Week 3: Digital Images

Gif was created using makeagif. Youtube video:Hitesh Gusani, "Timelapse Butterfly Coming Out of Pupa," via Youtube, June 4, 2012, Creative Commons Attribution,

Original image was taken from Wikipedia: "Butterfly", May 10, 2016, Public domain.

Butterfly Image was taken from Pixaby.com: "Butterfly," April 22, 2016, Public Domain
Other Images: Picktochart

Lesson: Digital images are helpful for kindergarten students to have a visual representation of the information they are learning about.  With these different images, I plan to show students different aspects of butterflies, including: their body structures, life cycle, and interesting facts about butterflies.  This will be spread out throughout the week.  After they have seen and discussed this information, they will write a sentence about anything they have learned about butterflies as well as draw a picture to represent their sentence.

Objective: After this lesson, students will be able to recall visual and auditory information about butterflies to demonstrate their learning.

Application: The design principles from week 1 apply to both my lesson plan and digital images.  Two aspects I focused on were the Coherence Principle and the Segmenting Principle.  For my lesson plan and digital images, I applied the Coherence Principle by reducing extraneous processing by eliminating extra information that does not focus on the topic at hand.  For example, my lesson is spread out throughout the week with different topics on different days.  Spreading out this information allows for students to focus exactly on the days information without overstimulation.  For my digital images, I included information and pictures only relevant to our topics.  For example, my GIF focuses on the metamorphosis of the butterfly from the chrysalis.  This allows us to talk specifically about this stage of the life cycle without including extra irrelevant information.  I applied the Segmenting Principle in my lesson plan by breaking up the information into separate days, this allows students to focus on different aspects of butterflies on separate days.  For my GIF, I segmented the life cycle of a butterfly into different stages, this GIF focused on the metamorphosis into an adult butterfly.  I believe that breaking down the life cycle into different GIFs would be really helpful for students to focus on the different aspects of the life cycle. 

Reflection:  Before reading about access, I would identify myself as a person that lacked awareness.  Although, I have been educated through my education classes on educating those with disabilities, I haven’t had a student with an impairment in my classroom.  Therefore, I never really applied access principles into my classroom.  However, I realized that as a teacher of kindergarten students, their computer capabilities are limited and I need to adapt my lessons and information to meet their needs.  I feel this applied to the idea of access.  I really enjoyed making the digital images this week.  Although, I believe I am tech savvy, I just never had an interest in creating images.  After this week, I believe I will use digital images more often, especially GIFs.  GIFs are a perfect way to show students little snippets of information you want them to focus on without showing long videos.