ICT workshop assignment

After reading the article ‘Typology of Web 2.0 Learning Technologies’ by Matt Bower (2015) I decided to choose the video as a topic for my theme ‘Educational Technologist’ since this is the tool that most interests me in designing and developing technology-enhanced course materials and educational programs that are learner & knowledge centered. 

Last week and this weekend, I was mostly surfing the internet to collect materials about this topic in order for me to create a public collection of these materials to be able to learn and develop my skills in creating, editing and sharing video-based lessons and later on to create a design for course materials package that can be used to help other educators learn how to produce, share and use this tool in teaching.

In summer 2014, I was very much interested in learning how to create e-learning lessons in Business English & other language skills which I have been teaching over the past seven years, yet among all the web 2.0 tools available I was mainly interested and focused on learning how to create and share video lessons for language courses.  

I spent the whole summer last year researching and developing my skills in video production, it took me hundreds of hours standing and speaking in front of my ‘HD Sony Handycam HDR-CX260’ camera learning how to present information for education purposes acting in a professional body language while simultaneously learning voice over techniques and training my voice to be able to record professional audio and video lessons for course development.  

It was the toughest period in my self-regulated learning life, yet I cannot deny the joy and fulfillment I felt once I received professional feedback on my video production skills from e-learning consultants who are experts in the field that my skills qualify for professional course video-production.

While adding different layers to my videos, I came across the Chroma key compositing as a special effect in post-production techniques for creating videos so I decided to learn how to work with this technique. Surprisingly enough, winter 2014 and spring 2015 were very fruitful for me in terms of Chroma keying practice where I managed to build my own home studio for video production working with green screen and Chroma keying effects.

As a result, in summer 2015 I published on my youtube channel two of my videos for Arabic lessons that were recorded and edited by myself using the post production effects mentioned previously. Examples of some of my youtube videos are:

Greetings lesson in Egyptian Arabic 

The Response to the Greetings in Arabic

For this reason I have chosen the most challenging theme ‘Educational Technologist’ since I have already made huge efforts over the past year in learning this technology and for me to be able to utilize the skills I have developed in designing, developing and sharing e-learning lessons using video tools.