Week 4 (June 5, 2006)

This week I began working on the newsletter with Suzanne to identify the content, some of which might include a calendar of events, new events of interest to the fellows, Webinars (mostly relate to Horizon Wimba or Blackboard), what’s new at ITS, and getting the most from your fellowship. Now that we have identified potential content area, we need to decide, in some cases, the focus of the content. We are also trying to decide the frequency of distribution, which is important due to PICT staffing. Too frequent a newsletter may fizzle out because it might become too cumbersome for the limited staff, and not frequent enough may cause the Fellows to ask “what is this?”

During the PowerPoint pedagogy module meeting with Dr. Allen and Marc Pastor, we prioritized the development of the modules into 3 phases, with phase one focusing more on pedagogy than how to use PowerPoint.

Phase 1
1. Engage Students with Presentations
2. Using Frame Based Animation
3. Animation for Content Building
4. Predict Observe Explain
5. Guidelines and Directions for Group Activity

Phase 2
6. Use PowerPoint to Enhance Learning
7. Close Inspection and Comprehension of Text

Phase 3
8. Using an Interactive Syllabus
9. Grouping and Timing in PowerPoint
10. Worked Examples – Increasing Transfer and Learning Efficiency
11. Learning through Student Experimentation
12. Using Audio and Video to Enhance your Power Point
13. Organizing and Managing Resources – Providing Structure with concept maps

For phase 1 of this project, Dr Allen is responsible for drafting the narration and finding someone to narrate modules 3 & 4 and Marc Pastor and I will take care of 1, 2, and 5. It was decided to have easily recognizable SDSU faculty and staff narrate and provide personal examples so all the other teachers can relate. I thought it was interesting that when we were discussing who should narrate the first five modules that it was important for them to have at least one or two women in the mix so that female faculty wouldn’t feel as though only men could be capable of learning these tools. I never thought of it from that perspective. Normally when I think of having mixed gender represented, it is for equality only – not because a women would relate her competency or capability to the voice behind the screen.

With that said, Marc intends on having James Frazee and Jim Julius narrate 2 of the modules and will find someone else for the 3rd. Marc and I will work through one of the modules together and rough script it and then we will each do a module by ourselves. We decided that rough scripting the narration instead of scripting verbatim narration will not restrict the narrator, who in most cases for the modules in phase 1, will have a great understanding of the content and tools. The goal is to complete all five modules in this phase narrated with the files uploaded and accessible through Horizon Wimba by the middle of August. Phases 2 & 3 will be complete at a later time – as these are deemed more labor intensive to complete.

I also sat in on a few Horizon Wimba live chats to test functionality and realized that some of the content of the PowerPoint pedagogy modules will not work properly in this system. All animation and interactivity will be lost unless the narrator does a screen share and demonstrates the interactivity initially intended for the learner. I uploaded a few modules and confirmed this, so we will have to take this into consideration when developing them for Horizon Wimba.