Journal Entry #3

My final project is becoming clearer and clearer to me.  As of my last Design Journal post, I had decided to do my project on lesser known events in history.  Here were my 3 ideas that I planned on:

·                  Abraham Linclon and John Wilkes Booth are in the same photo at Lincoln’s Second Inauguration.

·                  George Washington technically isn’t the first U.S. President, he’s actually the 9^th.

·                  Thieves tried to steal Lincoln’s body on election night in 1876 and hold it for ransom.  What happened to Lincoln’s body after that is pretty fascinating.

Originally I planned on including all three of these events in my project, but I realized it would probably be best to narrow it down to one event.  This would allow me to really go in-depth on that one topic.  Sheng-Shiang Tseng suggested the grave robbers and Lincoln story.  I agree that this might be the most interesting story that could be well told using Articulate Storyline. 

As far as the progress with my final project, I’m planning and laying out the story on paper.  There are a number of interesting characters in this story, including a gang of Chicago counterfeiters and a double agent that infiltrated the gang, that could each have their own path in Storyline.  I think re-living the attempted grave robbery from the perspective of each of these characters would be interesting    For my research, I’m using a documentary on the attempted grave robbing of Lincoln and have also read about it online.  Jennifer Colwell also said she bought the book and said that it seemed interesting to her.  I’m still learning the functions of Storyline and plan on starting  my project since I’m more comfortable with using the software.

Journal Entry #2

             I’m starting to feel a little better about the direction of my final project.  I had thought I narrowed down my topic to creating a tutorial for teachers on how to create a STEM unit.  However, Martha made a good point in her feedback when she stated, “Creating a standardized tutorial on it seems to go against the STEM model, not to mention it would require a great deal of in-depth creation to properly showcase it.”  That was a good point.  Then Dr. Orey got me thinking when he said in class to choose something we’re passionate about, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be something we teach. 

            So I decided to do my final project on Lesser-Known Events in History.  I’m kind of a history buff and like learning more in-depth the story behind the story when it comes to historical events.  I want to stay away from events with conspiracy theories like the assassination of JFK and the moon landing and focus more on facts.  A few ideas I have include:

• Abraham Linclon and John Wilkes Booth are in the same photo at Lincoln’s Second Inauguration.
• Thieves tried to steal Lincoln’s body on election night in 1876 and hold it for ransom.  What happened to Lincoln’s body after that is pretty fascinating.
• George Washington technically isn’t the first U.S. President, he’s actually the 9^th.

I’d like to make it interactive, sort of like the Crime Scene Investigation example.  The next step for me is to get acquainted with Articulate Storyline over the next few days to start to get an idea for how my project will be laid out.

There are definitely some aspects from Krause that I can use in my final project.  I really found the section on Composition interesting, but there were so many rules and principles to follow that I found myself overthinking some of the slides I use in my classroom.  Three major rules of Composition that stood out to me were:

• Principles of Unequal Spacing
•  “Dead-center” spacing
• Alignments principles on pages 80-81 that talked about the flush-left, flush-right, justified, and center.

Although there were a lot of rules and principles to follow in the Composition section, the examples made it easy to follow.  The beginning of the Components section was a bit more ambiguous to me, such as the idea of visual texture.  It took some re-reading by me to understand some of these principles.  Some of the principles from Components that I’d like to incorporate in my final project came from the “Supporting Elements” sections:

• Effective use of backdrops (nice examples on pages 182-183)
•  Linework:  Should only be used when needed (great examples on pages 174-175).