5366 Reflection
My Digital Graphic
and Desktop Publishing class was an unfamiliar, but enjoyable task to me. As a
Lamar student that is enrolled in the Educational Administration program, this
was an inexperienced task that gave me the opportunity to focus on a technological
phase. All this was evident as I completed the weekly assignments that begun
with the understanding of design principles to creating a personal logo to
familiarizing myself with an animation program.
All of this contributed to a final product where a group of colleagues and
I created a website and proudly exhibited the learning acquired throughout this
class.
The creation of
the website in week 4 was a task that I felt confident with. As a campus technologist I have had the
opportunity to contribute to our school website every beginning of the year.
However, this website was created with a collaborative group that needed to
come together as a team and find a common mindset. At first this was a difficult task as each
member bounced out ideas to the developmental design of our webpage;
nonetheless we were able to work together and find a mutual ground. During this
activity I had the advantage to implement the C.R.A.P. design principles and was
able to perceive limitless possibilities for my website page design. In fact
the attained learning has made me spend hours polishing my page and learning
how to integrate the design. Now I find myself noticing the design principles
in announcements, commercials, and restaurant menus. I don’t believe I will
ever look at another logo, advertisement, newspaper or other publication
without analyzing the application of these four basic principles on it.
One of the
challenging areas that I am able to reflect on is the creation of an
animation. This was definitely the most
puzzling and time consuming assignments during this course. I experimented with the stykz animation and
definitely was unwilling to begin the assignment. However as I planned,
produced, planned, and reproduced, I became captivated in the project. The time
required to create a decent animation is a huge challenge for use in the
classroom, but the activity is packed with opportunities for technology integration.
The activity opened my eyes to the higher order thinking skills (HOTS) in
Bloom’s digital taxonomy. If implemented with my students, they have the
opportunity to create or construct their own animations to suit the content
they wish to project. By applying this taxonomy element and connecting it with
technology-based tools, we can dramatically enhance student learning. This learning
that I have acquired in this course will definitely better equip me to utilize
more technological aspects in order to reach the diverse learners within my
classroom. I should explore the digital
tools and software that I’m not particularly interested in and portray them in
my classroom.
All in all the
knowledge that I take away from this course will better prepare me to teach my
co-workers and my students the skills needed to produce various digital
projects. As a lifelong learner, there are many issues pertaining to technology
that I must continue to research and investigate. The fact is that I took
advantage of the technological resources that this class presented to me and
helped me continue building my administrator toolbox. I know that I still have
much to learn in the area of digital graphics, but this course has set me on the
right direction of greater technology integration in the classrooms.
References
Anderson, L.W., and D. Krathwohl
(Eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: a Revision of
Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Longman, New York.
Churches, A. (2007, April). Bloom's
digital taxonomy. Retrieved from http://www.techlearning.com/article/8670
Yearwood, J. (2009, July).
Basic elements of design.
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