Wednesday, April 23, 2008

15/5 April 23, 2008

Well, this is it. Tomorrow is our Studio showcase and the final presentation of our project. It’s been a long road but I believe we have arrived at our destination pretty well intact. This week we worked on polishing up our lesson units as well as supervising our undergraduate students for the post-test, which is part of our formative evaluation.

We were in the company of about 31 of Dr. Powell’s students whom worked through the module and provided us feedback regarding the navigation, learning activities and interactivity. I think they did a very good job letting us know what issues they perceived. Much of it were bugs we already were aware of but it was good to see that our feedback is consistent.

Tomorrow is also my portfolio defense and I am looking forward to being behind that experience also. I’ve been talking quite a bit about the Instructional Technology program with a few of my co-workers. Since being in the program I have had one person begin the program and another who plans to start in the fall. Our school IT person also mentioned that she may be interested in finding out more about the program.

It feels pretty good to be confident and positive about a program like the IDD program. I know I gained a lot of knowledge and I would hope some of my experiences have inspired these few others to pursue this career.

Next week:
1. Enjoy the lull in activity.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

15/5 April 16, 2008

It is already time for another 15/5, time is really flying by. This week has been very busy for the Genesis Learning Solutions team. We met on Monday, the 14th with actual camp directors to have them go through our project for content accuracy as well as provide specific feedback on several aspects of the project. I worked with John who was able to share several suggestions of areas that could be improved upon. Several suggestions were things we had been mentioned by our 6200 consultants. So we are in the process of making adjustments.

We had quite a breakthrough with some limitations with our project, thanks to Roman who was able to convert our basic design template into a CSS document. I am not sure what that means exactly, (I never really understood the concept behind CSS) except I know it allows us much more flexibility in adding additional text or graphics.

I am looking forward to getting our work to a more refined state. I noticed while the SME’s were going through the project, there were quite a few issues, especially with navigation and the wordiness of the project. One we can adjust, the other is quite a bit beyond the scope of the project. Now, I can really appreciate Dr. Branch’s detailed description and discussion on the importance of the scope document in project management. Without such guidelines, we could end up doing all sorts of things.

This week:
1. Attend SIG
2. Work on fine tuning Unit 1 (my section)
3. Meet with Dr. Powell’s undergrad’s for the beta testing (Monday)

Saturday, April 12, 2008

15/5 April 9, 2008

I admit I’m a little late posting this 15/5, although I don’t have an excuse besides poor time management, I do have a reason. We are so far into the semester and things are beginning to boil. I have completed the guided practice for Unit 1 in our module. We are working on assessment pieces for the module. Our live debut of our module was thankfully pushed back to the 21st instead of the 14th which does give our team a little breathing room.

I was happy to have completed my comprehensive examination on Tuesday, the 8th and now have that behind me. I look forward to the completion of our EDIT 6210 project as well as my EDIT 6190 project.

This week we are heavy into the alpha and beta testing for the project. Myra utilized her Survey Monkey account to provide surveys for the students in Dr. Powell’s class to complete a content pretest. We are also using this to get technical feedback from some of our EDIT 6200 consultants.

Thursday, the 10th is the dress rehearsal for the Studio Showcase which our Genesis Learning Systems team will present the ACA: Business and Finance module for the first time. There is still quite a bit of connecting of pages we need to do as well as adjustments to the content pages.
We will be able to use the technology feedback from our 6200 consultants to help determine what we need to adjust as far as page navigation and interactions. That information is very important and will need to be gathered as soon as possible.

Next week:
1. Studio Showcase dress rehearsal
2. Meet with ACA Directors for SME assessments 4/14
3. Apply results of technology feedback.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

15/5 April 1, 2008

This past week has been one of our busiest; from my opinion. Our development continues on our project. My assignment was to provide the example documents and guided practice for Unit One. This is the same unit for which I designed a storyboard so I was glad to work with material I had some familiarity. I am feeling a little overwhelmed due to my program comprehensive is scheduled for next Monday 4/7. Our dress rehearsal is next Thursday 4/10. Our project goes live 4/14. My portfolio defense is coming close and I am very overwhelmed.

I realize, this too shall pass, but I am really ready to be on the other side of all this. At this point I continue to work on my guided practice activities. I am proud of my drag & drop I was able to do in Flash. It was very time consuming but I believe it worked out well. I still have a few little items to clean up but other than that I think it is okay.

Work to do:
1. Finish guided practice.
2. Check content pages for continuity and completeness.
3. Add graphics to content pages.
4. Work on what else is needed.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

15/5 March 26, 2008

This week has been very busy first kicking off with a meeting with our client, Dr. Powell. She listened, gave input as well as feedback on our storyboards including interactivity for each of our six units. We made adjustments to the storyboards and decided to meet face to face on Monday the 24th instead of online in Horizon Wimba.

During our Monday meeting we worked on adding content to our web pages. Our homework was to continue in that vein so that we could have adding content completed by our regular meeting Thursday evening. We are getting past the design portion of our project and actually working on the development, which feels pretty good.

This week:
1. Perhaps visit Josh's SIG on 3-D animation.
2. Find graphics to include in project.
3. Decide on example items to include in content.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

15/5 March 19, 2008

Although I didn’t write a 15/5 for last week due to my being out of town for two days with 450 8th graders traveling on a bus to Savannah, Ga., much work did go on last week. It was also UGA’s spring break week so we didn’t meet on Thursday as we usually do. Genesis team did meet online in Horizon Wimba, Monday, the 10th and discussed our storyboard activities for the project. I found a website that has good as well as easy to understand examples of various types of storyboards (I’ll make sure to put it in the Studio Wikki) so we adopted a version to use.

We met as a team this Monday, the 17 to go over our storyboard and make it as detailed as possible so when we present it to Dr. Powell, she will be able to visualize our ideas. Well, that’s what we hope will happen. As a result of Monday’s meeting we also must develop pre/post test questions as part of our evaluation process. These questions will be given to a sampling of our target audience. The pretest results will provide us a baseline of the learner’s knowledge and hopefully these results will support our posttest results which will conclude that the students did indeed gain knowledge due to utilizing our product.

We meet with Dr. Powell Thursday evening and will present her with our storyboard, pre/post test questions which she will approve and submit to her students. The next step is to begin building our product and move toward the final project phases.

Next week:
1. Building project framework
2. Design and development of interactivity

Saturday, March 1, 2008

15/5's March 5, 2008

This week the Genesis Learning Team is getting closer to where the actual rubber meets the road… the design phase of our project for ACA. I am continuing to get our html. file to a place where we can actually begin to design and import actual content into our webpage. I decided to ask Trudy, one of our great 6200 consultants, to send me the html. file of her screen shot. This hopefully will make this part of the project go a little smoother.

Our presentation of our project for the Studio, I believe, went very well. Roman’s “KeyPoint” presentation (Mac’s version of PowerPoint) was awesome and of course Myra presented the information in excellent fashion. Dr. Powell was present and she again stated her pleasure to be a part of the Studio experience.

This semester is flying by and I’m getting a little anxious about getting everything done. However, worrying will create little assistance in that aspect so I guess just moving forward is the best solution.

This week we are beginning to work on the design portion of our project. I am beginning the storyboard on PowerPoint so we can visualize the feel and interaction of our module. Melinda is working on the assessment piece; Myra is going through the content to section it for inclusion in each webpage. Roman is working on the hardware and software aspects and Radcliff is I believe working on Beta testing components.

This week:
1. Get design ready for webpage
2. Meet Monday in Wimba for updates.