Extra Credit Post for 5153: Emerging Instructional Technologies

Though the presentations at ITEC 2011 were geared toward teachers, I was able to take ideas and new resources to work in the business/training setting. Specifically, I would have gone to all of Leslie Fisher’s sessions because of the useful applications she suggested.

What I learned from Leslie was that educators and professionals alike should promote themselves through websites. While her focus during this session was geared toward school or district websites, she did note the importance of being able to present yourself in a creative and truthful way.

As I work to create my portfolio for my degree, I will keep her suggestions in mind. Leslie noted there are steps to creating a successful website, be it for myself or an institution. Leslie qualified these as: identifying a goal/reason for website, gathering content, designing the website, and finally actually creating the site. She stressed the importance of these steps, because people often start making their website with no plan and it can tend to end up looking messy and confusing to maneuver.

She offered resources from 99designs.com, themeforest.com, and dreamtemplate.com for templates and designs to use for a website. Actual site makers like weebly.com offer 3 pages of a free website (she claims its better than Google sites) and you don't have to know html!

99designs.com

  dreamtemplate.com

This information in conjunction with another session featuring tips for photography was very interesting to me. Going off of her work for the website, Digital Days: Video and Photography Workshops, she exposed 10 problems most faced while taking photos and ways to correct them.

1.       Not close enough

      2.       Not in focus
       3.       Camera shakes (nothing in focus)
       4.       Boring composition
       5.       Ignoring background
       6.       Missing the moment
       7.       Too much flash
       8.       Not enough flash
       9.       Could have been vertical
      10.   Digital zoom

Learning how to take better photos would be important in the classroom or training for various reasons. If your training focuses on visual learning or referencing materials, then clear concise photos would be needed to convey specific directions. Using photos in the classroom can vary from students who use photos to communicate to creating online coursework and websites to scholarly presentations.  

I think I tend to forget that a photo can communicate as much as a literary piece and it makes sense to spend time to learn to communicate well with photography.

Photos from: http://www.digitaldaysphoto.com/instructors (Leslie Fisher) http://99designs.com/web-design (web designs)
http://www.dreamtemplate.com/ (web designs)