Category: Assignment 1 – Blog Posts

From my own experience, one of the most effective ways to show my claims of presentation is showing the audience videos about the content. According to the segmenting principle, the voice of the videos could also positively affect the multimedia presentation. However, since I have no background knowledge about editing video, I was not good at editing the videos at all and have some bad experience of editing videos. The worst video-editing experience was about a video introducing a traditional Chinese food cured meat.

• Firstly, the transition of the video was not good. It is important to add a transition between two video clips to make the entire video look fluent. However, since I did not know the importance of transition, I did not add any transitions in my video and the content of the video confused some audiences.

• Also, I did not pay attention to the audio of the edited video. At that time, I did not check whether the volume of the video clips was appropriate. As a result, the volume of a video clip is too low and the audience could not hear that clip clearly.

• Last but not least, I did notice that the color of the subtitles were quite similar to the background. So, it was not easy for the audiences to read the subtitles which affected my presentation result.

After understanding the principles of Universal Instructional Design and Universal Design for Learning, I realized some shortcomings of my previous designs and found ways to improve my future design.

First and foremost, the principle that impressed me most is that I should offer more than one specific way to show my content. In my previous design experience, I mainly considered my professor as the audience. As a result, I only provide the experiment result and useful conclusion in my presentation and reports. However, in the future, I would also think about my classmates and other people that might be interested in my research. Therefore, I should also include more background introduction to my future project. Also, I would provide some useful short videos in case people are bored with massive data and formulas. What is more, it is also important to include some graphs which can illustrate my result clearly.

Besides, I should also offer people more choices to participate in my project. Previously, the only way they could participate in my project was that I would ask whether they had questions and they could express their problems by asking some questions face-to-face. I think in the future, I might include some ways that people could participate online. For instance, in the future, I would also post my content on the blog so that other researchers could view my project.

The worst presentation I have ever given was in last semester. It was a Maths final project presentation about the population model of the whooping cranes. There are three main reasons that the causes the bad presentation.

First of all, when I was introducing the whooping crane, I chose a scientific video to explain the content. Although the video I chose includes the main details should be mentioned about the cranes, the video is very time-consuming and relatively boring. Some of my classmates did not pay attention to the video and missed important background knowledge of my project.

Secondly, the layout of my PowerPoint is also very massy. Since I did not have enough time to prepare the PowerPoint before the presentation, I includes nearly all of the tables and plots in the draft. As a result, several important plots that shows the tendency of the population and the explaining words are not on the same slide. Since I compared three population models in total, there are dozens of plots and tables provided. As a result, lots of my classmates were confused about the difference between the models due to the massive tables and charts.

Last but not least, the timing was one of the reasons caused the failure. As I mentioned before, the video is very time-consuming. The representation was required to be finished within 15 minutes. However, the video I chose is an 6-minutes video, which took nearly half of the presentation time. As a result, I did not have enough time to describe the details of some contents which also caused confusion to the audiences.

When I look back on my learning experience after knowing the basic knowledge of the learning paradigms, I realize that two main paradigms were applied.

When I was in my first and second years in primary school, cognitive paradigms were applied by the majority of my teachers. When the teachers, especially math teachers, tried to introduce the new contents, they would simply state the definitions and explain them with plain words. Although the teachers tried some in-class games to make the learning process more interesting, I was not extremely fascinated about learning at school at that time. Math was my least favorite subject at that time because I thought math was about remembering numerous formulas and repeating complicated calculations.

However, nearly all my third-year primary school teachers preferred the constructivist paradigm. Taking my math teacher as an example, she would let us preview the knowledge the day before the class, and then assign an exercise to us at the beginning of the class. Then, she would give three students opportunities to write their own procedures on the blackboard and explain their own thoughts in front of the class. After that, she would let us spend about ten minutes representing and discussing the question. And at the end of the class, she would conclude our methods. Her different teaching method changed my attitude towards math because I loved presenting my own ideas about math questions to my classmates.

References

AITSL. [AITSL]. (2016, April 20). Engaging a Maths class [Video]. YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=csR-Py99PZ4

Since English is a worldwide used language, I was required to learn English when I was about five years old. However, there were lots of difficulties when I started to learn English, especially in word comprehension. Besides, it was not easy for a five-year-old kid to keep focusing on the contents during class. Luckily, the teaching method of my English teacher changed my attitude towards English. Before every class, she made cards with graphs representing the meaning of the words and taped the cards on the blackboard. Then, she would say a word we learned in class, and we would run to the blackboard and choose the card. Since the first one who chose the correct card can get a piece of candy, all of us participated actively in the game.

Her teaching method not only makes me interested in English but also has a huge influence on my project presentation method. Instead of only using words to introduce my projects, I always use videos at the start of the presentation. For instance, when I presented the project about the mathematical model of the number of cranes a month ago, I used a short video to introduce the features of cranes, such as their average life span, and their living habits. Not only did the video draw the attention of the audience, but it also made the background of my project more understandable compared to word description.

References

Earth Rangers. [Earth Rangers]. (2012, September 26). Whooping Crane [Video]. YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb_2iQYNwRY&t=1s

As a statistics major student, there are lots of projects, and the project presentations have huge impacts on the final grades of the courses. The aim of every project presentation is not only to show the result to my professor and classmates, but also to make the content easier to understand for people who do not have enough statistical knowledge. However, I always find it hard to explain my project content and concepts that I understand properly through the presentation. For instance, when I try to explain a certain concept that is only used in statistics, it is not possible to just use words to give a simple definition. Because for people who lack statistical knowledge, the definition is not likely to make sense. In order to solve this problem, I always use pictures and a short video to explain it. But, it is not easy to make the presentation fluent. When I try to combine the video, pictures and words together, the powerpoint I used to present always looks massy. Thus, the main reason that I want to take EDCI 337 is that this course can improve my presenting skills. Through this course, I am looking forward to learning how to manage my presentation, and make it more accurate and understandable for people.