▩Week Five Question:
After completing the podcast and video projects, reflect your working experiences of creating multimedia materials, the challenges you encountered during your creation. You also want to focus on how you will use these technologies into your own classroom? How can authoring software help you teach and your students learn? Make sure to use Chapter 7-8 as your reference.
The three projects for this week are a podcast, a storytelling video, and an interactive video. The keyword is definitely “multimedia”, which I’m quite familiar with. I’m glad that the programs I used to complete this week’s assignments are all free to use.
I used Audacity first to record my voice and then added a piece of background music to it. Audacity is an excellent software for audio editing which allows users to adjust several characteristics of the audio file. For example, since I recorded my voice with apple earphones, the recording sounds like “not real”. But with the help of AU filter function in Audacity, my voice is more like being recorded in a luxurious studio. Then for the storytelling, I planned to do my video with Storybird, but the fact is that Storybird makes users choose images from its resource collections instead of uploading pictures of our own. Then I gave it up. Finally, I used iMovie to make the video with images, texts, background music and my voice narration being integrated into. Then as for the last project, we need first to create a classroom in EDpuzzle and then create a video with questions to be assigned to our group members. I enjoyed the process since I like viewing videos and answer questions which are based on the video contents. This type of videos would satisfy a group of learners’ learning style.
Chapter 8 offered readers with several kinds of active learning software such as educational games, problem-solving software, brainstorming tools and authoring software. Among these numerous categories, I feel related to the discussion when the author mentioned mobile apps for active learning. I already noticed that whenever I learned a new program in my classes and I checked them in Apple App Store, you got kind of 90% chance to find them there. That’s because the technology companies understand the trend in our field and have faith in the future of mobile learning. Just like this time, I checked EDpuzzle in App store and yes, it’s there! But at the same time, I do agree with the concerns mentioned in the book, such as the funding problem and difficulties to manage these mobile devices for younger kids. Also, I also checked the I Education App Reviews (IEAR), and it turned out the website has gone. I even went to their Facebook page and the newest post is from 2012. The link to their website which is www.iear.org now is a Thailand website and have some football news… I found the website address in IEAR’s Facebook page so it must be the correct one but it seems they ended their services. But there are still some other sites that offer teachers with app reviews from educators. For example, Apple App store has a category for education in which you can find more detailed categories such as apps for kindergarten, for elementary school or college.
Please check out my projects by hitting the following buttons.
P.S. The class code to my Edpuzzle is catapca.