Well, I feel like I am making some progress on the final Culminating Project now. I decided to go with Windows Movie Maker. I had used it before but only put in audio and pictures. So I spent time learning how to make "slides" and put them in (I made a rough draft of the visuals in PowerPoint then copied them over to Fireworks for the final markup and so they would be in .jpeg format). I am happy with how it is coming along so far. I still need to work on the print message part and am a little confused on which direction to go for that. I did not do super on the first Instructional Message in Print and want to make this one much better. Then there is the Design Script. Going through all the readings and having these design guidelines and ideas from the authors has been so helpful. I want to make sure and address them all appropriately and effectively.
I really liked reading Marty Tessmer's "Writing Online Training Tutorials." He has a great sense of humor but also presents everything in a very straightforward manner that makes it easy to understand. And attending his guest lecture on the same topic helped me understand it all even better. I hope that I can make a tutorial he would approve of! I have struggled some with wondering if my project meets the criteria of being a tutorial. It is not like a step-by-step process of how to do something. The idea is to give students a list of ways to succeed in my class (ie. come to class on time and prepared, follow the rules, study for tests, etc.). So it is not so much teaching them how to do one specific task, but I feel like it is an important topic that needs to be addressed with them. But Marty talks about the idea of interaction being a definitional element...the student interacts with the content, not just watching a video. So do I need to add some interaction somehow? A quiz at the end to show they understand the content? Could this be part of the print-based component? Would there be a way to include a Flash quiz component with the Windows Movie Maker part? I think I am coming up with many more questions than when I started and should go back and re-think the direction I am going....
November 21, 2008
November 1, 2008
5130: Instructional Message Ideation
I have started working on the final culminating project for IT-5130 and have some ideas for the content going, but now I need to focus on how to best present them. I've checked out a few tools that I could use, but feel a little bit lost just yet. Do I use Flash, Keynote, Windows Movie Maker, PowerPoint, etc? I figured out that even though many people in the class love Keynote, it appears to be for Mac users only. Just a side note, I love my PC. So that one is out. I looked into VoiceThread, but I don't think the extra features, like being able to comment during the presentation, would be necessary. They might be more distracting than anything, and I plan on showing the message in my classroom rather than only on the web (although it will be available to students for reference online afterwards).
Basically there are 3 tools that I am really focusing on. One is Flash because I enjoy the variety of things it can do, like tweens and giving fonts different gradient fills and being able to see a timeline of the sound and screen so I can match them up. I do worry though that because it is going to be a longer presentation than I have made on Flash, I would end up with one huge timeline. I think a solution to this would be to create multiple scenes, but then do I break up the narration or do I record it in segments. Recording multiple segments might make the presentation sound choppy. I will have to look into this issue.
The 2nd tool would be Windows Movie Maker. I have seen some great presentations in our class this semester that were made with the tool, and I have used it before to make a picture video of a trip to Ecuador. It was easy to line up the images with the audio, and I like the various transitions. I am wondering if there is a way to make slides similar to what I have done on PowerPoint and insert them in the Movie Maker so I can still be able to match up visual and audio. If I cannot insert the slides themselves, is there a way I can make a slide and save it as a picture or edit in Fireworks and insert? I wonder if this would be creating a ton of extra work.
The other tool I am seriously considering is PowerPoint. I want to use the best tool for the presentation, but I have also been excited about how much I have learned about PowerPoint this semester and finding ways to use it effectively. At the beginning of the semester I was so depressed by what Tufte had to say about the tool, but as we have gone through various readings and projects, I feel like I have been able to make big steps in creating more powerful presentations with this tool. Also, it is something that is readily available on my computer at school and at home, so I can work on this and future projects at both places (during my off hours of course!) and really try to make bigger improvements. Ultimately I want to make sure my students are gaining the most they can from my presentations, and I feel like I can develop my PowerPoint skills to achieve this. It may be a challenge, but I feel like it is possible. The other benefit of using this tool is that I have used it so much before that I am familiar with how to do various things with it and would not need to spend a lot of time learning the tool while trying to make a big project - I could save learning tools for smaller projects, test them out, and then see if I want to keep going with it.
So that's where I am today. I hope to get some good work on the project this week. I will see how that goes as I plan to spend a lot of time getting pictures taken for the presentation - I want to use a lot of my own images, especially of the school and various staff members, so I need to get started on that in case some need to be re-taken or re-worked.
Basically there are 3 tools that I am really focusing on. One is Flash because I enjoy the variety of things it can do, like tweens and giving fonts different gradient fills and being able to see a timeline of the sound and screen so I can match them up. I do worry though that because it is going to be a longer presentation than I have made on Flash, I would end up with one huge timeline. I think a solution to this would be to create multiple scenes, but then do I break up the narration or do I record it in segments. Recording multiple segments might make the presentation sound choppy. I will have to look into this issue.
The 2nd tool would be Windows Movie Maker. I have seen some great presentations in our class this semester that were made with the tool, and I have used it before to make a picture video of a trip to Ecuador. It was easy to line up the images with the audio, and I like the various transitions. I am wondering if there is a way to make slides similar to what I have done on PowerPoint and insert them in the Movie Maker so I can still be able to match up visual and audio. If I cannot insert the slides themselves, is there a way I can make a slide and save it as a picture or edit in Fireworks and insert? I wonder if this would be creating a ton of extra work.
The other tool I am seriously considering is PowerPoint. I want to use the best tool for the presentation, but I have also been excited about how much I have learned about PowerPoint this semester and finding ways to use it effectively. At the beginning of the semester I was so depressed by what Tufte had to say about the tool, but as we have gone through various readings and projects, I feel like I have been able to make big steps in creating more powerful presentations with this tool. Also, it is something that is readily available on my computer at school and at home, so I can work on this and future projects at both places (during my off hours of course!) and really try to make bigger improvements. Ultimately I want to make sure my students are gaining the most they can from my presentations, and I feel like I can develop my PowerPoint skills to achieve this. It may be a challenge, but I feel like it is possible. The other benefit of using this tool is that I have used it so much before that I am familiar with how to do various things with it and would not need to spend a lot of time learning the tool while trying to make a big project - I could save learning tools for smaller projects, test them out, and then see if I want to keep going with it.
So that's where I am today. I hope to get some good work on the project this week. I will see how that goes as I plan to spend a lot of time getting pictures taken for the presentation - I want to use a lot of my own images, especially of the school and various staff members, so I need to get started on that in case some need to be re-taken or re-worked.
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