ETEC 531- Media Study Guide on Finding Nemo
In my classroom, I am incredibly selective in regard to the media that I expose my students to. I know many educators who show their students movies that are often not connected to the curriculum in any way. The only time that I have shown a full length movie in my classroom for my students is when it has been connected to something that we are studying, or when I have chosen to show the movie version of a novel that we have read. The information that we had to familiarize ourselves with prior to the creation of our own media study guides only served to further solidify my strong feelings on the matter. Being that I am so skeptical about the use of popular films and shows in the classroom setting, this project really helped me to see how the inclusion of such media can actually be a very valuable thing when it is done in a pedagogically sound way. Having the chance to explore the media study guide compilations of past classes put me in a completely different frame of mind going into this assignment. I was pleased that my group was given special permission to select a movie that was more suited to my own students’ age group. We chose to build a media study guide for the film ‘Finding Nemo.’
I really enjoyed the process that we worked through as a group to complete our media study guide. We met regularly and set benchmarks to be at in our own individual tasks by a certain date in order to facilitate our next steps. Much of our study guide stemmed from the major themes from the film that we thought were the most applicable to our target age group. I am including this project as an artifact of learning because this particular project required me to access prior learning from a number of my other MET courses. We had to consider copyright issues which we reviewed within this course, but I had also been exposed to this content in both ETEC 511 and 540. I also had to draw upon my knowledge of design principles from ETEC 510 to help make the resource visually pleasing, well organized, and easy for an instructor to use. We also wanted to ensure that the activities that we built into the media study guide were both engaging and enriching for the students. During this process, I was introduced by a group mate to a new piece of desktop publishing software called Adobe InDesign. This is the medium that we chose to use for our project and I was astounded by the high quality and professional looking product that we ended up with. In addition to the appealing look, we were also able to embed videos within the pdf that are fully playable from inside the document itself. I had not previously seen a pdf document with this feature. The value of this affordance is huge. Rather than teachers being asked to fast forward through the movie to various points in order to review certain portions of the film with their students, all of these clips are playable for the teachers from right within the guide itself. I think that the ease of use in this regard will appeal to many educators and I wanted to include it here so that my audience would have the chance to experience it firsthand. This was a valuable learning experience for me, as it enhanced my design and technological skills. As a result of this project, I also made some classroom application connections that will impact my selection and usage of film in my own teaching in the future.
I really enjoyed the process that we worked through as a group to complete our media study guide. We met regularly and set benchmarks to be at in our own individual tasks by a certain date in order to facilitate our next steps. Much of our study guide stemmed from the major themes from the film that we thought were the most applicable to our target age group. I am including this project as an artifact of learning because this particular project required me to access prior learning from a number of my other MET courses. We had to consider copyright issues which we reviewed within this course, but I had also been exposed to this content in both ETEC 511 and 540. I also had to draw upon my knowledge of design principles from ETEC 510 to help make the resource visually pleasing, well organized, and easy for an instructor to use. We also wanted to ensure that the activities that we built into the media study guide were both engaging and enriching for the students. During this process, I was introduced by a group mate to a new piece of desktop publishing software called Adobe InDesign. This is the medium that we chose to use for our project and I was astounded by the high quality and professional looking product that we ended up with. In addition to the appealing look, we were also able to embed videos within the pdf that are fully playable from inside the document itself. I had not previously seen a pdf document with this feature. The value of this affordance is huge. Rather than teachers being asked to fast forward through the movie to various points in order to review certain portions of the film with their students, all of these clips are playable for the teachers from right within the guide itself. I think that the ease of use in this regard will appeal to many educators and I wanted to include it here so that my audience would have the chance to experience it firsthand. This was a valuable learning experience for me, as it enhanced my design and technological skills. As a result of this project, I also made some classroom application connections that will impact my selection and usage of film in my own teaching in the future.
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