Friday, June 20, 2014

The Importance of Remaining Agile

As I move into the final phase of the Capstone II class, I'm reminded of how quickly the time has gone and how little time is left. I've tried to be careful to chunk my work into manageable pieces by setting goals of working a little every day during the work week and working a lot during the weekend. Early on, I set up the pages of my website. I knew I needed the following pages: Home, About Minecraft, Guides, Resources (which evolved into "Plans and Ideas"), Videos, and Tutorials. I've stayed with the same ideas for those pages, playing around with the titles and fleshing out the content.

Last week, I met with my client, Frank Barnes. I unveiled the website for the first time. He was pleased with the content and remarked on the tutorials. I was happy with his response and knew I didn't need much more for this site to be complete. As we were talking about Minecraft and the SVSU, I suddenly realized I was missing a very big piece of the website. I hadn't included anything that had been done with Minecraft in the SVSU anywhere (I'll repeat that - ANYWHERE!) in the site. My baby, that I had agonized over and discussed until others' eyes rolled back into their heads, was nowhere to be found.

Since leaving it out for the sake of "being done" was unthinkable, I added another page and a lot more work to my plate. Three more Google presentations and at least one more to go and I'll be happy.

Friday, June 6, 2014

Doing it Right

In the Web Design and Instructional Design classes, we created a number of videos. After trial and more than a few errors, I learned that I needed to write the script for videos. I found that if I didn't have a script, I hesitated, went off on some tangent, threw in extra words and made other random mistakes. I was trying to save time but in so doing, I wasted time.

I learned a lesson and now it's paying off. I've created a number of tutorials for my Capstone and I have
taken the time to write scripts for each one. I don't have a printer attached to this laptop so now I'm actually writing on paper - and I have a callus on my finger (haven't seen that in a while!). I've found that smaller slips of paper work better than a large legal pad - I don't lose my place so often. I've decided that chunking my script works better for me and I have less do-overs. Using transitions when I put the screencasts together keeps it from seeming so choppy. I also try not to be overly "chatty" on my scripts because of my experiences listening to other tutorials. I find I become impatient waiting for the narrator to get to the information I need. Am I successful? I hope so... At least I'm not saying spontaneous "stupid stuff" like I used to say.