Digital Images

Use in the Classroom or Educational Setting

Lesson Plan Idea:
Incorporating elements of last week’s lesson, I will teach my coworkers how to use multimedia artifacts to support training content. They will use both last week’s job aid template and images to teach a specific task.

Learning Objectives:
By the end of this learning event, the learner will develop a job aid on hand-washing using provided images. The learner will put the steps in order and write descriptive instructions for each step. The learner will add captions under each image that describe the image so that applications for readers with low vision will adequately describe the image.

The addition of captions will help users who cannot view the images in the job aid. Captions will also act as another reminder to perform hand-washing regularly. Non-compliance is a barrier to infection control, so captioning performs a dual role in increasing access as well as compliance.

Application

Multimedia design principles applied to my lesson idea in that text and images are combined to facilitate understanding. Using clearly worded steps with images allows the user to learn the skill on their own without extraneous material getting in the way. Some of the specific principles include coherence (limit the job aid to the steps required to do the task), signaling (number the tasks so the order is clear), contiguity (images and steps appear together to promote understanding) and segmenting (breaking the task up into steps).

Digital image technologies in general followed the same path, but coherence stood out in this week’s tasks. All four tasks had a limited canvas to use. It was hard to clutter these types of multimedia with extraneous information. A meme or gif doesn’t work if you are not very concise and on point. An infographic is the distillation of a larger concept. If a job aid is meant to take a complex topic and make it simple, an infographic is even more so.

Reflection

I normally don’t use memes, gifs or infographics in my work since I am focused on online courses. This week has piqued my interest in these forms of multimedia. I can see helping my fellow classroom trainers develop these types of artifacts.
I grew up with a group of blind friends and have an interest in access issues. I have attended conference sessions on how to enable more access in eLearning. I do try to incorporate these concepts, but my workload often limits my ability to make my courses wholly accessible. I will try to increase tagging and keyboard shortcuts in my courses instead of just adding captions to my videos to increase access to users with more types of disabilities.
All the tasks this week stood out for me. I regularly modify images in some way, but not in a creative way like this week. I enjoyed that. I really enjoyed the meme. I redid the infographic multiple times until it felt right, which is my process so I think I will use that more as well. I worked with it enough to feel it is now part of my toolkit. As far as growth, I am spending a lot of time on areas that I don’t do at work. I have to sit with the content longer before an idea comes to me than I do with a work assignment. I am newer to these tasks and am expanding my skills in related areas which I am fully enjoying.

Artifacts

Meme

Modified Images

GIF

Infographic