Category Archives: ETEC Courses

Courses which I am taking for the program.

Interactive Timeline

Creating an interactive timeline using TimelineJS 3, is straightforward, yet there is still enough flexibility to customize some formatting, and to add content to the timeline using HTML code.

As indicated on the TimelineJS 3 website, there are only four steps to create the timeline:

  1. Download the timeline google spreadsheet template document provided on theTimelineJS 3 website and follow the instructions to populate it.
  2. Publish the Google spreadsheet.
  3. Paste the published Google spreadsheets url into the Timeline JS generator and select formatting options.
  4. Embed the code into your website, or blog.

Here is a sample of a timeline I created for a project in the ETEC 540: Text Technology: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing course.

The drawback with creating interactive timelines using this tool, is that links can be broken as content is removed or moved online. But that is a common issue when referencing online content and resources.

The Mindy Project: Media Study Guide

Our first assignment in the  ETEC 531:  Cultural and New Media Studies was to create a media study guide based on a television series, game series or a theater show. Since we are all fans of the show, my group selected The Mindy Project as our subject. We created the guide for students in grade 10.

All the media guides created by our class will be included in a section in a book created by ETEC531 peers. My group and I created the study guide using Lucidpress, which, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, is an online publishing software.  If you would like to use the media study guide for your training, click on the image below to access it , or download the pdf file.

from: http://pub.lucidpress.com/4fcfdf86-dc41-4f66-931f-3a24f2f2708a/

from: http://pub.lucidpress.com/4fcfdf86-dc41-4f66-931f-3a24f2f2708a/

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”.

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E-Portfolio Learning Commons

For Teaching Professionals

Our group project in the ETEC510: The Design of Technology-Supported Learning Environments course was to create a learning space, on a specific topic. My group and I chose to create a website which is dedicated to helping educators of young adults incorporate electronic portfolios into their teaching practice and instructional design.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/eportfoliolearningcommons/

https://blogs.ubc.ca/eportfoliolearningcommons/

Dabbling in Stop Motion

One of the course projects in the ETEC 510: The Design of Technology-Supported Learning Environments was to create a stop motion video. This was the first time I’ve created one. I choice to create it using Adobe Premiere, because I am familiar with that software. In retrospect, I realized,  that in my typical fashion, I choose to do things the hard way! I learned that there are a number of free or relatively affordable, and easy to use applications available which could have been used to create the stop motion in less that half the time that it took me.

Regardless, I enjoyed this course project, and from the creative output by my classmates, I can see the ways that stop motion can be applied for teaching. Here is my project video: