Come join Nicolette, Lan and I as we take you through using Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube in classroom and training environments! This webinar will:

1. Learners will be able to create and follow a twitter hashtag they created based on their educational group.
2. Learners will be able to create their own Pinterest Board and learn how to make the board a collaboration between the student and the teacher
3. Learners will see the value of using a platform in which most people use on a daily basis

You can join us on Thursday, April 26 at 6pm MST! Hope to see you there!

When designing e-learning courses or trainings,  the principle of CARP is a valuable resource in your design. Today, we’re going to look at each of the CARP principles and also discuss which are most important when it comes to designing webinars and other live presentations.

CARP is the acronym for contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity when you’re designing presentations. When you’re designing a presentation for learning, it is important that you keep these elements in mind so that the learner can focus on the presentation and the information being presented. Let’s look at each one and discuss what they are:

Contrast: Sizes, colors, shapes and directions. You should use relevant sizes to your presentation and everything should be as uniform as possible. If you’re using comparisons, sizes can vary, otherwise, pictures, and other visual examples should be the same size. Colors: You should choose a color scheme and stick to it. If you want something to stick out, use a different color to add meaning to a point you’re trying to make. As far as direction, you should try to keep your text direction in the same direction as much as possible, changing direction to help something prove a point.

Alignment: Your presentation should have alignment from beginning to end. Imagining that every slide is a grid and lining up everything the same from slide to slide or grid to grid is important. Also, decide how your text will be on each slide (use left alignment or center alignment), and stick to that.

Repetition: Like alignment, everything in your presentation should be predictable as far as the design. Colors, layouts, texts should follow a pattern and the learners should not be surprised from page to page.

Proximity: Make sure that you keep things close to each other as much as you can. For example, a picture and caption should be in proximity to each other so they can be easily read.

As you can see, they are all similar in creating a presentation that looks clean, uniform and easy to follow. Without using all four, you could create a presentation that is hard for learners to follow and that could cause a learner to not pay attention to what they should be learning, but trying to figure out the presentation instead.

In my opinion, when you’re creating a webinar, you should focus on alignment and repetition. When you’re creating a live presentation that you’ll have virtual learners on, making sure that predictability will help keep focus for the learner. In a situation like a webinar, learners focus and attention could easily go to something else so having a clean and simple presentation will help the learner focus on the training at hand.

In our class, Joni challenged up to watch two TED Talks, follow the instructions on the Talks and then make our own drawing: How to make toast. First, I though the TED Talks were great. It really made me wake up when they both discussed how kids draw, they don’t care, they just draw and they think it’s good. When we hit a certain age, we all the sudden think “we can’t draw” and we stop doing so. This was certainly true for me, and I’m sure a lot of you think the same way. Ole Qvist-Sørensen’s and Graham Shaw’s TED Talks took those fears away, and showed that drawing is really easy, we just think it’s hard.

For me personally, this is going to help me with the design of my trainings. When i’m trying to design them, I usually stick to list because I always think “I can’t draw”, but I know I can, i’m just not an artist. When I dooodle or draw, it is far better than the list I come up with, visually anyways, so why not make it into something more fun. Below are the drawings from the TED Talks and “how to make toast”.

ENJOY!

As we’re beginning our first project in Creative Design for Instructional Materials, we need to understand how important Contrast, Alignment, Repetition and Proximity or CARP is to creating an infographic that will be meaningful to our learning audience. In scanning the internet, I found the following infographic that represents good CARP:

 source: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiX2YfD-pXWAhVEK1AKHWorDW0QjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F167899892332670999%2F&psig=AFQjCNFgEaISaTHAYFEQZVA6Bt1CAwkz1Q&ust=1504972735720638

Why is this great CARP?

Contrast:

The colors match throughout. They compliment each other well and the follow of the instructions are easy to follow.

Alignment:

The steps are aligned both vertically and horizontally, even though they’re across the infographic from each other. The image of the glove and the overview are aligned in the middle of the page and with each other as well.

Repetition:

The gloves that are edited throughout are showing this. The same glove, just highlighted differently to emphasize the steps it takes.

Proximity:

The gloves that are showing the instruction throughout stay the same size, even though they are emphasizing different parts of the glove. The text remains the same on the infographic as well.

I started a Networked Learning Space for educators ECE through University taught classes to help understand the need for cultural competent teachers in education as our country diversifies. I’m hoping that this is a space that will be utilized by teachers and educators to learn more about what being culturally competent means and why it is important. Feel free to join the group, (you can be in education or not in education) and give input to the topics, articles and books shared in the community.

Cultural Competency in Education

Enjoy!

This was a hot topic on my Twitter feed last week.

An associate professor was giving a web based live interview to the BBC from his home and his kids come into the room while he is giving the interview and hilarity ensues. A woman then tries to get the kids out of the room during the interview, and she’s Korean, so when it first went viral, many assumed it was his nanny (including myself). As you see, it was actually his wife.

It’s safe to assume that we still live in a society where we still stereotype way too much. The initial reaction should have been that it was his wife, not a nanny, but because of her initial looks and his initial looks, it was assumed that she worked for him. In my upcoming Networked Learning Space, I am going to focus on biases that we have a how we can break the biases we inherently have.

Schools are adopting 15 minute “recess” time for students and I think that is brilliant. They encourage students to “unplug” during that time and play a quick game, or just unwind, which I think would’ve been great when I was in high school. Granted, I was in high school before everyone having cellphones, but I still would have loved having 15 minutes to get a quick card game (Euchre or Spades) in before having to go to my next class.

The average high school day is around 8 hours, and you get a lunch break, and that’s about it. Sure, high school is the gateway to adulthood, but are we making kids grow up to quickly by enduring a strenuous day starting at age 14? Even in my day to day job, I get more downtime then most students during a high school day. Giving kids a break would probably help kids throughout the day by giving them a break and letting them unwind a bit midday.

We’ve been discussing tribes in Social Media and Digital Culture, and with my upcoming Networked Learning Space, I wanted to discuss the tribes I’m looking bring into my NLS. First, this is the type of tribe I’m talking about:

The tribe I am going to try to attract is going to be teachers from Early Ed. to college. I’m going to have to provide valuable content to keep people engaged on the NLS. The content is going to have to be something that can be quick to read or watch, but also keep people in education engaged.