I decided to create a digital story using a platform which I have used in the past for active presentations. I was curious how several of the actions would translate to to a digital story. That platform was Prezi… originally introduced to me via students, this tool became a quick and effective way for students (and their facilitator) to present information. I have used it in multiple conferences as a means to present, and thought it may be a good tool to use for the digital story.

My story focuses on the “Why Marine Biology” part of my course… I offer a personal story about each module, as well as lay out the various components of the course. My objective was to create a bit more interactive of an overview to the various components of the class, and render them in a story based format.

Prezi to me had many advantages for a story format. You could add voice overs, aside videos, and links to content that was being discussed. It also was user driven, with each click advancing the story as the user wants it. The only issue I had was that I could not create a time delay on various parts of the story popping up… it created a bit of a glitch to the flow in my opinion.

I also had to use Audacity to create the audio files, and learned about the advantages of a OGG format versus MP3. It fits in great with the copyright unit in our course, as the Mp3 encryption is not public whereas the OGG is (and therefore was readily usable). As for content, I read through Prezi’s disclaimers and found that the images they return in their search are open for use, and since they are all linked to their original source there is no problems (or so I understood at least… this stuff is definitely a challenge to fully wrap my head around).

Creating a course with students 11-13 in mind was a lot of fun. I have worked on the text for such a course for a long while, and really enjoyed the drive needed to get a couple modules completed. As I worked through the development of this course, it began to evolve and change to best suit the asynchronous nature of the course.

To start, here is a brief summary of what this course is all about. Many of my friends are home schooling their children, and looking for ways to keep them engaged and interested in a broad range of topics. They asked me to help create such courses. The students should work through parts of this course over 4 weeks, and there should be a project that the student designs as a component of the course.

I felt that naturally a forum would be a good place to start with getting to know each other, and sharing a bit of our passions for sea creatures. I chose to start sharing links, because I wanted to blend the learner community centred and knowledge centred learning environments (Anderson, 2008). However, since the course has not definitive start and end dates it meant that many of the users would not be sharing the learning journey together. This is an element of the course design I would like to review, and find out how we can best put groups together so that their learning can be more interactive.

I decided that there would be two elements of assessment which would require teacher evaluation: the long answer quiz questions and an assignment which really focuses on the learner centred attributes as discussed in Anderson (2008). The quizzes are primarily automatically corrected, and serve as a platform to help students verify comprehension of the reading. It serves primarily as a formative assessment by allowing students to use it as an aid to their learning and self evaluate their comprehension of the primary material (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). By allowing students ample time (2 hours) as well as access to the primary material the online quiz functions more as a guide than as a test.

The most challenging aspect in this assignment for me was to avoid diving too deep into the technology of it (Bates and Poole, 2003). I became a bit obsessed with the presentation format of the primary course materials, and worked slavishly on it until I was able to create what I wanted. In doing so, it was interesting to reflect on how much I had learned personally. I had declared a personal goal and through adept internet research skills I was able to achieve this goal without a teacher. In doing so, I recognize that is part of what I must create in this course… a great format for evoking personal passions and then providing a platform for students to work through this.

My final course will have multiple levels of engagement, and has already been created to have as much guidance as possible in what comes first, then next, and so on. These different levels of engagement will be reflected in the badge earned, which ultimately associates with different types of achievers and different habits.

Please feel free to browse through the course thus far… I took a look at others and there are some amazing ideas out there (just don’t forget to use the student login!)

References:

Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. Theory and practice of online learning, 45-74.

Bates, A., & Poole, G. (2003). A framework for selecting and using technology. Effective teaching with technology in higher education, 75-105.

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf