Reflecting on Digital Images in the Classroom

The GIF presentation that I put together for this assignment was based on the multimedia principle. The basis for my presentation relied on using words and pictures to help students learn better than just words alone. My primary goal was to use the temporal contiguity principle and use animations with narration, however the version of Photoshop that I was using did not allow for the input of audio. I later discovered that the new version does have audio capabilities, which I intend to explore in the future. It was my intention to try and place the words and diagrams together on each slide to prevent any non-successive information; however this is not always feasible when working with large images that take up most of the screen space. It was very difficult to navigate through this program, as this was my first time using it. I learned a great deal the longer that I spent working on my GIF file, and if I had not spent ten hours writing my final GIF, I would have gone back and made some changes to the way that I tweened the animation. Trying to make sure that any images I included in the presentation were relevant and not decorative was another guideline of Swisher’s that I tried to adhere too.

The process of locating images for this presentation was fairly easy. After adjusting my settings in Google to only pull up images that were available for commercial use, I found that all of my images were available through the Wikimedia commons website. Each image that I pulled up was licensed to be in the public domain and free for use by anyone. The primary reason I think this part of the project was successful is the nature of the content that I was working on. Most images that are based on some sort of scientific principle can be found in the public domain. I could see this as being a real challenge to find images that are available for use if I was creating something for pure enjoyment or entertainment. Because I was able to pull all my images from the public domain, I see no issue sharing my work through any form of social media. Overall, in the future I think if it was physically possible, I would like to use a digital camera and capture my own images so that I could manipulate and use them in whatever fashion that I saw fit. The drawback to following an idea like this might arise when you are dealing with a topic that it would be impossible to photograph, such as particles on a subatomic level.