Tum, ta-Tum Tum Tum

I am FINALLY in my last week of outdoor education down in the far reaches of Richland/Ashland Counties and you better believe I'm looking forward to its end. It's challenging enough with three classes and a job, but trying to balance them with the 24-hour demands of camp has been a nightmare. For example, one does not get adequate, re-energizing sleep when a boy vomits all over a cabin at 3 a.m. and it's up to you to get the boy to the clinic, wake teachers up, comfort the kid, go clean up the mess without waking 17 other sleeping boys, and THEN try to get back to sleep and be ready to go full-bore the next day from wake-up to lights-out.

I've heard back from one other counselor so far regarding the geology PowerPoint that I put together for my EDCI 505 hypermedia assignment, and she thought it was well-done and useful. Yay! I passed it along to seven other people as well and am hoping for more feedback as far as what's good and what needs tweaking. I was late once again though getting the next assignment done for that class. Ugh, I don't know that an "A" is going to be possible for me in the class at this point but I continue to hope that the work I'm doing will contribute to the greater good of being useful to me and to others down the road.

Day late and a dollar short

Really got behind the 8-ball with my Hypermedia project. I tried to be really ambitious in creating a self-test/tutorial covering local geology for the camp where I work. Assembling all the content alone was very time-consuming, and then going through the steps of putting the non-linear presentation format together doubled the amount of time put into the final product. In the end I feel I created a useful tool for the camp's staff to use, but I was a week late in submitting the project for my class. Ugh. I can only hope that the professor will give me at least some credit for having completed it. Of course I'm now behind in the assignment that was due this past Sunday night. Sigh. Hope to have it done no later than Wednesday.

Anyway, back to the presentation. I've used PowerPoint for traditional note presentations before and hated it. I feel that drawing and writing things by hand is so much faster, and I think people feel more at ease when they see concepts or diagrams diagrammed by hand (it's much easier to copy someone's hand-drawn work, I think). So, when I give notes to classes I prefer much more traditional means, such as writing everything up on the chalkboard/whiteboard or using an overhead projector. PowerPoint, up to now, I've felt was only good for showing slideshows of pictures only. But I do have to admit that knowing now how PowerPoint can be used to create non-linear hypermedia projects is really cool! I can see now how effective these can be for making self-paced tutorials. I suppose once a person's made a few of these and has his/her own version of a standard format that this could be a very cool tool to employ in teaching, but man is it time-consuming the first time around!

One of the camp directors and several counselors have downloaded copies of my presentation, and I'm anxiously awaiting their feedback regarding how effective they think it will be as a teaching aid. I can already see areas where I can make some changes though. As it stands now, the only way to get to the tutorial slides in the file is to select wrong answers to questions on the self-quiz slides. I either need to be sure people are aware of this short-coming or go back and create some hyperlinks on the main page that will go directly to the tutorial pages. Live and learn, I guess.

Anyway, time to get cracking on my overdue next project...