For our final assignment, I chose to improve some of the work I started with earlier in the course. The difficulties in sharing my work from the school LMS were overcome by beginning to develop my own Moodle cloud platform, where in the future I hope to continue to showcase the work I am doing with my Animal Assisted Activity dog – Kona. At this point in my learning I have still not figured out how to invite my students in to the cloud (having only begun to work in this space) but am happy with the direction I am going with it and can envision the ways I will continue to use it as the year unfolds. In returning to these three work samples I learned that just like writing, multimedia projects can be a work in progress and improved infinitely as they transform with time, effort, skills, and feedback. It was fun to “try again” on the video and learn more about how the iMovie app works and produce a better quality product. I have not figured out how to end the movie just yet, and so you will notice that it ends abruptly. Again, a work in progress. For the photo, graphics and audio work, I learned that practice makes progress and to learn the skills, practice is everything. In some cases knowing what to do required a lot of revisiting pages in the course and trial and error. Overall, the process came more quickly and the path for knowing how to get to my finished product was more clear.
Included in the course I began creating is a redone version of my movie, “Kona’s Kids”, using both cropped and original images I’ve worked with through the term. Initially when I made the movie, I tried to keep the faces of my students out of the photo and showed only the dog in and around the students, to protect privacy. This particular version of the movie includes students faces because the full images convey much more positive information and will make the movie more meaningful for my students. I used iMovie on my school iPad to create and then edit the movie. I imported the music from YouTube, using an MP3 converter on my computer, edited and saved the music in Audacity and then uploaded it to Google Drive in order to attach it to the movie on my iPad. Once completed (though I’ve found that the more I go back to it, the more I want to edit and improve on it), I saved it to my channel on YouTube and the embedded it in my Moodle Cloud in the book format. You can visit the movie on my channel here. My plan is to use this video during a planned showcase of our school, to share with our board members, trustees, families and students the ways Kona has helped in our program throughout the year.
The second piece of work that I included is a retouched version of a photo I used to describe the anatomy of a cairn terrier. I recropped the image and played with the colouring of the numbers, using Picasa 3 on my school computer to get the effects I was after. I chose to use a black and white image of the dog to better highlight the parts of her body that are the focus of the information.
The final submission is my retouched Voki of the puppet I use at school to introduce my students to the vocabulary, predator and prey and to play with how information can be shared using technology. I had to remember to use the “deprecated – uses Flash” option when embedding the code in both Moodle Cloud and here to allow it to upload to my site. I rerecorded my script using my iPhone to reduce initial poor sound and then uploaded it from the web to the app. I am still not 100% satisfied with the quality of the sound, but will leave it for now due to the lack of better recording tools and time.
I continue to work with my space in my school district LMS and hope to include some of the work I have done there on my personal Moodle space – which I named: Big Ideas with Kona 🙂 This could potentially become a part of a Masters project if I decide to go down that road in the future. For now, I think it is a good place to learn more about Moodle, improve my technology skills using a topic that is close to my heart, and play with my students. At this point I have yet to learn how to invite all of you to this space (or any of my students for that matter) so will leave you with the artifacts I’ve included here. If I figure out how to do it, please feel welcome to accept my invitation (through email I believe so you will need to send my your personal email) and have a look!
