Action Research, Round 2!

It has been a while since I've shared anything on my blog, well it has only been about two weeks but I thought now might be a nice time to share some of the initial findings from my action research project. What I have been doing is plugging in quantitative data from the attendance at our school and looking for any patterns in the attendance numbers. The good news is that our attendance has been consistently up at the building I teach in since we began using our PlascoTrac program! Feel free to download my reports in this blog and check out my findings so far... https://sites.google.com/site/travispatockaspanish/action-research-project-for-lamar/preliminary-action-research-results All of my research has documentation to prove its' validity so please, share any data from my report so far! I am also looking at the literature and case studies out there on PlascoTrac. There are a slew of case studies on schools that have begun using this program in their schools.

Web Conference #4 down, EDLD 5363 and time to finish things up!

It has been an incredible journey so far!  Again, my Lamar classes amaze me as I learn more and more about just what is out there in terms of multimedia tools and information.  I am no longer afraid to work with iMovie, do a pod cast, experiment with computer animation and graphics in my classes.  A bit part of it is simply diving right in and making the time to practice working with all of these programs and online web 2.0 tools.  Below I have posted the final edition/version of our multimedia collaboration video.  Even though some of us were 1,000 miles apart we still were able to make it work.  Using facebook to chat and google docs/drive and gmail to collaborate we worked hard to create the video below.  I hope you enjoy it.



I can't tell you how many hours I put into this video and I would have saved time had I been working with my colleagues directly, under the same building but learning how to work over long distances makes everything so much simpler.  Little things like learning how to embed video, work with html and just play around with what is out there makes this class worthwhile.  Just as a personal note I feel blessed and grateful to have such a patient wife and it helps that she too is a graduate student working hard.   All I need to do now is get going on me week 5 homework.  Actually, I spent a ton of time on it yesterday so we will see how it all comes together when it comes time to get everything turned in.  All done in time for winter break!

EDLD 5363 Weeks 3, 4 and 5 thoughts and reflections.

I have to admit that is has been wonderful having two weeks to get our group collaboration instructional video in full swing.  Thinking about it, just three weeks ago we were hosting the NFL draft of group formation lining up our partners for our EDLD 5363 multimedia project.  I ended up quickly joining a few other fellow Lamar students that I had taken previous classes with and while we had not worked together before, communicated and assisted each other regularly on our facebook class pages.  We started discussing ideas, created a script, then entered into the process of the production of the video.  Everything from multiple drafts of the script, a shot list, gathering of the media and creation/finding of the creative commons information for our projects was also completed.  We decided on splicing audio and video footage with the computer animation program, xtranormal.com in order to create this entire video.  In the end we discovered that if we were patient with each other, and communicated regularly, as well as were open with ideas, the whole process would come together nicely.  The only real technical difficulties that we ran into had to do with audio.  Two of our characters that spoke to each other in the video and during other video footage were in two completely different locations, using two completely different audio systems and comptuers therefore creating two audio files that were not balanced out.  I did my best to try and balance out the audio running as much as I could using Audacity and in the end, I think we came as close as we could to simulating the volume of two people talking to each other in the same room.  Now, it is off to the week 5 homework where I will be filling out documentation of all of our work and our final drafts of the production process.  Wish me luck!

Web conference from Saturday, 12-1-2012

Saturday mornings web conference was excellent as it gave us a chance to catch our breath and share our experiences with our podcasts, as well as any difficulties that you encounter when you deal with audio recording software.  It also was an excellent opportunity to ask specific questions of the professor in preparation of our group multimedia project.  While I am confident that our group will create an awesome 90 second video on some aspect of earth science, the collaboration part scares me but I do have an excellent team that communicates well via facebook, both messaging as well as through our shared google drive documents.  We have a template posted on our website we will be sharing that enables us to contribute to our script production of our science video and I was able to ask Dr. A, specific questions on Saturday's web conference about the creation of this program.  We are going to be using Xtranormal as it is basically an all in one animation studio which will allow us to all log in and contribute to some aspect of the video.  Collaboration, technology, publishing and instruction will not be easy but will be very rewarding in the end!