This past week Justin and I finalized the overview video and sent out user testing questions to a couple of people to go through the whole process of signing up to creating their own classroom.

The WordPress Classroom is about to conduct a user testing session for the site, this week we have been focusing on the “Getting Started” section to really get people going on how to setup their classroom or be apart of a classroom. We have also been working on an overview video that entices people to sign up and start teaching!  If you want to have input or be apart of the testing please contact Neil Tan or Justin Mahon.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the free Wednesday admission at The Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. When approaching the Academy with Jeremy and Cystyle we were astound on how many people there were, but luckily we saw Lauren and she let us in line, so we could get into the place. We were waiting in line for about 20 minutes tops, which was not bad considering the line that wrapped around Golden Gate Park.

Long Line

Map

Once we got in to the Academy, we got tickets to the 3D bug show and the Planetarium. This was exciting because I have heard so much about the Planetarium and wanted to see what this was all about.

While walking through and observing the many interactions this place provides with nature and learning, there were a couple of multimedia integrations that I thought were interesting.

One: was a kiosk that had a Google Earth Quiz to test our knowledge about how much we really know about our planet that we live on. The sad thing was that we did not get to many answers right, but we took away knowledge on what were the right answers, which was nice. To reinforce this exhibits content there were short documentaries playing.

Short Documentaries about our Earth

Jeremy Interacting with Google Earth Quiz

Feedback on how we are doing

Two: was another touch screen in front of the observatory room that was very interactive, it had video, sound, and really engaged the viewer with short interviews and documentaries of what these scientist research. This

Looking at the many Scientist and listening to their explanations

One place that was lacking interaction was the Naturalist Center, but there were real animals that had been preserved which I thought was great to see and very interesting. A way they could boost the interaction and level of learning to the next level is to have mini kiosks that relate to each of the species or artifacts that are presented with numbers to explain and engage the visitors with audio and video. Maybe something similar to the Google Earth quiz to reinforce the knowledge that the visitor just learned.

Naturalist Center

Human Skull

Skull

Last week after Justin and I presented the WordPress classroom, someone SQL injected our site during the week, which messed parts of our database and main page of our site. This was a huge problem! So, after talking to Justin, we figured a solution to look at what exactly happened in the Database.

I conducted a SQL Dump then took a look at the tables within the database in Sequel Pro. We found out that someone changed the admin email, the path of the home page, and moved certain information needed for the other blogs.

Our next step is to reinstall all of our blogs and information and have a hacker proof site!

For the past week I have been designing the WordPress Classroom with Justin Mahon and thinking of new approaches on how to implement good design to enhance the experience of the whole site. This has been a very challenging and interesting process to integrate WordPress and Buddy Press to create a center for people to start learning WordPress and contribute or to any other topics the users might want to learn. Start your own classroom or become a contributor now! Here is the link to the live site.

[View with PicLens]

Today in class I had the opportunity to take a quiz to see what my preferred learning style was at it was pretty accurate.

When creating this website to train 9 year olds how to perform magic tricks or illusions, I thought back to my experiences with teaching martial arts to the same age group. Teaching to 9 year olds is not bad, but in order to teach them I had to demonstrate katas and to be able to communicate with my students with their lingo, then I would have them repeat the movements by themselves till they remembered the movements. This was practicing scaffolding. Scaffolding is the process of a mentor/instructor demonstrating a process or technique, then the student repeating the steps, back and forth with decreasing instructor feedback, as the student masters the process.

Now, to the magic! I created a site where young magic enthusiast could come and explore magic tools, tricks, videos, and shops where they can buy cool tricks!

Lets get started with some magic!

Multimedia is the use of media and content that utilizes different content forms such as text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity. With all these elements combined, multimedia designers can create rich and useful applications.

While researching this topic of “Multimedia in Learning Applications” I had a flashback on my past job at The George Lucas Foundation and what the whole foundation’s goals were, which is integrating technology into our schooling system and documenting great examples of schools that integrate multimedia within the classroom. My thoughts on multimedia is that it is the future for interaction between human beings and the way we learn how to solve problems or just to learn new studies in general. I have posted a video from Edutopia that goes over how multimedia is helping kids to learn new skills.  While watching this video think of how the next generation of youth is going to be.

Here is another interesting link that I found intriguing due to the fact that it presents great stories on Multimedia Learning, for example one of them was “Abraham Lincoln and Facebook”
view more amazing articles at www.MultimediaLearning.com

Edutopia on Twittering, Not Frittering: Professional Development in 140 Characters:

Here is an experiment using Captivate CS4. It was an interesting screen capture application, but it is only for windows which kinda sucks, but it is a really easy to use screen capture program.

I ended up making a demo on how to upload videos to YouTube to mess around with Captivate.

Here is the Youtube Demo.