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Successes: Multimedia Development
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Multimedia Development
Each of the small images are iconic representations of screen captures from various multimedia projects. Clicking on an image will display the full-size image.
The Teaching Cycle: A Lesson in Observation
For Macintosh
- Dr. Mary Leglar, a professor in the Department of Music Education, contacted me wanting to produce a CD-ROM for teaching students about observation classroom teachers. We came up with this product, which is basically an interface to dozens of digitized movies which are viewed previous to exposure to "prompting questions."
- This CD-ROM is currently still in development. A prototype was developed for conference presentation and for evaluation.
Georgia Agricultural Education Curriculum Resource & Reference CD
For Windows 3.1, 95
- This CD-ROM product was designed as an instructional resource and distributed to all of the Agricultural Education teachers in the K-12 system of Georgia. It contains hundreds of files - each one a lesson plan produced by the Georgia Department of Education. What was required was an easier (than simply navigating the CD) interface to the files. An Authorware Engine was built which contained much information about the Ag. Ed. programs, but primarily functioned as an organizer of these content files.
- The interface was designed to help make accessing the lesson plans easier by categorizing the lesson plans into various courses, catagories, and grade levels. The user launches the authorware engine and navigates to the lesson plan(s) they want. Then they may either choose to open up a lesson plan in their word processor, or (if they do not have a word processor which can open the file) they may view the lesson plans with a web browser (included on the CD).
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The response to this CD has been astounding. The Agricultural Education teachers love it and it is currently going into the 5th version, each adding more curriculum lessons and more features. The latest complete version (v. 4.0) was redesigned so that future versions could be made without the need for an Authorware (or other) programmer. The interface, splash screens, on-screen text, downloadable files, and even internal links can all be customizable with no programming or authoring experience.
Interactive Tutorial & Development Kit for the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia.
For Macintosh, Windows, and Windows95 machines.
This project was the first CD-ROM project that I designed and developed while working with the OIT. It is noteworthy because it marked my reaching the level of multimedia design where I was designing tools for multimedia designers.
- When the OIT was asked to help produce a tutorial for the University if Georgia's College of Veterinary Medicine, the coordinators of the project originally had in mind that OIT would produce the 200+ example cases involved and master them onto a CD-ROM for student use. We decided that a better approach (given the time and resources involved) was to empower the coordinators of the grant with the ability to create the cases themselves. After all, the client in this case was the subject matter expert.
- What the OIT completed was something called Create-A-Case. This program allowed the project coordinators (SMEs) to be able to place appropriate images (in this case, X-Rays) and text into one of several templates. The authoring works so that as Create-A-Case generates each complete case, it updates a Main Menu file. After all of the cases have been created, the entire thing (minus the Create-A-Case engine) is mastered to CD-ROM. The Main Menu file is launched by the end learner and it allows the learner to access each example case by name (for reference) or by category (for identification practice).
- Creating a tool for someone else to use was a project that really challenged my authoring abilities. The user was able to use this tool to complete the project with minimal assistance from my office.
Patchwork Stories - Interactive Teaching Tool for Reading Education
For Macintosh.
- This CD-ROM project was done as contract work through a grant from The College of Education. The grant supported the college's Multicultural Education Initiative. Multicultural Education was identified as one of the three primary agendas for the COE and is an effort will address the issues of infusing appropriate multicultural perspectives into academic programs. The aim is to respond within each program to the saliency of cultural factors and diversity for the achievement and well being of our students in relation to the universal context and to the context in which they will be working following graduation.
- For the project, approximately 6 hours of video footage was gathered and reviewed. 48 video clips, ranging from 20 seconds to over 2 minutes, were identified as usable. These clips were digitized using the Media100 QX and a PowerMacintosh. The interface accesses these video clips and allows them to be viewed in multiple organizational schemes (chronologically, by activity, by teacher, etc.).
- This product is used in Teacher Education classes where instructors want to demonstrate the implementation of a particular curriculum dealing with reading education. The emphasis of this curriculum deals with global cultures and the American historical practice of slavery. In this way, students benefit from a multicultural approach to reading, history, and art.
The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking - a tutorial for practice and review
For Macintosh, Windows, and Windows95 machines.
View 2 screen snaps of this project.
- The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is a nationally-utilized test of an individual's creative abilities. Scoring of the test is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Dr. Bonnie Cramond, the director of the Gifted and Creative Education Program at The University of Georgia, obtained a grant for the creation of a tutorial which would allow students to experience practice with various sections of the TTCT. While scoring the TTCT has been taught for some time, students rarely understand the process until they actually have an opportunity to score. This CD-ROM tutorial gives students the opportunity to practice scoring a specific section of the TTCT, using examples from actual tests.
- The TTCT CD-ROM briefly overviews the material in the specific section, then allows the user to practice identifying and scoring examples. The program provides immediate, in-depth, and time-appropriate feedback to the users, allowing them to review sections when necessary.
- Two-thirds of this program have been completed, dozens of copies mastered, and formative evaluations have been completed. The final phase of the project will involve completion of the final section of the tutorial, debugging, implementing modifications based on formative evaluation, final evaluation, and mastering of the program.
Talking Books
For Macintosh
- In this experimental research project, a number of works of children's literature have been created adapted for CD-ROM in order to foster early literacy development. In addition, characters from the stories have been integrated into a Kidpix 2 package allowing students to expand upon and respond to the stories through the use of stamps and computer graphics.
- I was secondary author on this project but it represents my first attempt to really modify an existing application at the root level. The software application KidPix 2 is a successfull commercial paint product which allows the user to use the many intergrated tools to illustrate. One of the tools is a sort of "rubber stamp". One selects a rubber stamp (which is a small picture or icon) and clicks on the canvas... stamping that image onto the virtual canvas.
- I was asked to modify these rubber stamp images so that they would represent characters from the programmed talking books. School photographs of a specific set of classroom children (this was originally a research experiment) were also scanned and incorporated into the rubber stamps. In this way, the children could place images of themselves inside their picture along with the story characters.
- I used a utility called ResEdit which is a resource editor for the Macintosh. I edited the rubber stamp files and imported new characters which were created from scans of the actual stories. It was a lot of fun and it seems to work great. It was satisfying to modify content at that level inside some commercial software and also very rewarding to see the final results enjoyed by schoolchildren.
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