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Week 13 Journey Blog

How has your journey of learning to use multi and single media to teach been so far? What have you learned? 

My journey in using multi and single media to teach has been very rewarding and challenging at the same time.  Prior to this class, I did not have any previous experience using Audition, Premiere Pro, or InDesign.  Out of all the applications we used for our instructional design sets, I have to say that the hardest one to learn was hands down InDesign.  I think if I had taken this class during a full-term semester, I would have had the time to really learn InDesign and enjoy it a bit more.  I would recommend that this program not offered this course as an eight-week course.  Although I found it to be the hardest application to learn, I also found it to be the most rewarding.  In the end, I was really happy with my ‘Audio/Visual’ assignment for week 10.

As far as the other applications, I was already familiar with Photoshop and with Dreamweaver and had used a different video application similar to Premiere Pro many years back.  I still find Dreamweaver difficult to work with at times and would have liked to have used a different program, one that I wasn’t already familiar with.  My second favorite assignment was the visual assignment with Photoshop.  I did have to spend several hours changing my images as revising my work.  I didn’t think this assignment would take so long but it did.

I enjoyed many of the readings.  Hede (2002) talked about positives and negatives of learning with multimedia and discussed how learners who are highly visual learn best with multimedia.  This helped me realize that in order to reach as many types of learners is best to use text and images in instructional sets.  Hede also warned that some combinations of multimedia can lead to ‘split-attention.  The article by Shapiro (2004) was also very helpful.  Shapiro suggests using fonts with serif for the body of a document because it increases readability and reading speed as serif helps the eye travel across the line of text.

What would you still like to learn? What is still hazy?

There is a lot left to be learned.  I would like to learn more about the best way to design online courses.  I also need to learn more about learning theories, this is the area that I lack the most as I don’t have a teaching background and learning theories are somewhat new to me.  I also hope to see ‘real life’ applications for using social media on a real course.  The area that is still hazy for me is designing storyboards.  I don’t think I have read material that goes over best methods or effective ways to create storyboards.

Closing

I really enjoyed this class and loved working on the same project but with different media.  I think this is a great concept for someone who doesn’t have any previous experience with Adobe products.

References

Hede, A. (2002). An Integrated Model of Multimedia Effects on Learning. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 177-191.


Shapiro, A., & Niederhauser, D. (2004). Learning from hypertext: Research issues and findings. Handbook of research on educational communications and technology, 2, 605–620.

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