EDLD+5366+Week+5+Reflection

==== EDLD 5366 Digital Graphics, Animation and Desktop Publishing was an enjoyable experience for me. As a technology teacher, I embarked on this five week journey with a haughty attitude, feeling that since I teach technology for a living, I had nothing more to learn about the topic. How very far from accurate I was! ==== ==== The design principles covered in Week 1 were very familiar to me. As a matter of fact, I present a very detailed PowerPoint presentation to my DIM (Digital and Interactive Media) students over this very topic. My flyer was critiqued very strongly by my peers. I was told the Cardinal was distracting by one of my peers. Peer criticism was a bit difficult to receive because, after all, this is my field of study, and if I thought it was appropriate based on my knowledge of design principles, it should have been okay. This experience taught me that not all viewers have the same perspective or taste. ==== ==== Week 2 brought about the process of me trying to condense myself into a space no larger than 200 pixels by 200 pixels. What about my personality was I going to choose to highlight when making my own unique logo? By reading __The art of self branding__, I was able to glean that a logo does not necessarily have to be a busy piece of artwork to portray someone or something. I ended up choosing some very simple pictures set on a white background to depict myself, after initially starting with a rainbow background and a myriad of text. Week two taught me that simplicity in design can be a good thing. ==== ==== Week 3 was another enjoyable week. I was able to take the logo created in week 2 and bring it to life using Adobe Flash. Although I did not experience any “aha” moments this week, it was so enjoyable to create a unique animation that represented me. The ballerinas and notes parading across the screen from morning to evening, all with Vivaldi playing in the background, was fun to create. Aside from the actual animation, I read with interest Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Although I did not realize it, there are hundreds of verbs that have been added to the original taxonomy due in a large part to the emergence of technology. ==== ==== Week 4 forced me to sit down and create a newsletter solely from scratch. Until this point, I had viewed this exercise, both personally and with my students, as a rote assignment. We simply retrieved a template from one of the many word processing software available and started adding text, pictures and images, all with pre-defined font styles and sizes. This week’s assignment made me realize the power of text boxes and their versatility, and took me a bit out of my comfort level, for although I teach technology, I do not consider myself to be a very creative person. Many of the layouts I had envisioned in my head were altered, for the better, thanks to my readings regarding evaluating newsletters. (Lamb) ==== ==== In summary, I will not assume my creations are above critiquing, will share my thoughts, ideas and products with colleagues prior to publishing them, and will never assume that I know everything there is to know regarding any topic, be it in my field or otherwise. ====