In My Element

I created a walk through tutorial for class last week, a prototype that was to give my team and our 'client' an idea of what I envisioned my portion of the project to look like. Our client loved it, the rest of my group was pleased as well, but it was tied to a power point presentation. At the end of the class, after we'd decided that our product will be delivered as a 'course' in the learning management system, I suggested a name for the course to the client. She ended up creating the course with this name.

As there really wasn't too much work to do for class this week (which felt rather weird, honestly), I decided to take the demo portion I'd created, refine it a bit more and add an intro and outro with the course name, similar to the little news actualities I'd done in my radio days. Instead of a six minute screen capture, the content was netted down to under two minutes of relevant material. This was much better. I uploaded it to the course and got a little more feedback on it. I can see doing fifteen or twenty of these, when our objective is to complete five this semester.

However, I saw a closer to home need and started on it. My students have begun blogging and for the past two weeks, I've had them create an email account, send me an email, respond to an email, build their blogs, write a post, invite readers, and comment on other posts. It's a lot of steps for them. So, I created some paper job aids to refer to on some of these steps, but then I launched back into Camtasia, and I'm making videos to upload to my class blog. This way, they can access the information anytime they want.

Sometimes, I don't feel like I use enough of my skills with the kids, then I see them having a hard time visualizing and am reminded how much what I do really helps them.