Final+Course+Reflection+-+5366

EDLD 5366: Digital Graphics

I made the transformation from career woman to stay-at-home mother in 2003, a seminal moment in the technology integration for my school district and many districts that surrounded me in north Texas. I became very involved in volunteer work, eventually becoming the media and publication head for a large local parenting group. In this capacity I worked extensively with Paint Shop Pro, Publisher, Excel, PowerPoint, and even PhotoStory as I created promotional and recruiting materials for the organization. Because I came into this course with so much background in these various media and publishing applications, I expected the creation of a hard-copy/electronically compatible newsletter to be essentially a review of previously acquired skills.

While I certainly used my prior experiences, this course also called for a completely new understanding of both design concepts and available applications. To begin, study of design principles drove me to rethink how I utilized visual impact in my work. I realized how the concept of ‘less is more’ drove my designs into cleaner, more professional lines, as even the best ideas can be suffocated in a cluttered, inefficient design (Parker, n.d.). (Parker, 1994-2011). At the same time, the course challenged me to look at great print design elements of the past, and I found great beauty and engagement in the sophisticated connections between text and graphics. Particularly, Lewis Carroll’s ink illustrations in his original manuscript, “Alice’s Adventures Underground” (1864) capture much of what I perceive as intuitive, sophisticated design. Carroll’s ink illustrations give life to the images of his written words: words and graphics collaborate, instead of compete as we so often see in modern print and digital media. In the story of the mouse’s “tail”, Carroll uses a variation of micography to create the “bends” and turns that Alice attempts, unsuccessfully, to follow. Also, as with the other texts, despite having the text hand written, the margins on the text are justified to an astonishing degree of accuracy. Lewis Carroll made the reading of words and the appreciation of lovely design one experience, rather than two.

The animations I created to include in my digital newsletter were the products of a fascinating, enjoyable project; but, the assignment itself actually prompted one of my first real moments of hesitation regarding how I would utilize an application in the classroom setting. My own efforts at animation yielded widely varying results based on all manner of factors, including subject matter, experience with the software, and my perceptions of how such technology would integrate in various learning objectives. Scratch, to my mind the most intuitive of the applications I review, still requires a significantly functional knowledge of trigonometry and operators; as such, I was relegated to fairly elementary work at best. My students and I had enormous fun, and the students utilized their communication and collaboration skills to their fullest. As such, I will commit to the work necessary to make such an activity fit into my lessons. Nevertheless, I continue to wonder: at what point does a teacher or a technology facilitator cross the boundary between truly supporting curriculum and simply tinkering with technology merely for its own sake? The work began on this assignment with many of these ideas and images of great design swirling in my mind. As I created my newsletter, in the hopes that I would develop a product that not only drew the reader’s eye, but would enhance learning in support of ISTE Standard V. C (Williamson & Redish, 2009). I considered my professional audience as I created the various articles and features that would be available in the newsletter with an eye for future editions of the newsletter. I planned to create at least one newsletter per semester as an exercise in building continuity between issues and in order to offer an ongoing, responsive resource to my faculty; to that end, I offered a survey to my faculty as mentioned by Annette Lamb in her guides to developing and maintaining effective newsletters (Lamb, 2005). I reviewed the resulting data and spoke to various colleagues as I made updates with an eye for future editions of the newsletter. When the newsletters received a warm response from my campus principal, she invited me to collaborate with her and the campus PTA to develop a more user-friendly and clearly organized document that could also act as an interactive piece within the campus website (Epstein, Coates, Salinas, Sanders, & Simon, 1997). PTA’s response was quite positive, and the online newsletter will go live in January 2012. PTA plans to utilize the online newsletter to collect more survey data, and I will work with them to analyze that data so that it can be used as further qualitative data to develop our campus comprehensive needs assessment (Thomas, 2006).

References: Carroll, L. (1864). //Alice's Adventures Under Ground.// Retrieved November 19, 2010, from British Library Online Gallery: [] Epstein, J., Coates, L., Salinas, K., Sanders, M., & Simon, B. (1997). //Epstein's framework of six types of involvement.// Retrieved October 22, 2011, from Colorado Parent Information & Resource Center: [] Lamb, A. (2005, June). //Desktop publishing: evaluating newsletters//. Retrieved December 9, 2010, from Eduscapes: [] Parker, R. (1994-2011). //12 Most Common Newsletter Design Mistakes//. Retrieved December 12, 2010, from Graphic Design & Publishing Center: [] Thomas, R. S. (2006, October). How to survive data overload. //Principal Leadership, 7//(2), 37-42.