This assignment really put me out of my comfort zone! Though I’m very comfortable and familiar with many educational tools, I am not much of a designer or creator. I began by asking my brother who works for the digital effects industry in Hollywood what program he would recommend for creating a graphic (this was a giant mistake!). He said that since I didn’t already have Photoshop there was a free alternative called GIMP.
Six hours later and many frustratingly ugly graphics later, I decided to utilize the tools that I am familiar with and just go with it!
I started with an awesome Web 2.0 site called Tagxedo.com It is similar to Wordle.net but it gives you the ability to create word clouds and put them into shapes. I had already highlighted the first chapter by Januszweski & Molenda “Educational Technology: A definition with commentary” and was ready to place my key words in the Tagxedo text screen. I gave the phrase “Educational Technology” more value in the text screen by adding a colon and then typing the number 300 (so that it would be three times as big as the key words that makeup the definition). I gave the keywords in the definition the value of 100 and lesser words that supported the keywords a value of 50. I chose a dialogue box as my shape as I wanted the definition graphic to feel like a conversation I just had with my wife the other day at dinner. She had asked me about the program I had enrolled in this fall and specifically about what Educational Technology means. I then created the rest of the image utilizing SmartNotebook.
I’m happy with my graphic though its nothing like what I had first imagined I was going to create!
Januszewski, A., & Molenda, M. (Eds.)(2008). Educational technology: A definition with commentary. NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
EDTECH Learning Blog 