assignment

A Great Animoto Story

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As a usual assignment, my Introduction to Computers class needs to create a multimedia presentation on one of the topics covered in the class and embed the presentation into their blogs.

The students usually enjoy this assignment very much especially since I always have them use the Animoto Multimedia Web 2.0 site is which is free to use and also provides royalty free music that can added to the presentation. If you are not familiar with this site, check it out here: Http://www.animoto.com.

Well, 2 weeks ago during the last class day, one of my students had a wonderful story to share with me. Apparently for the last two years, he has had a business working from home creating personal memory videos for people to show at anniversaries, retirement and weddings parties and memorial videos for funerals.

Lately he has been unable to keep up with the demand and was planning to hire someone to help him out with his business. He had been using a movie editing software to create the movies which had a really high learning curve and is not very user friendly. Therefore, it was a very time consuming task to create each video.

He wanted me to know that I really helped his business out tremendously since one of the options on the Animoto site allow businesses to buy a yearly membership and use the site for business purposes.

He bought a years membership and since then has been able to cut the amount of time he spends to create the videos in half and no longer plans to hire anyone to help him out. He has also managed to double his productivity.

Wow, this made my whole day. Not only had I educated the student as far as Computers are concerned, but by introducing him to this site, I was able to help his personal business grow.

I guess educators will sometimes will never know the full implications of an ordinary class assignment. In this case, my assignment did more for this student than I ever imagined. It is stories like this that just reinforce my love for teaching.

Short Student Assignment Yields Lots of Learning

Last week, I decided to make up a very small assignment for my college level Multimedia Presentations Class. The assignment was to use a royalty free picture site such as Http://www.sxc.hu to find 10 Jpg formatted photos in a topic relating to multimedia. For example: 10 photos of musical instruments to represent sound.

They were supposed to download them to their desktop and then use the MS Paint software to save 2 each in the following formats, Tiff, Gif, Png, Monochome BMP and regular BMP. Our book chapter concerning graphics had discussed all of these. After converting these, they were to use their Google sites , create a new page and insert a table that would display one photo in each cell.

Well, at first I was thinking that this assignment was very elementary and probably an insult to their level of graphics related knowledge because most students in this class were digital media majors. However, I was in for a big surprise.

As the students started working on this assignment, one student called me over.  She had just converted the first photo to a Gif format. She asked me why the image did not look as good as before and seemed blurry.

Well, this gave me the opportunity to tell her and the class that the Gif format should never be used for regular photos. It should only be used for logos, thumbnails and small animated images. It had a limit of only 256 colors which were not enough to create sharp looking photos.

The next student quickly called me over and asked me why the photo she just converted to the Monochrome BMP  format was now black and white. I quickly told her and the class that this was exactly what Monochrome BMP format was supposed to do.

Still another student called me to her workstation and asked why she could not upload the two .Tiff format images to her Google site to insert into her table. This gave me the opportunity to tell the class that when you convert a .jpg to a .tiff format, the image sometimes gets corrupted and that is why it would not upload.

Of course, most of this information was covered in the chapter in our book but I guess that the information did not hit home until they actually completed the hands on assignment.

So I guess I learned a valuable lesson.  I should never overestimate what my students already know as doing so might result in a missed opportunity for my students to learn new things. I am now more confident that none of the students are going to miss questions about these topics during the midterm exam.