I had a lot of fun creating this digital learning environment (DLE). The process really challenged me to consider how to best present the production of audio to students. My first digital artefact was over 35 minutes and I did not realise that it needed to be between 5-7 minutes. Once I learned that, I had to think of very creative ways in order to compress 35 minutes of content into 7 minutes. I had to decide on what was the most important factors in the production of audio. I had to cut a lot of theory out, however, the time spent did not go to waste as I utilised the 35 minute video as an “extra” link for those who want to learn more about the audio production process.
The group collaboration was solid. Our group took about a week longer than the others to form because COVID-19 caused the group to be abandoned from withdrawls. However, once we established a group, we worked very well together communicating through the Facebook Messenger platform. We used video calls for important times and we constantly messaged each other to see how everything was going. It was a slow process and I completed my parts faster than my team members, not requiring the extension in which we obtained. However, the extention gave time to my other team members in order to create a really tight website about digital learning environments and how to create them.
We used Weebly as our website interface and it worked well. I have never used Weebly before and some of its free limitations annoyed me. However, we were able to overcome those limitations and establish a website that will be of great benefit to teachers wanting to learn about learning environments, audio production, and video production. I am very happy with the website as it provides a great guide for teachers to learn their way around web platforms and how to optimise them for audio-video learning.
It was a very wise decision to show our faces in the videos. Many educational videos online today distance the teacher from the student by not showing their faces. This hinders learning potential because if you can’t see the face of your teacher then you will struggle to identify with them. I think that all online teachers should show their faces to personally connect with their students.
As far as how this module can assist with my own students, I shared it publicly with them. I want my students to learn how to use audio and video so that they can share their concerns with both me and the world. My online video teaching encourages others to teach collaboratively with me. In order for that to happen, they are required to learn how to produce audio and video. The skills of our website DLE are essential to encouraging students to interact with my content.
One “trick” that I did do was to show how to produce video at the end by combining all of the scenes into one. This is how I make my productions and in my opinion, is the best way to make videos. However, Elly’s Video Mastery section is very useful for those who want to make videos from inside the computer instead of outside of it. I am very pleased with the final results of our project as it is all-inclusive – classroom, video, audio. The only thing missing from it is the gaming aspect…
