Please feel free to explore my ETEC 565 e-portfolio and my Synthesis Reflection.
I would like to thank my classmates and instructors for a great semester! The discussions have been rich and I have enjoyed following all of your weblogs.
The past 13 weeks have been instrumental in my development in the field of Educational Technology. Other courses that I have taken have done an excellent job exploring theory and I feel that this course has allowed me to put theory into practice. ETEC 565 has been my third course in the MET program and I now feel that I have developed a strong foundation in terms of technical competencies. I feel excited and confident for the next seven courses! In short, this course has far exceeded my expectations. I have learned immensely and appreciate how my learning was scaffolded, resulting in success!
Think about an example of how multimedia has been used effectively to enhance your learning. Feel free to reflect on your MET experiences, or any other.
Over my first year and three courses in the MET program, the multimedia which I feel has been used effectively to enhance my learning has been screen casting. A screen cast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration.
It wasn’t until my third course, ETEC 565A, that I was introduced to this technology. Now that I have been exposed to it, I believe that I would have benefitted from other professors using this multimedia to convey some of the course materials. Here is an example of a screen cast that my instructor in 565A put together towards the beginning of our LMS projects. Thanks John! 🙂 This was an effective method of showing ETEC 565A participants how to set up their course shell and, as was mentioned in the screen cast by John, saved him about a day and a half of work time!
There are many screen casts available on the web, such as this one on YouTube, which explains how to export and resize a photo using Picasa. This particular screen cast helped me to be able to resize a photo quickly, without having to spend time fiddling around with the program. In the end, this gave me time to focus on other aspects of the E-learning toolkit.
Having been exposed to screen casting, I have created a screen cast with ScreenToaster for my moodle course. My main goal in creating this screen cast is to identify the different components we are being assessed on and to highlight some interesting features of my course.
Screen casting is a multimedia tool that I will continue to use in my teaching practice, with students and colleagues. I often do short educational technology presentations at staff meetings, and presenting a screen cast, which can be archived for reviewing, will be very beneficial and appreciated.