Category Archives: Tech Tips

When Technologies Collide…

Infographics and ThingLink

I may be dating my self, but do you remember the old Reese peanut butter cup commercial—”You got chocolate in my peanut butter”? Well, if you do remember it, you will know the main premise is a combination of two things can sometimes produce something else that is really, really cool.

The same is true when infographics are used in combination with ThingLink.  Even though vision is our dominant sense, it alone, is often not enough for teaching and learning.By combining the two technologies, you are able to express ideas and key points more effectively. The combination of video (with audio), explanatory text and links to other resources, the learning becomes layered (encouraging scaffolding of instruction) and encourages an organic style of exploration.

If you are not familiar with using Adobe Illustrator, there are a number of online tools available to create infographics easily. Here are a few which are very intuitive to use: Continue reading →

Media Literacy Education

I am learning about media literacy in the ETEC531: Cultural and New Media Studies course. The question of whether media education important enough to be requirement in education is something that interested me. I recall a point made by Sir Ken Robinson, in his Do Schools Kill Creativity Ted Talk (2006). He mentions “education is meant to take us into a future we can’t grasp”. We are walking into the future, but trying to base it on the past. Because of this, and the rapidly changing technologies, teaching media literacy is particularly challenging.

That being said, it does make sense for media literacy education objectives to cover the past practises, in addition to the most current practices, to serve as a foundation for future knowledge to be built upon. If educators focus on digital media which is only 20 or 30 years old, the affordances of newer forms of digital media will not be fully understood or appreciated. If the previous forms are neglected, then the context, progression, and development of those technologies would not be understood or valued. Experts have noted this difficulty to “fully capture the diversity of ‘past’ ideas and experiences that shape our practices” and “how can we capture the ‘present’ state of media literacy education worldwide”.

Continue reading →

Hyperlinks, Online Learning Content & Embedly

Hyperlinking, a critical feature of the internet, is frequently used in online educational content. Typically, the hyperlinks can be identified by text that is in a different colour or underlined.

Online learning content often utilizes hyperlinking to make connections to other online information and website outside the course content. From a student perspective it can be confusing to distinguish which hyperlinks are critical to review as part of the course and which ones are included as optional course links. Course designers can use a number of approaches to minimize or eliminate that confusion. Continue reading →

Long Live the GIF!

Public Domain (wikimedia.org)

For a long time people avoided using animated GIFs on the web. They were considered to be simple, annoying, like the tacky cousins of the more sophisticated flash animations, javascript and videos. A snobby web designer might have said that they were so Web 1.0! However, after a decade long dormancy they are back! Continue reading →