Week 12

Chapter 30: Using Rich Media Wisely

After reading about rich media as an effective instructional method that promotes learning, I need to adjust my thinking on a new concept that is being introduced in our BUS 1750 Freshmen Business Enterprise class. For Spring 2009 semester the once 3 hour a week class is now only an hour long per week class with the rest of the time being spent watching videos. Due to lack of information provided to the advising office, we really don't know the content of the class. I am going to believe that it has been well planned and includes using rich media wisely. I will take away from this chapter a different view of this class. We have smart people and great faculty in the college of business, so I will trust that what appears to be a great way to educate a lot of students with limited professor contact will really be a trendy way of using rich media to help the student improve learning. I hope to see some evaluation data on how students are responding to this new set up. If the opportunity presented itself I would also like to be involved in future plans when incorporating rich media into instruction.

Another tangible I will take away from this chapter is how important visuals and pictures can be in improving the learning process. Based on Mayer (2001) research "students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone." Another important issue for me to remember is how the cognitive learning process works. We all have a working memory and a long-term memory. Part of the brain remembers images and another part of the brain remembers words, so if I give the student a little bit of both, they will store this information in separate channels and hopefully retain more of the information that has been provided to them. Another important factor to remember is that too much environmental sounds and background music will overload the capacity of the auditory/verbal channel, hurting the learning process.

I am more interested in the subject of using rich media to enable more effective instructional methods that promote learning than I was before reading this chapter!


Review of online applications:

When I first went to Google Documents I got excited because I thought it would be a great tool for keeping spreadsheets and word documents stored in one universal site in which I could share with the President of ISCSC, in which I am the "treasurer" and keeper of membership payments and membership lists. My first excel file uploaded fine, however my second pick was a data base file in Access and it would not upload and either would the most current versions of word and excel. This free application would be fine for the older version of Microsoft, however if one has already converted to the 2007 version of Microsoft this will not work. Another issue I found was that for the best version and all the options you had to pay $50.00. The version that is free is the "ad-supported" version, which is fine for being free, but has the before mentioned limitations. On the same page as the price quotes there is link to "see our solutions for schools" link. It gives an Education Edition that would be great for school districts to utilize it as it is free and there are several similarities between this and Microsoft word and excel.There are several reasons to use Google Docs and they advertise well with the Top 10 Reasons to Use Google Apps. However, I would only recommend this to schools, non profits, or other entities that do not have a budget for any other software purchases. It has limitations already with being outdated with the newest version of Microsoft and will it continue with that trend? A reason to not rely on it at this point for serious business dealings.

The Image Editing application I choose is Picnik. I would recommend Picnik as an effective photo editing tool to students, family and friends. It lets you do basic edits and fun to create different effects in your photos. It is free and that is one of it's greatest advantages. This could be used in an educational setting. However, my computer did tend to freeze up a bit more than usual while using Picnik, so that was a little unsettling. I did have fun playing around with the tools. I liked the tooth whitening and the red eye reduction features. Going to black and white really helped make some of my photos better looking, that is another neat feature. This application is very easy to use and I would recommend it to students, family or friends. But in a professional setting in which the business is of photography, not so much.