Course+Reflection-+Digital+Multimedia

I had a great amount of trepidation coming into my Lamar University course on Digital Multimedia. I was unsure of my abilities in this area of the digital realm. I was hoping to at least gain a basic knowledge of how I could use this in my classroom and better yet, how I could teach other teachers to use it. I stand now pleasantly surprised in the achievements that I have made. I was hoping to learn the basics such as editing with sound and video as well as the legal uses for the work post production. My end results were very close to what I envisioned. I am very proud of my ability to work well in a group as well since it is a thing I loathe, well at least until now. I hope to continue experimenting with Movie Maker so I can become more organized when teaching this to my students as well as my school staff.

The work I did in this class is super relevant to my campus's goals for technology placement on campus. We expect teachers to use technology in every lesson as well as expect our students to be in Quadrant D thinking 75% of their school day. Students are most definitely using higher thinking learning skills while using tools such as audacity and movie maker to express themselves and create projects that could be useful in almost every subject. Our school is striving to be a model for technology within our district and by utilizing software that is FREE and readily available teachers can make lessons that encompass technology relevant and interesting. In all honesty 100 web based digital stories are far easier to grade than 100 reflective three page essays, teachers will hopefully use these tools to further their students creativity and technological abilities. I also hope to enlighten some of my staff members in terms to copyright problems we currently have on campus and show them ways to use the creative commons.

One of the outcomes that I failed to achieve was to be able to adequately record my voice for the first project and to be able to use video to edit our second. I was disappointed in my digital storytelling video due to the breaking up of my audio. I troubleshooted for days, trying to reinstall programs to make my voice more clear and to reduce the high amount of static on the recording. In the end I deducted that the problem was the quality of my microphone. For the PSA that I did with my group I used a new laptop that had a much more efficient microphone built in. After hearing the recording it was night and day from my original sound. I also had a very hard time editing video for our quick movie during week two. Most of my trouble stemmed from my bad choice in laptop. It was slow and unpredictable, which made the project much harder than I had anticipated. Thank goodness I was able to purchase a new laptop by week 3 and the rest is bad history.

While my laptop woes definitely made me less enthusiastic about completing my course assignments I think I fared well on everyone. I enjoyed this course far more than I imagined and this was partly due to it being a new area of a visual art that I hadn't explored. The uses for this knowledge are really vast, I cant wait to use what I have learned in my class and beyond.

A lot of my prejudices were trashed in this course. I am or really was very against doing group work in such a way. My brain told me "danger!" or "disaster!" but in reality it went incredibly smoothly. I am usually a leader in things like these, almost to a control freak level but since we all shared the duties as well as the decision making nicely via email it felt like our project was less "mine" and more "ours". That shared feeling of ownership really helped me put my foot in my mouth at times and do things that were right for our group. I felt a triumphant camaraderie that I have honestly never felt before in a group work setting. I lost my need to do it all and some days I felt a little helpless like I had missed something big that I needed to work on. I have learned from watching my teammate Ing Mu that I still have a lot to learn in terms of editing, but with more practice and patience this should be easy in no time. Out of all the assignments I really liked the digital story, it was personal and it was an assignment that I felt I could really use my creativity on.