I feel that I have learned more about technology in this course than I ever have in my entire life. There are so many options and resources available online that I never knew about. I have said this before and I'll say it again: this course will help me in my school career and my work career. The information gained will prove to be extremely valuable in all aspects of my life.
The final project.
The final project was fun for me. I love watching digital stories and was excited to create my own. Using WeVideo was a little confusing at first. It was all very foreign to me because I've never created a video before. I enjoyed adding my own flare to the piece. It was a very nice way to save our dream coming true in video form.
Here is my digital story of our journey to homeownership. I hope you all enjoy it! We certainly did!
I have seen many digital stories, I just didn't realize they were called digital stories. I must say that I love them. To me, they are much more effective at conveying a message than presentations are. They include an element of emotion which I think is why they are so thought provoking and draw the viewers in.
WeVideo
I was able to play around a little bit with this program. I did not save any work done because I haven't figured out how to make a cohesive video yet. I'll keep working on it! After looking through some of the WeVideo's on the Youtube channel, I can see that you are able to do a lot with this program and I am excited to explore more.
Storyboard
This is a rough outline of my story. It was hard for me to come up with an idea for my story. My final decision: my journey to owning my own home at 23 years old. It was a long, hard journey for me but it was also so exciting and a dream come true so I thought it would be fun for me to create a story about that time. I still need to gather more pictures, choose my audio and write my script, but I'm very excited to create my own digital story.
I had never heard of infographics before this week. I had seen a couple of them in magazines and such but never quite understood their purpose. They are a new way to present data. They can include the old go to's like bar charts and graphs but you are able to present these in such a way that catches the eye of the reader and is easily understood.
Videos:
The two videos we watched, one from Hans Rosling and one from Garr Reynolds, were extremely helpful in understand how to present data in a way that is visually appealing. Hans spoke about the rise of the washing machine, or in more general terms how much energy is used by each income class. But for me, it wasn't the message of his presentation that stood out it was the way he presented it. His visuals were clear and interactive, and he used physical props which brought an element of theatrics into his presentation. Garr Reynolds's video was a nice overview of what you should be doing with your visuals of a presentation. It was interesting to note that Hans used most all of Garr Reynolds tips. I think that's why he had such an effective presentation.
Google Forms:
I had obviously used Google forms before when submitting responses for this class but I had never created one. I think this is an awesome tool. It is a quick and easy way to gather data about basically anything. Google also makes it really easy to distribute the form to people through Google+ or other social media sites.
Infographic making tools:
When looking at all the different tools and websites available to create infographics, I chose to use Google presentations. I think I chose Google because we had just used it to create a slide a couple weeks ago so I was familiar with it. I found the other sites to be overwhelming and confusing, but it's possible I didn't take enough time to "play around" with them. I also found that I couldn't do the quintessential infographic with Google presentations, there weren't enough options. If there was something in the middle of Google and infogr.am, it would have been perfect.
Infographic:
I wish I had taken more time to use the other infographic creation sites because I felt very limited on Google Presentations. I don't feel that mine is in the normal infographic style but, here it is:
Before this course, I had used Prezi before but I hadn't had a chance to really explore and see all the program had to offer. I was also able to learn from the Prezi website how to create really effective presentations.
Challenges
My challenge using Prezi is that sometimes my mind is so stuck in PowerPoint mode that it is hard to think and create outside of the box. Or in this case the rectangle that is a PowerPoint slide. When I first starting using Prezi it was hard for me to create a "slide" because of the different shapes. However, referring back to Garr Reynolds I realized that it didn't matter what shape of the slide was, the content and visual on the slide is what matters.
Prezi Topic
This Prezi was actually done for another class I had taken, Principals of Management. I chose this topic (How to give effective feedback) because at that time I had recently been promoted to a manager at my current place of employment and I found the task of giving feedback to my employees daunting. I was able to not only teach my classmates how to give effective feedback, but throughout creating the presentation I was able to learn myself.
As I mentioned in my forum post, after reading Garr Reynolds website I realized that I had been doing presentations all wrong. Here are the major tips that I took from his website:
1. Too much text is distracting
2. Images should be re-sized to fit the slide
3. High quality images should be used
4. Don't have too many distracting visuals ie. animations, bright colors, etc.
5. Let the slides accompany the presentation, don't let them be the actual presentation.
Overall I think that the point emphasized is that all to often presenters allow the power point to steal the show, when really they ARE the presentation. Presenters should use powerpoint as a guide and a resource.
CREATING PRESENTATION
I have never used Google to create a presentation before. I had previously used Power Point and Prezi. I fould that Google did not have as many options as Power point does. But after learning how to properly create slides, maybe this is a good thing. I think Power point has so many options that people often want to put so much "pizaz" into their presentations that it is very distracting. I found myself wanting to simply put a white boarder around my photos and Google did not allow me to do that. Here are the slides:
PRESENTING ONLINE
I had often wondered how an online course would go about doing presentations. After this week, I know how. There are a couple options: Screencastify, Google hangouts, and MoveNote. After checking out each option I chose Screencastify, it seemed the most user friendly. After doing a couple test shoots, here is the final product:
OVERALL
Before this week, I never realized that you could video while sharing the screen on your computer. I had only known of Skype for video calling and conferencing. The assignments this week showed me that there are many other options for presenting online. This week also allowed me to learn the correct way to create a presentation. Hope you all enjoy and use my Quick Tips!
YOUTUBE:
I have used YouTube in one class before to make and post a video. I was familiar with creating a channel and sharing it with a community. What will be interesting later on in the class is making the video, I'm sure the way I made one before will be very different than we will be making them in this course.
TWISTED WAVE:
This was a new tool to me. I found it to be very cool. I like that you can make a sound recording without having to have a video as well. I personally do not like having a video of myself, so this was easier for me. It's also cool because if you have friends that are out of town it is a nice way to re-connect, to send them a voice recording rather than a generic text message.
PICTURE ALBUM ON GOOGLE+:
This was a hard task for me only because I have too many pictures to choose from! But I was sure that the Google+ community didn't want to see four million pictures of my cats:
Again, this is a nice way to keep in touch and see what people are up to on the Google+ community. It's a nice alternative to Facebook or other social media sites.
OVERALL:
This week was difficult for me (personal-wise, with the flu) but the actual work was pretty informative and I will definitely be using these tools learned outside of our coursework.
Cloud storage is a relatively new concept to me. To be honest I never understood how it worked. Essentially it's a free service anyone can use to store files or documents. There is no hardware or physical necessities. I will definitely be setting up an account with one of the many options for cloud storage, iCloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox.
The videos we watched about which is better: Google Drive or Dropbox? were very informative, explaining the benefits and downfalls to each. I think I've decided that I will open a Google Drive account so that I can use it for my school needs. I'm ALWAYS misplacing my thumb drive and it would be nice if I could have all my necessary documents in one place.
THE FUTURE:
I think this is only the beginning of what is to come in the future. I think we won't ever need any actual physical devices (except for the actual computer, phone, tablet, etc.) I believe all our storage will backup to the cloud, wifi will be available anywhere and we will never need to worry about losing important documents and files because they will be available anywhere and everywhere.
Being literate a hundred years ago meant that you could read and write. Simple as that. Nowadays it is very different to be considered literate. Not only must you know how to read and write, but you also must be able to work with and understand technology to some point.
The basic form of literacy is, as mentioned above, reading and writing. To be able to understand technology you must have the basic "literacy", without it technology would be like a foreign language. Our times have evolved so much that in order to be successful you MUST use some type of technology at some point in life.
The TED talk by Doug Belshaw showed how messages and ideas are spread over the internet at such a rapid pace. Much of the communication happens over the internet. The digital world has taken over so much of the media that I can't even remember the last time I read an actual newspaper or magazine.
I found this week to be interesting because although I know that to be literate these days includes understanding technology, it was cool to learn about just how important it is. Not only are we learning from others ideas and creations WE can be the creators. The TED talk we watched inspired me to research "Memes". I came across tons of hilarious pictures! For the assignment this week I tried to mimic a "Meme":
Working with PicMonkey was fun. It allowed me to change every part of the picture to create exactly what I wanted. I didn't realize this was so easy. I think in the future I'll do a lot more photo editing!
This week we learned about Fair Use and how to determine it.
Most media posted online (or elsewhere) has an original author who has copyrighted their work. The universal symbol for copyright is:
Having a copyright means that the author or owner has the sole right and opportunity to re-produce, copy or display the work. The owner may also give permission for others to do this. It is illegal for a person without permission to duplicate or use the media that has been copyrighted.
An exception to this rule is if the way the media is being used is considered Fair Use. The factors that determine Fair Use are if the work is being used for:
An educational use such as research or news reporting
Criticism or commentary
Non-profit
A transformative use such as creating a new work with a new purpose or creating a parody.
If the purpose you are using the media for can be classified under any of these categories, it is most likely fair use.
Factors that DO NOT constitute Fair use are:
Commercial use
Gaining a profit from the use
Using the media for non-critical, non-commentary reasons
The definition of Fair Use is very general on purpose. The lawmakers who created the law did not want to limit what is considered Fair Use and what is not. They wanted to leave it up for interpretation.
Overall, this week has been very informative and helpful to me. I had no idea about Fair Use and often would use images or other media without giving a thought to the owner or author. Both of the images I provided in this blog were found on Google Images but I made sure that they were "labeled for reuse" so that I am within the Fair Use rights.
When I think of Multimedia Apps I think of all the different types of media that are involved in presenting information. There is video, text, images, sounds and animations. I'm sure there are much more than that but that's my basic understanding. When presenting information it is believed that having more than one media source enhances the learning of the audience. It also keeps them interested and focused. This would be a pretty boring blog if I didn't have any videos or pictures, if it was just text.
Here is an example of the different kinds of media available:
The next image describes the Quality of Experience. This chart describes what goes into a presentation of information and what will make the Quality of Experience rating high. This is a good guide when creating a presentation with multimedia. I believe this is why journalists from The New York Times and The Guardian News use multimedia applications, to enhance the experience of their audience.
In this day in age we have so much technology available to us that I'm sure I'm only barely touching the surface of what Multimedia apps are. I'm anxious to learn more about what is available.
