My Course Reflection of Multimedia Tools in Education

Throughout this course, I feel that I was able to learn lots of practical tools and tips to help me grow as an educator. One of my biggest takeaways was to be more conscious of how I present material to both students and parents. I want to make sure that I continue to regularly communicate but I feel as if I need to make some improvements with how I do so. For example, I want to work sending home notes in lists and bullet points and instead of overwhelming families with multiple paragraphs of information. I also want to make my communication more interesting. Instead of just using text in my newsletter, I want to work including graphics and photographs to grab the reader’s attention. This is also true when creating graphic organizers for my students. I learned how it is important to pay attention to choices and to include all important information at the top of the page. This point was brought to my attention in the article about the F-Pattern Reading by Lesley Hanes.

One tool that I really liked using during this course was Adobe Spark. This tool allows users to create videos and trailers. It was very user friendly and I could easily see my students using it. I chose to this tool for both my book trailer and for my parent communication tool. It made my videos very fun and engaging and I am excited to continue using it within my classroom. Another tool that I am very excited about is Screencastify. I have seen screencasts being used in other classrooms but I was unaware of how simple that they were to create. Now that I have found this tool, I plan on creating screencasts to help enrich my lessons whenever possible. The best part of using screencasts is that my students will be able to refer back to them whenever they need to.

I have always been comfortable with using technology in my classroom but I feel that this course has shown me many new ways to incorporate technology that I may not have thought of on my own. I am excited to take what I have learned and apply to my classroom when I return in the fall.

Artifact 2- Visualizing Graphic

The next artifact I chose to reflect on was my graphic design project. For this project, I created a graphic using Google Drawings. I have used Google Drawings before to have my students submit assignments through Google Classroom, but I have not created a graphic myself. I chose to create a graphic to remind my students that readers should visualize while they read. This graphic is something that I can hang up in my classroom and my students can consistently refer back to it. I plan on using lots of graphics in the future because I teach primary grades. The visuals will help reinforce topics to my students and will be able to quickly capture their attention. I plan on creating more graphics to illustrate how readers use other strategies. For example, I can use the same layout and illustrate a reader asking questions, and stopping to check for understanding. I could then refer back to them during small group instruction to reinforce these behaviors among my students. One of the difficulties with creating this graphic was that it did take a considerable amount of time. I did not use any images that already existed and therefore had to figure out how to create pictures using standard shapes. This helped me follow all copyright guidelines but was at times challenging. I think this would be especially hard for my students. Therefore, it would be important for me to model creating a graphic design multiple times so that they can see that mistakes will be made and that they may have to try multiple things before they are happy with their finished product.

References
Google Drawing (2017). Retrieved from docs.google.com/drawings

Artifact 1- Book Trailer

The first artifact I chose to show my learning from my EEND 677 course was a book trailer for Julius Baby of the World by Kevin Henkes. I chose to create a trailer for this book because it is a book that I want my students to be excited about reading. The story has clear plot elements and shows how a character changes so I have refer to this story when teaching my fiction unit. I created this book trailer using Adobe Spark. I found that Adobe Spark was very user friendly. It had tutorials and templates to create videos with. One challenge with creating the trailer was making sure that I changed the image in the video frequent enough to keep my students engaged while watching it. I wanted to be sure that the trailer excited them and could hold their attention. I would love to have my students create book trailers to replace traditional book reports. I think they would love creating them and it would show me how well they comprehended the book that they read. The only challenge would be that the students would need to record themselves talking so they would have to take turns to ensure that the rest of the room was quiet so that the listeners could clearly understand what was being said in the book trailer. My students could also create trailers to share their nonfiction research. After researching a topic, I could have them find images and record themselves sharing facts about their topic. This would be an engaging way for them to share with their classmates.

References
Adobe Spark (2017). Retrieved from https://spark.adobe.com/
Henkes, K. (2007). Julius, the Baby of the World. New York: Greenwillow Books.

Graphic Design

Using graphic designs in the classroom can be very beneficial. Students are overwhelmed by seeing many texts each day and therefore may not know what information they should focus on. A graphic design would jump out from the rest of the text and catch their eye. In the article, Why Teachers Should Care About Typography by Mercer Hall and Patricia Russac, the authors state that certain learning styles may cause students to have trouble reading to texts that are very word heavy. Theu go on to say that this may be true for students with IEPs. I have students in my classroom who have IEPs and I believe that this is true for them. Therefore, when giving a reading assignment teachers, like myself, can use a graphic design to help reinforce the main points.

Graphic designs could also be created by students. Students could be more creative while using a graphic design than they could when writing a traditional report or slide show.  If a student created a graphic design using Google Drawing they would be able to easily share it with their teacher, parents, and classmates. Google Drawings could also allow multiple students to collaborate on the same graphic in order to complete a group project. In the article, 8 Examples of Incorporating Infographics in Middle School Classrooms by Jonna Mae Magno, she suggests that not only could graphics replace reports but they could also be used as games, visual aids, or presentation tools. Therefore, graphic design could be used in any classroom!

At the start of the school year, I always teach a unit on character traits. I feel that I could easily incorporate graphic design into this unit. I could create a graphic for the characters that are in my read alouds. After I have modeled this a couple of times, I could have my students create a graphic about a character in a book that they read. As the unit progressed they could add text to their graphics to describe the character’s traits.