Like Krazy

As I begin to study Course Management Systems (CMS) for a class in my Masters program at Full Sail University, I can't help but see a connection between the large scale CMS programs being discussed and what my students and I can create (and in some cases have created ) for my course using a blog and a wiki. In a way, the course sites have become a personal version of a CMS. The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) identified five learner-centered principles (http://net.educause.edu/nlii/mappingthelearningspace/2954) that lead to "deeper learning" in the learning experience: social (feedback and interaction between learners and instructors), active (peer and expert feedback), contextual (learner-centric design), engaging (individualized learning), and student-owned (some degree of self-control). Through a comment section and added chat window, the site can become social and active for my students. It is contextual in the fact that students can explore the lin...

There were several specific things I learned in relation to my media project this month. My intention was to find out as much as I could about displaying videos and video segments on a web page and add some sort of interactivity. Some of the things I learned: embed video (from another site) in a blog or other website embed a portion of a video (from another site) using begin and end points using a program called embedr, I can set up a display list of videos segments a website on Wetpaint is easy to set up, looks nice, and incorporates video nicely Wetpaint only incorporates video from YouTube, Google video, and Hulu, which rules out my hopes to use embedr! Animoto may be a good presentation tool for parts of my project, keeping things interesting and varied. taking a clip from a DVD and incorporating it directly into a web page While these are some of the specifics, I did get a much better overall sense of what I want this media project to be. Through my experiments and exploration, I ...

I thought that this final project for the Media Asset Creation course as part of my Education Media Design and Technology masters program at Full Sail University was going to be easier than the "Show me what you know" project from week #1 because it only covered this month while that project covered eight months. I was slightly mistaken! In looking back, there has been plenty that I have learned, discovered, and explored. Between looking for relevant tools, reading for my thesis, writing blogs posts, and going on MANY tangents, I feel that I have learned much and hopefully become better prepared for my students come this fall.

One of the programs suggested to me for development of my media project was Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com). It is a wiki that has more functionality and design options than pbworks, which has been the wiki of choice for my classes. The reason Wetpaint was mentioned is my need to incorporate video and it did not disappoint. It is easy to update text and add video, as long as the video links are to YouTube, Hulu, or Google video. I typically use Safari but Wetpaint works better with Firefox, allowing more functionality. The "practice" project I am developing using Wetpaint is actually a real site for the faculty at my school. I have started a summer technology institute for faculty and hope to create a page that corresponds to each of the sessions. My hope is create an organized, easy to use, and non-overwhelming site for faculty to reference. I have found that many of those teachers not using these technologies need a gentle nudge as to WHY, WHAT, and then HOW. I want the site to...

I began reading Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? last week (while I should have been writing my thesis) but I thought that I could justify the outside reading for a few reasons. I came across the book through one of my feeds as part of an online discussion forum with teachers from all over the world. I had never participated in a discussion of this sort and thought it would be great to learn and share with teachers in this way. The second justification is that the book probably contains something I could use in my thesis so it would not be a total detour. And finally, I figured I was learning some new ideas about teaching and the classroom and it sounded like it would work well with Zander's The Art of Possibility . All was not a total loss. After having read just the first two chapters, I have come across several ideas and practices that will be very useful as I think about my teaching for next year. An idea that Willingham discusses concerning engage...

I have been attempting to find a good chat window to use with my class blog and wiki but the gadgets that came with the programs were not very useful for my purposes. I may have found the solution with a program called Yaplet . Students click an icon, type in their name, and begin chatting real-time. The chat is saved and continued when a new session is begun. Now my students not only have the ability to read and respond in the comment section but in a chat window as well. And both are saved for further study and review.

This scene from The Karate Kid (1984) clearly conveys what Zander is saying in The Art of Possibility when describing the idea of Being the Board. The example Zander gives is when the boss of someone does not listen to his advice. Instead of blaming the boss, he looks at the situation and decides to "design a conversation that matters to him," enrolling him in his idea. Once again, this is another example of a paradigm shift in looking at the student who is totally disinterested. I have found myself too often quick to blame the student in this situation. The student may be upset not with the content itself, but with the fact that he is not engaged with the content. On some level that student desires to be engaged with the material. As a teacher, how do I engage him? A "good" teacher, like Miyagi, will find a way. I will have to be like "Daniel-san" in this instance and become a good student in order to strive to be that "good" teacher. Wax on, ...