Game Making

This week has been very interesting. Clark brings some important points regarding the culture of transfer in the workplace. She emphasis that the training should be such that at the end participants are in a position to apply knowledge and skills learnt in real life situations. Chapter 13 further suggests selecting the instructional methods to promote deeper learning (p.342). There may be several reasons behind failure of training and the main reason can be ‘poor learning strategies and monitoring failure.’

I tried to make a game using Gamemaker.com which is free platform to develop free games. It enables users to create basic games from scratch or user can write codes to create one. I started with a game but found that it is a long process and I need to practice before I could create a good game. I tried using Classtoolnet.com to create a basic game and realised the dustbin game was the best fit for my topic. Classtoolnet offers limited options and there are few colors to choose from. But it is a very good free tool which gives teachers and students an option to create their own games, even if, they don’t know coding. Teachers do not have to rely on expensive games or game making software. They can make their own small games using this tool. The only drawback is the color scheme which may not be fit for visually challenged students.

Journal 6

I always wanted to use Prezi for making presentations but never got a chance to use it. This week’s assignment gave me this option. I felt most engaged while creating this prezi presentation. It is a great tool for presenting presentation in liner  or non-linear fashion. It definitely offers more options compared to the powerpoint in terms of templates, colors, object orientation and sharing. Users can add as many frames on the Prezi canvas and keep adding text, graphics and other multimedia to these frames. The objects in the frames can be ungrouped and objects can be presented individually.  I liked the features which allows users to rotate, scale or move objects. The voice over feature is great too. I just added some music.

After reading the DB posts on implicit and explicit instructional styles, I didn’t find myself very comfortable with the idea of using only implicit instructional methods. I think that if explicit instructions are provide prior to the start of teaching, it is helpful for learners and they make sense of what to  do. Also, simple tasks are best learned through explicit instructions.  

E-portfolio

I’m hand-coding my e-portfolio in HTML. It is a little time consuming. Writing and re-writing codes and then refreshing the page, is what I usually do. But, I like it.  I’m not sure of the design of my e-portfolio. It is divided into 4 sections. The home page looked OK but when it came to the web-graphic it was a problem because the graphic was bigger. I researched found an alternative.

But for the Discussion board responses, I’m looking for a solution so that it doesn’t look         clumsy. I’ll make the links which work as show and hide. The user can click on the buttons to read or hide the DB topics.

Another issue is the browser compatibility. All browsers do not display the same results. I’m working on this issue as well. I’ll be revising and redoing the pages as per the suggestions I receive from my classmates. I think my portfolio will be evolving till the course ends. I plan to finish my e-portfolio by March 12, 2013.

Basics of Instructional design

I really appreciate the instructional material and the instructors of this program who presented everything in a decent way. I think I’ll be ready to create my own course in few months.

The collaborative learning is a key to human learning. So the interaction that takes place on Discussion board plays an important role. The ideas those may never come my mind are discussed here.

Many of the points discussed in the lectures were new and I was really surprised to read ”How people read online.” All these things added a new dimension to the way I perceived my course before. Instructional design is such an important component of any online or on-ground that it may lead students to either finish the course successfully or drop in the middle. A few basic things related to the design such as color choice, font selection, chunking information in digestible parts, questions placement, using cues, explanatory text, and many more things brought my attention to the fact that a course design is not simply putting some text together along with few presentations and videos. It is much more than that. As teachers we should redefine and redesign the teaching material such that it does not overload the working   memory of the students. The design of the course must align with the learner’s learning style.

If we want our students to pay attention to the material, it should be developed as a coherent structure, and integrated with existing knowledge. We should make sure that every media is relevant to the learning outcome and not included just for its sake. I think some interactive graphics within each section of the lesson should help learners balance intrinsic load with  germane events.