I took ETAD 803 during my first summer as an ETAD student. I was extremely excited to take this course for a number of reasons. First off, it took place during my summer break as a teacher and I would finally have the time to dedicate to a course, something I struggled with very much during my first three terms as a graduate student. Secondly, I have a secret passion for multimedia design. I have dabbled in web design, Photoshop, and any other multimedia design tool I was able to get my hands on for as long as I could remember. And, finally, I would get a chance to formally develop that skillset and not feel guilty about spending too much time on formatting or image creation.

803 was centred around six themes: text, web page design, audio, image processing, video production, and virtual tours.  To top things all off, we would create a final multimedia project which would combine all of these themes together into one place.

With the added free time of summer break and a strong motivation to learn more, I hit the ground running in this course. To a large extent, I missed the regular interaction with classmates (not much beyond posting our assignments), but I was thriving in the independence of the coursework.

With a conscious effort to be practical with my final project, I decided to create a resource that would be useful as I ventured into the world of Math 7 the upcoming school year, a course I was not at all familiar with. I knew that I would be implementing some form of the flipped/blended classroom model and saw this course as the perfect opportunity to really develop some of those resources ahead of time, instead of on-the-fly like I probably would have otherwise.

With that goal in mind, I set forth to create something that would engage my students, be a valuable learning resource to them and any other student who stumbled across the resource, and be a beautiful, functional space on the internet.

Although I didn’t get a chance to implement and reflect on the project during the course, it was an exciting class the day that I showed my 33 grade seven students the website. They couldn’t believe that this was something I made and they loved the functionality of responsive design that I built into the course. Unfortunately, I opened a can of worms I should have seen coming: they wanted this for every unit of the year. Had I continued teaching grade seven this year, I may have looked into how to build this project out into something larger and manage it using a CMS, rather than raw HTML and PHP as I had for this course.  I am quite proud of the result and am, to this day, continuing to strengthen my web design and coding skills as a result of this course.

Artifacts

Collection of Assignments

ETAD 803 Assignments (click to view site)

Final Project

Addition And Subtraction Of Integers (click to view site)