Design and Development 1 (EDIT 740) was a project based course applying the principles of multimedia learning to creating authentic learning objects. The learning objects below showcase my various skills.

Instructional Audio Project

I decided to create a podcast around the topic of data ethics.  As an AP Statistics teacher, data ethics is a topic that is not required to be taught by the AP Exam, but it is such an important facet of Statistics that teachers are encouraged to still introduce it.  I thought a podcast would be a great way to cover this topic.  This podcast can be uploaded into our learning management system for easy access for the students.  Please note my mp3 attachment is not a complete podcast!  I consider what I uploaded to just be the introduction of the episode (so an explanation of why data ethics are important, and what I would be discussing during the remainder of the podcast episode).  This is why there is no outro music to match my intro music, as my intention is to continue talking or start inserting old interview clips (when I make this longer and complete).  I would assume the final product would be 5-10 minutes in length, which I think is appropriate for high school AP students and wouldn’t be too long or overwhelming. Note: to upload here, I had to convert to a video format!

III

Instructional Screencast Project

My video is a short introduction into using the webpage Stapplet.com to create basic one-variable quantitative data displays.  I like to expose all my high school Statistics students to Stapplet.com as it is very user friendly, has more features than their graphing calculators, and is easier for them to access than programs like Excel that they may not have on their home devices.  This tutorial could easily be embedded into our LMS for student reference whenever needed.  I attempted to utilize Mayer’s multimedia principles in the creation of this video.  First, the signaling principle is apparent with the use of cues (boxes and arrows) to direct attention.  I also adhered to the coherence principle by making sure the task and menu bars were hidden so attention was not spent on those extraneous items.  Temporal contiguity was also applied to the video, with the audio narration simultaneous with the on-screen pictures.  Finally, I did attempt to adhere to the personalization principle even though I had a little script.  As my audience is teenagers, I have found they will always respond best to less formalized speech.

III

Instructional Animation Project

As a math teacher in a one-to-one district, I have made over 100 Khan Academy-esque style videos in the past narrating over worked examples.  So, I decided to try something new here with a PowToon explainer video of the 4-Step Process for inference (a process in our Statistics class).  I recorded my audio and edited in Audacity, and then imported the track into PowToon to add animation.  This video is meant for high school students as a quick reference that can be uploaded into our LMS.  In terms of multimedia principles, I did incorporate signaling, such as when I colored “in context” yellow so it would sharply contrast to signify its importance.  Segmenting was also a principle I adhered to, by having the 4 distinct steps with their own introduction; I figure students can use those benchmarks to easily fast forward or rewind to certain parts.  I adhered to temporal contiguity by timing animations to move on screen as I mentioned them in my narration and not before, which should help with extraneous overload.  Finally, I did try to adhere to the redundancy principle as much as possible.  Since this explanation did require some text on screen, I tried to make sure I just displayed keywords and phrases, and then let my narration elaborate on the text displayed as needed.  I thought this worked better than just using music as a background and having all the text displayed on screen as it helped incorporate the personalization principle also.

III

Video Learning Object

This video goes through a process we use in Statistics to determine if a problem is binomial.  We learn different types of probability problems, so students have to be able to read a word problem and figure out themselves what type of distribution to use.  I would use this towards the end of our probability unit when we focus less on procedures and more on concepts and applications.  I would embed this into our LMS so students can always access it.  I believe this video shows an adherence to the CRAP principles.  I used contrast with colors, in particular during the example when I highlighted the parts of the problem I was referring to in my narration – using the signaling principle.  Repetition was evident as the background and typeface/color remained the same for all slides.  I used left alignment for my bullets in every slide and attempted to follow the rule of thirds when my body was displayed, so alignment was considered.  As far as proximity, since I separated the 4 elements on different slides and use progressive disclosure with the bullet points, I think this was also adhered to and related to both the contiguity and segmenting principles also.  This progressive disclosure also should help with the coherence principle.  As far as the talking head portions, I tried to adhere to the image principle and make sure I did not include too much visual stuff on the page with me.