Final Project:

Check out my project, called Educarta, that works with Google Earth, teaching high school students a standards-based Geography lesson. In addition, Educarta includes a blog-like question and answer tool to be used with the Google Earth lesson to scaffold, assess and comment on the answers given. It can be accessed here:

http://hgseclass.harvard.edu/~teama/geoprompt/

You can access my final paper here:

http://hgseclass.harvard.edu/~whitejo/stuff/UDL_Final_White.doc

Mini Media Workshop III: Book Builder


I invited everyone to read my supported book: Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Empty House. http://bookbuilder.cast.org/

I enjoyed building and playing around with the Book Builder tool. I wish I was able to integrate the glossary into the text of the story. I feel that people won't look at the terms I added.

I certainly wish I had these supported books when I was in high school. It would have made my life easier.

Workshop Issues:

The nice part of being s student of Web 2.0 technologies is that I can create videos, blogs and podcasts with relative ease, which helps learners of all different types. However, one issue which we haven't discussed much is the issue of accessibility, meaning do our learners have the computer and internet bandwidth to access the new tools we are creating?

Granted, I have some experience in creating tools like the iTunes Movie Rental video I did for this week's workshop. Yet, the biggest issue I struggled with when creating that movie was the with size parameters. My goal was to make the movie somewhat easy to access yet with enough quality that the images, animation and audio was clear. The dilemma I was facing was make it in high quality that is slow to download, or fast but somewhat fuzzy quality?

We have all these great tools available (I created the movie in Snapz Pro), but we always need to be cognizant that computer/network bandwidth will be an issue no matter what type of learner you are trying to reach. This issue isn't going away. Sure bandwidth will increase, but the tools we use will increase the size needed as well.

MultiMedia WorkShop II

For this workshop, I created a tutorial that teaches people how to rent movies on iTunes. You can view the video at:

http://hgseclass.harvard.edu/~whitejo/stuff/iTunes_Movie_Rental.mov

Learning Through Listening thoughts...on video!

Initial Thoughts:

Hola, everyone. I'm John, a masters student in the Technology, Innovation and Education program at HGSE. Before school I was a software trainer for a small corporation in San Francisco. I trained people all over the world face to face and online. After school, I envision myself continuing that career path.

I can tell you that all my curricula and tutorials were designed with every user in mind. Yeah, right. That stuff was designed with one person in mind. Me. I had no idea what I was doing when designing my curriculum!

So, I'm ecstatic to be in this class to learn more about cognitive neuroscience and how those studies can positively influence how we design our education going forward. For example, after doing our first reading, just thinking about 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' processing, already changed my view of cognition. I can just picture, like myself, struggling to put together many individual facts into a common thread. Ultimately, I would love to learn more on making our education software more flexible, and also to learn more about myself.

While at HGSE, I'm learning more about educational software design, e-learning and adult and teen development.

If you've read this far and are wondering why I'm dressed as a cowboy, yes it's a joke!