Reflections on Creating a Newsletter (EDLD 5366)

Creating the newsletter for the course took quite a bit of planning. I had previously been a contributor to newsletters but had never been responsible for the entire document. Deciding on a topic for the newsletter was the first hurdle, the second being what articles to include, followed by the design. After I picked several topics for the articles and wrote some drafts I printed what I had and took it to school. I asked several of the other teachers to look at what I had already done and tell me how it looked; was the format appropriate for the intended audience, was the spacing easy to read, what articles were good for the newsletter. I also asked other members of the faculty for input on what articles or announcements they thought should be included in the newsletter.
One thing I learned new in this course was the Consistency, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity principles. Proximity, consistency and alignment were not new to me, but I never taught them as a complete set of principles to the students in my Technology Applications classes. Using the CRAP principles in my newsletter made me stop and look at the design in a critical way. I had to look at each page, looking for repetition, alignment, and consistency, fix anything that looked like it needed formatting, and then look again for the design principles.
I have known for quite some time that I am a visual learner first and an auditory learner second. In creating this newsletter, I struggled with what I consider to be one of my personal problems. I would think OK, I am done, would print it, then see something that could be rearranged, reformatted, edited for better sentence structure, etc. I finally had to say, “DONE! I am not making any more changes.” I was pleased with the final copy of my newsletter. I am not a writer and would not want to have to produce one on a regular basis.

Week 3: Creation of Animations for EDLD 5366

The following animation is one that I did in Flash, recreating the logo from the week 2 assignment.


This is the Stykz animation I made for an assignment during week three of the Digital Animation class.