If you could ask a digital designer to teach you something, what would that something be?

Hi,

I am a professional digital designer (graphic design, web design, multimedia, etc.) who teaches digital media design at a two-year technical college. I would like to work with area high school teachers to share what I know about design and teaching and find out what they know about design and teaching. I would like to start by offering a workshop/collaborative session of sorts. If you were offered such a session, what could a digital designer, such as myself, offer that would be of benefit to you?

I would appreciate any and all advice, ideas, or feedback! Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on September 13, 2009 at 12:46pm

Hmmm, I wish you lived local to my area so I could participate. Since your topic is digital, why not offer it in LearnCentral's Elluminate then a larger number of teachers from all over the world could participate? I would definitely be insterested. :0)

Hmmm, no on to shat I would want to know. I have been working with teaching online and have a traditional art background. I am gaining digital knowledge pretty well for internet and book based assistance because I am actively seeking it. I think one thing that would be good is a good list of the best resources out there for creating the digital resources would be a great start. You could have a list of free but good all the way up to the all-the-bells-and-whistles commercial tools (Gimp to Photoshop/Illustrator). Then lead them to some the best tutorials that are as close to what an educator can put most directly to use for a reasonable cost (Lynda.com for Adobe products, Gimp.org's site for Gimp, etc). Giving the teachers the ability to fish instead of just a fish I guess is what I am getting at. Give them a way that they can learn outside of a particular class.

Many instructors don't know if they need digital design because they don't see how it can be put to good use in their own teaching. Having a time of showing them how they can be creative and make their own resources would be essential. For instance, I wanted to have a very versatile vitual lab set for chemistry that the students could interact with on-screen (I teach online). A face to face teacher with a Smartboard would find a use for this sort of project. But what I found was that images from the net provided glassware images that didn't behave like glassware. I needed something that made the glass show through to what was behind and in it. So, I learned how to create an image in png file format which had varying degrees of opacity and I continually am adding to my set. I had need of making the bunsen burner flame and solutions in test tubes in beakers look like they were moving, so I learned how to creatd animated gifs. I wanted to create interactive biomysteries and chemystries so I learned a great deal about image searches and Creative Commons licensing to help me build the stories quickly. I wanted to create a Jeopardy like review game but with easy scoring, so I got pretty good at taking an image and slicing it up into puzzle pieces that could show the team's score visually instead of slowing down to add up points (for instance a brain was divided up into lobes for my Build a Brain review template). I am using digital tools almost continually to produce the materials I want.

I hope this helps. :0)

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Permalink Reply by Kathleen Kinney on September 13, 2009 at 2:25pm

Great ideas! Thanks! The only thing is, and I forgot to mention this, is we're starting out with high school teachers who teach in digital disciplines. So they should have a working knowledge of some digital applications. But I'm thinking I could ramp it up a bit by showing them some of the stuff we do that they may or may not be doing. What do you think about sharing how we use Flip Video cameras, create podcasts using Audacity, or screencasts with iShowU and Camtasia.

What do you think?