I’m actually feeling quite sad about finishing our Visual Media course. I feel that I have merely skimmed the surface of using visual media as a tool in order to progress my future career as an educator and instructional designer. In my first week, I was refreshed and ready to begin the final semester of my program only to now feel like a baby bird terrified to leave the nest. I think one of the most powerful tools from this course was being able to make all of the mistakes and see the mistakes others have made as we “deconstructed” infographics, job aides, websites, and instructional videos.
Now that I have finished our EME 6209 course, I feel more confident in my Photoshop skills, and my ability to work in a team of other instructional designers, creating infographics, job aides, and instructional films. At the beginning of this semester, I was very timid about creating anything with Photoshop or GIMP. I started off being very conservative with my projects but learned very quickly to go back and look at our resources because I wanted to make sure that not only were my resources easily understood from a UDL perspective, but I also wanted to make sure my designs were schematic. I wanted them to represent something that I would do in a professional setting and can use in my portfolio.
Even from the very beginning of the course, I was excited to really dive into the film editing aspect. I have felt very confident in my editing abilities and how to storyboard. I love telling stories. One of my SMART goals was to create an instructional video every other week throughout the course of the 16-week course. I finished with one. I love how truly ambitious I was at the beginning of this journey. To the woman (me) who wrote those lofty goals at the beginning of the semester, I appreciate your ambition but you DID realize that you are a single mom, full-time teacher, and have two other courses you are taking? Correct? I love you, but you NEED some sleep!
I did however, make sure I was checking in with Dr. Rizzuto to make sure I was staying on track. Her feedback has been invaluable to my success this semester. She has gone out of her way to check my website for an upcoming interview and you should count your blessings should you ever have the pleasure of working with her in any capacity. While I didn’t quite meet the SMART goals I set up for myself at the beginning of the semester, I will be continuing the overhaul of my website and working on more instructional videos throughout the summer…after I catch up on some sleep!
In my first week, I really thought we would be spitting out a bunch of projects and not breaking down as much about visual design. I am really happy we did because now, there are many elements that I need to go back and review to make sure I am putting my best work forward. I was also able to incorporate some of what I have learned as I was learning it into my internship. While I only created one video for this course, I was able to create a video about “The Hour of Code”, a “Strikingly Tutorial”, a “Prezzi Tutorial”, and a “Pokemon Go Tutorial” for the EME 2040 course where I am a TA. I was able to use my storytelling skills in order to connect with my virtual students and assist my professor. I was surprised by how many views each video received. While I didn’t receive any feedback from the students directly, I hope they found them to be helpful.
As I tell all of my personal students, we learn by doing and working through our mistakes. This is a tough concept for me to use as a student. I want my work to be perfect, or at least as perfect as I can make it. Every single time I hit the SUBMIT button, there was something that I wanted to change. One aspect of this course that has really stuck with me more than anything else has been the ability to see the design within the visual media element. I went from not being able to deconstruct an element of visual media to being able to immediately see what the visual designer did to accomplish certain goals. It’s similar to going to see a theatrical performance.
If you have only seen shows and not performed or worked on them, you see the show for the entertainment value and walk away. When you’ve worked on shows for as long as I have, you notice the little nuances of the scene changes, the lighting, the sound, the costumes, and the acting. All of those elements tell a story. In visual design, the colors, the graphic space, the images, the typography, and the visual hierarchy tell that story.
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