Animation presentations

Today's presentation opened my eyes to some great programs to use for animation. Although I was happy to explore keynote for my animation, seeing the other mediums made me wish I had tried something a little more interesting. I think I am most interested in trying Stop motion, a free app for the iPhone and iPad. I could see my students having fun with this apps and using it was a medium for assignments.

I was very impressed with everyone's ambition. Most people used a program they had never used before and surprised themselves with their great success. I am inspired by my classmates determination and desire to try something new.

Animation challenge

I spent part of the weekend getting to know garage band and exploring its various functions. I learned to cut a track, add in basic tracks, fade in and out, and change the volume on individual tracks. I recorded my husband playing 3 different tracks on the guitar and then put them together in garage band with his help. When we were finished I felt as though my sound scape was missing something. I had initially wanted to add a natural sound to my sound scape but got carried away with the guitar recordings that by the end I had forgotten all about it. Once finished I was happy with the end result but then remembered about the natural component I had wanted to add. That was when I remembered I had a wave audio file in itunes that I had purchased for another project. I was too excited because this was exactly what my sound scape needed.

I am very happy with the end result of my sound scape. It exudes the exact feeling I wanted it to.

Fast forward to today's class: animation

I had played a little bit with Keynote on the weekend so as to not come to class with no clue as to what to do. Paul's brief tutorial on Keynote was exactly what I needed. I was already familiar with the build in and out function on Keynote and therefore, with Paul's suggestions, was able to play around and achieve an animation that was worthy of my sound scape. This is not to say my animations is stellar, in fact, it is far from stellar. However, I am happy with the final outcome. I am not an animation artist and am very aware that in order to achieve seamless animation hours are required. The most important outcome here is that I learned how to animate in Keynote and feel competent enough to teach someone else how to use it!

My flipped classroom webinar experience

My prof for my morning class made our class a webinar. Though I was happy to not have to get up a 6am in order to get down to wolfville in time for my morning class, I am not 100% sure I enjoyed the webinar experience.

Because I wanted to make the most of my morning, aside from the webinar, I still got up early and got in my 10km run. This got my head into a great space and I was then ready to sit down for the 3 hours webinar (groan).

I used this opportunity to think a lot about space and the flipped classroom. I did enjoy being in my home space ( a place I have created to reflect myself and an environment that I enjoy). I found myself working on my deck. This is one of my favourite spaces because I love being outside, love my gardin, and enjoy the sounds of nature that flow in and out of this space. However, once I began the webinar, my mood slowly lower, my eyes got heavy and all energy I gained from my run slipped away.

This is when I really began to reflect on space. Though I was in a space that I loved, the monotone voices coming from the glowing screen on my computer were sucking the enjoyment out of everything! It was at this point that my attention wondered, and I began writing this blog post.

I am now thinking about about the ecology of space ( though we have not discussed this yet in class) I feel as though I have stumbled upon a great example of how online space (the delivery of a webinar for example) and how this type of space needs to be delivered in a visually pleasing, tactile if possible, and engaging way. Time is also a key factor. A 3 hour webinar is WAY too long! It's important to consider the attention span of your audience with creating a lesson for the flipped classroom.  Although my webinar was prerecorded and I could pause it when ever I wanted to take a break ( like I did to make my amazing kale smoothy - kale, mint, pineapple, chia seeds, and almond milk) my desire to return after every break was non existent.

So, my webinar may not have taught me anything about about its topic, but it certainly had me thinking a lot about space.

Getting deeper into Design

A Look at Design:

The key concepts to design are 1) Simplicity 2) The form must follow function 3) Engaging the target.

Other terms that were thrown around were functionality, intentionality, inspirational, versatility, adaptability, feng shui, and balance.

It was interesting to consider the design of our classrooms and our school and who they were designed for. I think it is clear that the answer is not the staff and students. I am sure that at the time of their construction they we're considered innovative (probably to please the desires of the higher up decision makers) but their function does not serve the purpose of providing a design that accommodates a larger number a students in their learning and socializing.

I am interested to know what kind of long term planning goes into design. Do designers consider possible future changes when designing? I would hope that versatility to accommodate future changes would be built into the process.

I found the design text we took a look at interesting as it provided me the opportunity to reflect on the design of my own website. In its creation and construction, I never consulted any type of guiding text or design reference. I went purely on intuition. I consider myself to be creative enough to attempt a site that is aesthetically pleasing and user friendly. I did learn some do's and dont's and would now consider reading a design text in order to correct some beginner mistakes I made and to further my knowledge on web design.

Our first glimpse of creative design...

Listening to the presentations on the five chapters of creative design help to build some understanding as to what exactly is creative design. I still feel as though I will need to continuously reference the five chapters.

What I found most interesting about today's class was the process that took place when we were assigned the task of forming groups in order to approach our first creative design challenge. Without even knowing it, we replicated the discovery chapter of the creative design for teachers toolkit. We started with one simple idea, watched it grow into many different ideas based on the perspectives of the people in the group, struggled to come to some sort of agreement, then we refocused our goals, revisited our task at hand, and eventually ended up with the first idea that we had been presented with. 

Whether this activity was on purpose or not, I think it did provide me with some understanding as to how this process was going to unravel. 

Once in my group, myself and my group members started bouncing ideas off each other and had a rather productive brainstorming session

July 3 class

Today's class provided me with somethings to think about:

1) There are so many internet tools and apps that I am unaware of or unfamiliar with that it is overwhelming to think about becoming remotely familiar with any of them. I suppose I should choose one and make it a personal project to learn how to use it and implement it into my classroom.

2) I am realizing that my school board is incredibly behind the other school boards in Nova Scotia and am left asking why the implementation of technology isn't a provincially mandated change.

3)  What is cave time?

4) I am interested to see this course unfold and to see what our creative challenges turn into.