© Graham Larkin 2013
Some of my own experiments in the course behind this website were purely technical, and like all true experiments they had very mixed results. I set up this public Blogger site in advance of the class. This was a way to let prospective students and the rest of the world see a basic description of the course, along with a syllabus and an extensive annotated bibliography. For a while I used it to make announcements for things like class field trips. In the meantime I tried in vain to make the school’s Moodle-based courseware meet the class’s communications needs.
In the end I abandoned the Moodle system in favour of the recently-launched Google Drive, which worked well enough for sharing visual and verbal content. (See here for a sample page.) The next time around I would implement Google Drive from the start, signing up students on the first day and providing some training to bring everyone up to speed.
Pinterest–a free, multimodal online tool for posting and annotating images–was used by me and the students within and beyond the classroom. The class board continues to grow today, with a following of more than 50 subscribers.
It was only halfway through the 12-week class that I began to develop this project description form. As with the Google Drive and Pinterest platforms I would implement this from the start in any future classes.
Permission to post projects on the web was granted by every student by way of this copyright license agreement. I made the current web site using the free Responsive theme, developed by ThemeID for Wordpress.com. Both the host site and the theme developer provide a robust and flexible platform with exceptional support documentation.
In the sections to follow I will recount my work as a teacherdesign producer. Following the classic A&R recipe, I will deal in turn with the steps of finding talent, overseeing production and promotion.
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