You need to make one of these awesome free Spark Pages
One week completed.The fall semester began last Monday. Work-wise, time feels like more of an extension of the spring semester merging into the now. Grad student-wise, we are still in that warm and fuzzy, new potential honeymoon phase.This semester I working on a core course for my MFA, so along with a few friends, we are taking a general education class on Instructional Design (this is for my brother Mark – did you just sigh upon reading this? I was looking for the right moment to share this with you, and well, I guess, here it is). I am very fortunate that there are two instructional designers in my world – my brother and my dear neighbor friend John. Just imagine all the potential fun dinnertime conversations as I spend the next three months immersed in this topic.What I did not fully fathom about this class is its roots in design thinking, the other MFA program at Radford University. Ken and I often speculate on what exactly is design thinking. We asked friends in the program and the definition seemed ethereal, much like my transpersonal degree.As my current assignment compared and contrasted the Stanford model and Design Thinking for Educators model, design thinking turns out to be similar to how we execute our design or photography projects (in the commercial world – my art is less altruistic). It is human-centered design that strives for meaningful, out-of-the-box solutions to challenges. Now before you tear my definition apart, please keep in mind these are my thoughts after just a little reading.Now here is what I really want to share about this first week. Since this is an online course, the professor found an interesting way for us to introduce ourselves. He had us answer a series of questions and make an Adobe Spark Page in response. This is more or less a social media tool or one page webpage. And its free.Adobe Spark pages are super simple to produce, possibly because they offer only a few choices. There are limited themes, fonts, and ways to present your material, but it looks great at the end of the process and seems very easy to use.Do you have a Spark page? If so, please share it in the comment section (scroll down). How would you use one?
Now I am off to see what my classmates have created with theirs.