EDTEC 572 Teach in 5 Minutes
Core Standard 4: Communication
Communicate clearly to achieve professional goals using visual and verbal modes to explain and persuade.

For this standard I chose my Teach in 5 Minutes project from EDTEC 572: “How To Slice Bell Peppers.” Links the project artifacts themselves are in the sidebar.

Context
When I took EDTEC 572 with Dr. Minjuan Wang in 2008, I was still with the distance learning group. Since it was an online course, my Teach In 5 Minutes presentation on “How To Slice Bell Peppers” was prerecorded with narration. As I prepared my slides in Keynote, I realized that I could add some rudimentary interaction with navigation controls quite easily. This allowed my presentation to be also a standalone module, with the user selecting which technique they wanted to learn: fajita style, julienne or diced. In the end, there were several versions prepared, each for different bandwidth and plug-in requirements- QuickTime, Flash and PDF.

Outcome
At first it may seem odd that I chose an artifact about a cooking technique to represent a communication standard. But I am very happy with the simple and clear presentation of each technique. I wanted to have a very clean layout, with minimal text and very large illustrations. I have always been envious the cooks on television who chop all their vegetables with lightning speed, but such “educational” programming seems more about showing off than showing technique. I wanted my illustrations to be large enough that the learner could see the proper way to hold a knife and where the fingers of both hands should be for safety. Using graphics in this way helps communicate the proper procedure and supports the lesson. In fact, they are so strong that the PDF version suffers little from the lack of narration.

Challenges and Opportunities
I wanted the “look and feel” of this presentation to be evocative of the style of Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness children’s books, with lots of white space and large colorful illustrations. I found a set of royalty free photo art that I was able to use, but I needed to set up a photo session for the actual slicing technique (as I could not take the images if I was the one slicing). Luckily my wife was able to oblige and we set up a little space in the kitchen as our studio.

My Contributions
The 5 minute limit really focused my efforts and freed me to be able to use tools with which I was already comfortable. I designed and developed the entire lesson, and the photographs were taken by my wife Joanne Dramko. While other some of my other example projects are more showy, this artifact highlights my ability to stay within a simple design. When it comes to knife safety, the less distractions the better!

Lessons Learned
This artifact serves as a reminder to me of the K.I.S.S. principle - “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” My intuition is often to go towards the wordy and over explain. Educational technology gives us the ability to bring together different media in support of instruction. In this case, the pictures were truly worth those thousand words: show, don’t tell!