without using a headset. Due to the quality of the recording, I used a headset. The quality of the second recording was significantly better. The recording process made me realize that talking for two continuous minutes with no physical audience is difficult both in terms of quality and staying focused.

In addition to learning the technical skills to produce animation and audio, I have compiled several ideas for incorporating technology into my future classroom instruction.

Information Overload & Current Events

As part of the M.Ed program, I am taking a field experience course this semester. This course allows me to learn from an experienced teacher and have the opportunity to work with students. Last week I facilitated a current events lesson.

As I was planning the lesson I reflected on the perception that some students do not follow current events. After discussing this with teachers and professors, there seemed to be one common thread;While access to information has never been easier, students can suffer from information overload.

During the current events lesson, we discussed this hypothesis and each student agreed that between school requirements and the availability of media (printed, radio, internet, etc.) they felt overloaded with information.

Although the students unanimously agreed that current events was important to them and the business world, they wanted efficient access to information. Which lead to today's lesson.

This morning we discussed various web sources available for the students to use for the current events project. I also demonstrated, with the assistance of a student, how to use the "News" function in the Google search engine. The students found that this function allowed them to search for news information without getting distracted by to many hits. I agree with the students, as I was unaware of this function until I learned about it in the Multimedia class I am taking this semester.

My takeaway from my own learning experiences and that of the students in my field experience class is that information needs to be easily accessible and meet minimum quality standards to be beneficial.