Educ 3412: Computers In Education

Assignment 2. Advanced Word Processing/Desktop Publishing and Digital Imaging: Communicating to stakeholders

• Thanks to UMD's Dr. Helen Mongan-Rallis for contributing to this project

Description:

• Choose an educational concept and communicate it well to your education audience.

Goals:

• Communicate with intended audience through words, images, and intentional layout
• Utilize digital images to illustrate and clarify information
• Critically assess use of word processing, desktop publishing, and digital imaging

Rationale:

• Educators are professional communicators who use various technology tools to effectively and efficiently communicate with audiences.

Instructions:

• In teams of 2 students, decide on an idea/message that you would like to communicate in writing to a given audience within your profession (e.g. students, parents, administrators, other colleagues).
• Make sure that the methods you have chosen to communicate your message are appropriate to the purpose and audience (e.g. I wouldn't choose a very large font with pre-school type of graphics on a handout to be distributed to university or school administrators).
• Explore layouts in newspapers, magazines, fliers, posters, brochures, calendars, and other forms of communication for samples.
• Also consider starting points, assistants, templates, and project gallery formats for ideas.
• Incorporate any variety of the following content items into 2 or more pages of advanced word processing/desktop publishing.

1. 4+ original digital images: use digital cameras and scanners as you desire
2. Modifications of project galleries, assistants, templates, or from documents from scratch
3. A combination of fitting and thematic typefaces, point sizes, and font colors
4. A thematic arrangement of text and images, image boxes, shading, shading patterns, text boxes, borders
5. Document margins, headers, footers, page numbers, and other organizing information as appropriate
6. Text columns, bullets, numbering, drop caps, shapes, auto shapes
7. Line spacing, indentation, text orientation
8. Spelling and grammar checking
9. Other items and effects as you choose
10. A page in your document explaining the following:

1. The purpose of your document and describing the intended audience (e.g. students, school or university administrators, senior citizens, school families, school boards).
2. Why you have created your work as you have. Explain your rationale for your visual effects (including digital imaging), degree of difficulty, and written content.
3. How the technology tools you've chosen help your audience learn about your message. Critique the strengths and weaknesses of what you have created. You should think reflectively about this one. Whatever you argue, please develop your argument with multiple supports, examples, explanations.

Checklist:

• ___ Document is free of spelling and grammatical errors
• ___ Names, sections, and intended education licensures of group members identified
• ___ 2 (or more) pages of product
• ___ Images are original and modified
• ___ Reflection is present
• ___ Assignment is saved as a .doc and a .pdf which which bears one group member's username, section, and assignment number (avoid spaces in file name)
• ___ On due date, submit a copy of your files via UMD's Webdrop 2 system: https://webdrop.d.umn.edu/
• ___ Be sure each group member has a copy of your project saved in your UMD network storage space

Evaluation Rubric