Educational animation Educational animations are animations produced for the specific purpose of fostering learning. The popularity of using animations to help learners understand and remember information has greatly increased since the advent of powerful graphics-oriented computers. This technology allows animations to be produced much more easily and cheaply than in former years. Previously, traditional animation required specialised labour-intensive techniques that were both time-consuming and expensive. In contrast, software is now available that makes it possible for individual educators to author their own animations without the need for specialist expertise. Teachers are no longer limited to relying on static graphics but can readily convert them into educational animations. Animations for Education[edit] In contrast with static pictures, animations can show temporal change directly (rather than having to indicate it indirectly using auxiliary markings such as arrows and motion lines). References[edit]
Education Using Powerpoint - High quality PowerPoint slideshows and resources for the teaching and revision of GCSE and KS3 Science and A Level Physics Over 45 Free Speech Bubbles to Make Your E-Learning Courses Talk If you add characters to your elearning courses, odds are that you’re also adding some speech bubbles. PowerPoint comes with the ability to create your own text callouts, but I find that I like to use ones that look more organic than the PowerPoint shapes. I try to create my own. I created some speech bubbles for a recent project so I’m making them available for you to use as you wish. I also added a few bonus tips below. On a side note, you’ll notice that the download links go to the new community site’s download section. Rounded Speech Bubbles Download rounded speech bubbles here. Squared Speech Bubbles Download squared speech bubbles here. Thought Clouds without Tails Download thought clouds here. Thought Clouds with Tails Download thought clouds with tails here. Bonus Tips Organic fonts look great in speech bubbles. Hope you can use the speech bubbles (and the other free stuff) for some elearning projects. Tidbits: I’m in Orlando this week at the Learning Solutions Conference.
Presentation design blog Idea Transplant Amazing Resource for Design Freebies The Complete Social Media Icons Set [EPS, PSD, CSS] Is it time to mix up the social media icons on your website? Try Candy, a new social media icon set from designer Ahmed Kaludi. The set has everything you need to help users... UIcons – Free Line Icons (AI, EPS, SVG, PNG) There’s nothing bigger in design right now than the use of great icon sets throughout a project. Thankfully for you, there’s UIcons. This huge collection of crisp and diverse... Free Photo Realistic Apple Device Mockups Apple Device Mockups are an important part of every design presentation because all these devices look nice and can improve the appearance of every project.
Tutorials How to Make a State Grid Map in R Something of a cross between a reference table and a map, the state grid provides equal space to each state and a semblance of the country to quickly pick out individual states. How to Make Animated Line Charts in R Sometimes it's useful to animate the multiple lines instead of showing them all at once. How to Make a Multi-line Step Chart in R For the times your data represents immediate changes in value. Symbols-based Charts to Show Counts in R Add visual weight by using individual items to show counts. Introducing a Course for Mapping in R Mapping geographic data in R can be tricky, because there are so many ways to complete separate tasks. How to Edit R Charts in Adobe Illustrator A detailed guide for R users who want to polish their charts in the popular graphic design app for readability and aesthetics. How to Make an Animated Map in R, Part 4 In the the last part of the four-part series, you make a longer animation with more data and annotate.
Dear NASA: No More Rainbow Color Scales, Please Dear NASA, The visualization community has noticed your insistence on using rainbow color scales for representing continuous data. This is a plea to you (and anyone else doing the same thing) to stop. On the surface, the logic behind using a rainbow color scale makes sense: the more colors there are, the easier you would expect it to be to see detail in a huge range of data. However, when perceptual issues are taken into account, rainbow color schemes are one of the worst ways to represent continuous data. Colorblind people cannot use them. (source) Now, to be fair to you, NASA, you have been releasing many more images with good color scales than images with rainbows. So, NASA (and everyone else): please keep moving in the right direction and use color scales responsibly. Sincerely, Drew Skau Drew Skau is a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC, with an undergraduate degree in Architecture.
Leveraging Words and Visuals in Training Whether you are a facilitator or a designer-developer of training materials, your basic communication tools are: visuals (static or animated) and words (printed or narrated). Is learning better when you add graphics to your lessons? When you display an effective visual, is it better to explain it with audio narration or with text? Guideline: Augment Words with Relevant Visuals In controlled experiments in which the same content was communicated with either relevant visuals and words or with words alone, the versions with visuals resulted in significantly better learning. Based on what we already discussed, the text-only version was not as effective as text with either of the added visuals (Butcher, 2006). No Silver Bullet As we review research on different learning environments, we will find few invariant rules. Coming Soon For More Information Butcher, K.R. (2006).
Six Principles of Effective e-Learning: What Works and Why by Ruth Clark "For the past ten years, Richard Mayer and his colleagues at the University of California at Santa Barbara have conducted a series of controlled experiments on how to best use audio, text, and graphics to optimize learning in multimedia. Six media element principles can be defined based on Mayer’s work. What follows is a summary of these principles along with supporting examples, psychological rationale, and research." Take any e-Lesson — show it to five people and ask them what they think. Unlike classroom training, e-Learning is very visible. Decisions about e-Learning courseware must begin with an understanding of how the mind works during learning and of what research data tell us about what factors lead to learning. What is e-Learning? Since the term e-Learning is used inconsistently, let’s start with a basic definition. The what: training delivered in digital form, The how: content and instructional methods to help learn the content, and The research The psychology The application
Evaluating multimedia presentations I don’t like PowerPoint. I’m happy to admit that; in fact I proclaim it loudly whenever I have the opportunity. PowerPoint became popular because it made presentations easy, but I would argue that it makes them too easy, encouraging and enabling presenters to dumb down what they have to say, letting the slides speak for them and condensing complicated arguments into simplistic bullet points from which the audience is continually distracted by a jumble of irrelevant images, sounds, and animations. It doesn’t have to be this way — and if we’re going to use PowerPoint in the classroom, we can’t allow it to be this way. It’s possible to use PowerPoint as part of a presentation that is thoughtful, educational, and encouraging of higher-order thinking, that gives students a chance to apply, synthesize, and evaluate information rather than merely reciting it, that opens the door to debate rather than closing it. Four rules for multimedia presentations in education 1. 2. 3. 4. Focus Organization
When Typography Speaks Louder Than Words Advertisement Clever graphic designers love to use typography to explore the interaction between the look of type and what type actually says. In communicating a message, a balance has to be achieved between the visual and the verbal aspects of a design. Sometimes, however, designers explore the visual aspect of type to a much greater extent than the verbal. In these cases, the visual language does all the talking. Cal Swan, author of Language and Typography, makes this point well when he says, “These two distinct areas often come together in practice as there is clearly a very strong relationship between the conception of the words as a message and their transmission in visible form.” To avoid any misunderstanding, let’s clarify what the terms “visual language” and “verbal language” mean. In this first of a two-part series, we will look at the powerful effect that typography has in taking control of meaning. Manipulating Feelings and Reactions Making The Most Of Visual Language (al) (il)