Multimedia Project Final Version and Reflection

Self Evaluation and Project Reflection


https://weibelphysics.shutterfly.com/multimediagroupproject

I would like you to reflect on the experience of building your multimedia project through the development of a screencast OR you may add a written reflective piece to your blog.  Please be sure to address the following points in your voiceover or blog:

1.   You were asked to develop objectives in the proposal phase of this assignment.
a.  Please be sure to SPECIFICALLY address each objective you created in this phase.
b.  Make a claim stating your success or challenge in meeting this objective.
c.  Point to evidence within your project that illustrates how you met this objective. 

"Students should be able to pursue their own avenue of interest and take quantitative analysis to come to a conclusion about what their results mean. By using an online wikispace, students can share their results with other students and that uploaded project will also be used to assess that they were able to form a hypothesis, test it, and come to a conclusion about the results."

I think that I have successfully met all three of these goals. Since the first step is to 'choose a phenomenon', it gives students the freedom to pursue their own interests. The "Project Steps" forum section is set up in a way to promote students interacting with each other, certain threads being for the purpose of sharing results and others there for suggesting ideas. Finally as this project is broken into three steps, the second step will assess their ability to develop a hypothesis and the third step will have them test their result and come to a reasonable conclusion based on the results.

Feel free to draw upon the reflections you shared in your screencast, noting any significant changes that may have manifested since your last reflection.  These changes may have been in regard to your attitude towards the process (knowledge, skills, beliefs about technology, about the process, about design, etc.) or those changes that you may have implemented as a result of the interaction you had with your peers during the process (response to Screenr reflection, for example). 

Updates since last time: Observational Video editted and uploaded. Heading added to the top to more clearly show what this page is for and where to find the videos. Section added for the Observational Step in the posting section. Overall, not that much really. I'd already made significant progress on this by the time of my second update so these are the finishing touches mostly.

2.  How do you view the role of technology in teaching and learning as this relates to what we have been learning in the course?

I learned a lot in this class about website design, use of graphic art, and media editting. The video editting really helped me create the three sample videos at the bottom of the page to flow in a coherent method that will be easy for students to follow. While much of this site was already set up from a previous class's final project, the things I learned still aided me with setting up this particular page for purposes of layout.

3.  Summarize what you accomplished by creating this project.  What did you learn from the composing process?  How did your readings regarding the design process affect your project’s overall look?

This project was a great exploration in using videos as demonstrations for guiding students in creating their own work. It was also useful to model out some examples of student interaction as it gave me a bit of a sense for how the setup might work. For students, this project is a good way to get them thinking about the scientific process and how people make discoveries. This is a very useful skill even outside of physics and would perhaps be one of the most important things I teach to my students if I can convey it.

4.  The advantage of developing a multimodal piece is that it is never static.  It can always be redesigned, redeveloped, reorganized, repurposed, etc.  This is true of “text” compositions as well, of course.  The purpose of this assignment was to have you develop a piece that you would be able to implement utilization of in your current workplace, organization, district, etc.  It is understood that your project will most likely change with the input you receive from your colleagues/coworkers, administrators/bosses, etc.  Where do you see the future of this piece?  What do you intend to do with this project once the semester ends?  How do you see it being accepted by the aforementioned parties?  Take into consideration the readings assigned for this week regarding resilience.  In an academic climate where technology integration is a hot button topic, it’s important to consider the ways you’ll have to take a stance and convince others that learning, adapting, and integrating Web 2.0 skills is advantageous to ourselves and our students to acquire and utilize these skills in a 21st century digitally-saturated culture.  That being said, how do you intend to ultimately “market” this project for your audience?  If it’s for your students, what’s the buy-in?  If it’s for your colleagues, the same question applies, but obviously the answer will change.  If what you stated in your original project proposal has changed as a result of this course, please explain this in your final reflective pieces. 

This project will likely never be used as is in any of my classrooms. The current setup doesn't fit very well into any part of the physics course simply because there isn't time for it among the topics that need to be covered. It might make for a great end of the year wrap up project, but I'll need to learn more about the physics high school curriculum to know for sure. As is, this is a little bit too much straight up 'technology' to well integrate into a regular course. If I scale back things a bit such as using the idea of a blog space but cut down on the presentation aspects, I think this could be well integrated. However certainly some form of this project idea will survive because being able to investigate your own scientific processes is really helpful to students.

MMP Update #2

I've done quite a bit of film shooting and video editing since the last update and currently have the footage for all the videos I intend to make, though I'm still doing editing on the one video that has about five different multi-trial experiments that need splicing together for coherency and flow. You can see the website I'm putting this all on at http://weibelphysics.shutterfly.com/ in the 'project' tab in the upper right. I think I'm set on the videos and narrative theme, so my question for you guys is... where do I go from here? I kind of feel like after I put up the third video this will just be... done. My project is after all, about giving a narrative guide for students to be able to follow and once I get the third video up, I think I already have that. Is there some significant step I need to take to bridge where I'm at with what is expected of me for this project? Or is the rest of everything simply touching up?

Participation Gap

To begin with, I'm going to give a bit of context on my teaching experience. Thus far I have only ever taught or assisted teaching in college setting courses, primarily in the field of math and physics related subjects. As such I am familiar with students who do not participate, but I'm also seeing them at a later period in life than many here with high school experience are used to. When I see that a student is not engaged is the lesson, it seems to often have to do with the fact that they don't understand what's going on. Whether the lack of understanding is the cause of non-engagement, vice versa, or they both share some common root is something that I've always struggled to determine. I've always gotten the sense however that it's a feedback loop where not being engaged means they don't pay attention enough to understand the material and since they don't understand the material, they disengage from the lesson even more. More so, I don't think that this is a cycle unique to the class I might happen to be teaching. I get the sense that this cycle is one that has developed over many years and they have come to see themselves as someone who simply just isn't good at school. This is something which seemed to be described by Halverson's "Film as Identity Exploration" as a 'narrative' (pg 4). This self narrative is about who you tell yourself you are, which is often influenced by who other people tell you that you are.

There have been many studies for instance done about girls who believe that because they are girls, they are not good at math. This belief causes them to give up a little sooner on tough math problems, opt for the regular instead of advanced course when on the verge of being able to do either, and pursue jobs in less STEM related fields. It's a subtle thing, but it adds up quite a lot over the years. Now think about who else this happens to. It's not just girls that lose out on opportunities because of this, other stereotypes include those about race and the lower class. Because people think they are not worth giving opportunities to, they do not get these opportunities. Fast forward to high school and you get a participation gap, certain students that do not participate because they don't want to display how 'bad' they are, and by now they actually may very well be bad at the subject because they haven't put in the effort over the years that others have by participating. I would love to see this gap be overcome, but when there is one teacher and twenty students per class (not even considering multiple classes per day) it is difficult to devote enough attention to be able to build that bridge once the gap already exists.

Curating Copyright

For this week's prompt, I found myself doing a lot more research on copyright law than I really expected was ever necessary. In the end, I think that what most spoke to me was the Fair(y) Use Tale and Fair Use School videos on what copyright law /does/ allow you to do. Thus for this week's video critique, I will be looking at Day at School, which I found to be cute, but unhelpful. As works go, it was a fun video to watch, and called back to the advertisements of the 1950s, however I found it to be what I would expect for a great contest entry, but not a great informative resource. Disregarding aspects that I just didn't like (I feel like they picked several of the worst aspects of the 50s to model while leaving out other things that reduced the effect of resemblance) in this video they inform you of three things which you can't so and alternatives for what you can do in place of those. These three points were good to address because they're the most common things that educators think are okay, but this really didn't paint a whole picture about what actually can be done. After watching that video first, I was left with the impression that copyright law is extremely restrictive. It seemed like the only things that an educator is allowed to do is show something they've already bought which is directly related to the curriculum, use only /very/ limited clips, or outright make their own content.

Something I found much more helpful however, was http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml which talks about what can and can't be done. Their link to the five major topics provided for easy navigation to important topics such as where the line between stealing and fair use for educators is, the cans and can'ts of fair use and copyright, and how the matter gets complicated by newer technologies. In fact it was in the new technologies section where I found evidence that my use of a song by Kevin McLeod would have likely been okay even if I hadn't found it at a royalty free site with a creative commons attribution license. On a more critical note however, the education world website is... cluttered. White space might not be bad, but they have wasted space on either margin of their site which they could really have moved their content into to give it more room. The navigation bar on the left is a reasonable size, but on the right column is a couple of unrelated tools that take up way too much room given that it's not the primary focus of the website. This page's actual purpose is the article itself and the tool column on the right is almost the same size as the actual article. Worse, the tool column is only one page deep while the article itself extends several pages down into where it is an isolated bit of text with more space /not/ being used than the article itself takes up. This makes their site look unprofessional and like it doesn't actually have useful and important information which can be very unfortunate because they really do.

Mini Art School Part 4

I definitely had a lot of fun with the 60 second video which you can see below. Also I can authoritatively say that while it's a huge pain to learn and it takes much longer to export files, I am super way more happy with Lightworks than I was with Filmora. Though seriously, it takes a very long time to export files. That's the main reason I'm posting this so late, some things popped up in the exported file that I had to go back and edit before re-exporting... several times. But since I'm really happy with the end result it's all good. (Edit: Ahahaha... so it does not take super long to export. I was just exporting 29 minutes of blankness which meant a 30 minute video over and over and over again. *facepalms*)

As for my story board, I'm still working on that, but it goes something like the following:

1. People looking at a swingset thoughtfully, titled, "Finding something interesting to examine"

2. People jumping from the swings with a tape measure on the ground. "Observational Experiments"

3. People with pen and paper. "Form a Hypothesis."

4. People strapping on padding and weights. "Design an Experiment to Test Hypothesis"

5. Nailing a stake in the ground at a certain point. "Use Hypothesis to Make Prediction"

6. Person midair with large question mark. "Reflect on How Well Hypothesis Held Up"

The above storyboard layout is representative of how the students will be making their projects as opposed to what I will be doing this semester. My end of things is almost a test drive of showing how this could be done for a group. Incidentally, do please let me know if I'm way off base about how that's supposed to go.

Multimedia Project Proposal

1)  Purpose/Goals: This project will be for high school students to investigate their phenomenon of choice and record their findings in a digital format.

2)  Rationale & Summary of Project: One important skill of scientists is to be able to make your own data and share it with others. As such, students in class will be set in groups where they investigate some phenomenon of science of choice and share their findings including data of their results, video of their experiment, and a writeup on a blog.

3)  Audience: My audience is high school physics students. They'll probably already be familiar with many technological tools already, and at the end they'll give a presentation about what they looked into.

4)  Overview of Your Instructional Plan and Your Learning Objective/s: Students should be able to pursue their own avenue of interest and take quantative analysis to come to a conclusion about what their results mean. By using an online wikispace, students can share their results with other students and that uploaded project will also be used to assess that they were able to form a hypothesis, test it, and come to a conclusion about the results.

5)  Technological Tool/s & Rationale: Students will use video recorder technology, any video or audio editors they feel are useful, and a wikispace that I'll have set up for them to upload their projects.

6)  Learning Theories/Principles: Using the Next Generation Science Standards, this project will support cross cutting concepts of 1. Patterns and 2. Cause and Effect. In the 21st Century Skills, this will assess Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Collaborating, Communicating, and Technology Literacy.

7)  Timeline: This would be a project which takes place over roughly a month. In the first week students would give a suggestion about what they would like to investigate. I'll consult with them about the appropriateness of their project and help them come up with alternate ideas giving them a week to conduct their preliminary experiments which they'll use and analyze to make a hypothesis about the patterns they've seen. Following that I'll give a bit of a buffer so I can look over their results and give feedback while students look at each other's posts, suggesting critical tests which might disprove the hypothesis or put it to a real test. In the final week, students will choose one suggested test or make their own and make a prediction about what will happen according to their formed hypothesis. Finally after actually performing the experiment which they should record and post online, they'll decide if their hypothesis actually held up or if they disproved their original hypothesis.



List of 21st Century Skills can be found here: https://k12.thoughtfullearning.com/FAQ/what-are-21st-century-skills

NGSS Crosscutting Concepts: http://ngss.nsta.org/CrosscuttingConceptsFull.aspx

NGSS Core Standards may apply depending on project chosen.

Mini Art School Part 3

For this week's art school, I picked exercises from Color Echo and Thematic Agreement. For the second of these, the task was to create a book cover for something called 'Flirting with the Bully'. The theme, age group, etc was completely up to us and I decided to try subverting the expectations a bit with this. Instead of 'flirt' as in romance, I opted instead for a takeoff of 'flirting with death'. In my mind's eye, this book is about a teen who has frustrations in his life and ends up taking them out his peers who don't deserve it. This person finds himself walking down a line towards being a person that he doesn't like, but at the same time he can't quite stop himself. I thought this picture on the right had a lot of promise, so I cropped it to focus only on the skateboarder. This worked perfectly for what I wanted by not showing the person's face, the person departing from the viewer, and the prominent display of his shadow or 'darker side'. This book is an urban look at some of the darker themes of growing up. It's not a fluffy look so for the wording I chose simple black with thick lettering. The fonting on the lower case ls keep it from being too boring and the author's name is completely overshadowed by the title. It felt like it needed just a bit more than that though so I added a quip in a lower corner. Just to make sure, I tried showing this blindly to a couple of people with the prompt 'if you saw a book like this and didn't know the summary, what would you think its about?' and they all more or less came up with what I was going for which I consider to be a big success.

The other two prompts were the mandatory crop and Color Echo. You can see the results of the cropping at the bottom which I'm happy with but don't have much to say about. Color Echo was about taking an image and selecting colors from it to use as a background. You can see how I progress from left to right. I'm much happier with the right most version since that's where I realized I could accentuate the swirling parts of the bottles with ovals. For the cropping I did some mixes between medium far and close shots and posed them all together. I saved them in a .gif with a transparent background, but it seems this blog doesn't like those. I will continue to struggle with the white backgrounds on this blog but in the meanwhile enjoy the corn, wheat, barley, and other crops.