Weekly Report and Reflection #10

Hello Again!

This is a two-part blog post, so I want to give you a reflection of everything that I learned from Animoto and my thoughts about my continuation as a Digital Learner!

As I mentioned in my latest post about Animoto, I had a good time using it, but I never went into the problems that I had with that tool. While using Animoto, I found that I would become stressed with the tool because it was lacking a lot of the features that should have been customizable. The text was something that I had the most problems with because it was very inflexible and did not allow for creativity to be expressed. As you must pick your design before you create the slideshow, you virtually have no control over the font, size or colour of what you want to write, On top of that, you also can only fit in a certain amount of words into your slideshow, which I found to be highly inconvenient, causing me not being able to get my point across. I was able to see how Animoto would be convenient because it walks you through the instructions on how to use it and the format is quite easy to follow, but I would still prefer to use Word's Slideshow.

Prezi. (CC). 2016.

I do believe that someone would be able to use Animoto in an educational context, yet I think Prezi would be more useful. I have found that navigating Prezi is much easier, plus I have had professors who have told me that they prefer Prezi. It is for that reason that I would choose not to include Animoto into my PLE.

With that being said, I did learn more about being a digital learner this week because of Animoto. I learned the importance of respecting copyrighted work, as well as coming to the realization of how many images are under copyright online. Smart Copying talks about the importance of understanding what copyright is and you should definitely take a look at their site if you have any lingering questions!

Wikipedia. (CC). 2016.

This week in my Feedly, I found an article from Michael Geist that relates to the constant battle that the Copyright Board fights with the Education Board. I found this article to be very interesting because I noticed that professors were becoming more wary about the content that they were allowed to scan onto the computer. If you want to see the progress the two Boards made, you should check out his blog!



Until next time,
Nicole