Christen Booth

Christen Booth

Christen is a designer, Google Certified Apps for Education Trainer, and has worked at CTL/eCampus for 21 years. She values inquiry and ingenuity as tools for remaining an effective lifelong learner, and is most engaged thinking about how we become better problem solvers. She finds the most interesting spaces are platforms that support user contribution, collaboration, and place-based learning. Christen has also taught the Web Graphics & Multimedia class (CITS F221) for 7 years at CTC, both face-to-face and online. Creative Director | Instructional Designer | Google for Education Certified Trainer | QM APPQMR

Creating Templates with Google Apps

Similar to Microsoft Word, Google apps support the creation of templates for documents with particular pre-formatted layout and style requirements. Templates are a simple–often overlooked–tool for saving time by eliminating the repetitive processes of formatting and layout. Templates help reduce cognitive overhead by allowing users to focus on creating content.

Navigating nonstop news

How do you follow news online? We have so much access to information we can’t possibly read it all. Do you remember the episode of "I Love Lucy" where Lucy works at a candy factory? She has to wrap all the chocolate coming down the belt but it keeps moving faster and faster. The pace of news today can feel like this.

Get to the point using animated GIF instructions

Is it possible to distill instructions to mere seconds using an animated GIF? While reading the Google product blog, I noticed they use this strategy to illustrate new functionality within their apps. These short demonstrations helped me understand new functionality without requiring me to launch the actual application and click around.

Weave meaning and media with interactive maps

Maps are a natural and efficient way to communicate spatial information. More than serving as tools to help us think about physical space, they are useful for visualizing and organizing information within the context of a particular place. Maps provide a concrete landscape on which to present a story tied to a place that can provide visually compelling interpretation of data.

How to use Augmented Reality in class

Have you been playing Pokemon Go lately? You have probably heard about it if you haven’t actually tried it out for yourself. Apart from cute Pokemons, one of the reasons this game is sensational is because it involves Augmented Reality (AR), which is a digital layer that can be seen on top of the real world through your mobile device, which is super fun.

Interactive video

PopcornMaker is a free to use, drag and drop video editor that makes mashup-making easy, even with multiple types of media. This is no ordinary video editor. It goes beyond basic edits, enabling creators to augment video and audio files by layering media resources on top of the timeline.

Using YouTube’s Caption Editor

Many of us use video in our classes, but sometimes we forget that video is a media format that is not as equally accessible to all viewers. Viewers who are hearing impaired will not be able to hear the voices, music, or background audio we include in our video. It is our responsibility to take steps to ensure that we make video content accessible for as many of our viewers as possible.

Virtual worlds

Do you remember virtual worlds? They haven’t gone anywhere, but back in the middle of the last decade, 2006-2009, they were getting a good deal more attention than they are now. Names from the automotive industry, news agencies, music labels, and even universities jumped in to see what all of the hype was about. Worlds such as Second Life, Open Sim, Kaneva, and Blue Mars were just some of the virtual spaces people could walk into.

Planning your Prezi

Prezi separates itself from conventional presentation platforms by breaking free of the linear nature of slides. That being said, how do we effectively take advantage of its unique capabilities? One of Prezi’s greatest features is the way in which it presents multimedia content. It enables presenters to guide viewers through images, text, video, and audio media in a way that highlights the relationships between the information and ideas presented.

Interactive timelines

Creating an interactive timeline can provide perspective on how a topic has evolved, and how events occurred along the way. By using a Google Spreadsheet template and resources on the website,Timeline JS, you (or your students) can quickly create a multimedia-rich timeline.