“Make it a good one.” He always says this right before we hang up the phone. I talk to my Dad almost everyday. During the COVID-19 pandemic we logged many hours discussing everything under the sun. I told him that I was struggling with how to best shift from face-to-face teaching to a virtual format. My child development students were out in the field serving children and their families when the rug was pulled from under all of us around St. Patrick’s Day of 2020. For safety reasons during the global health crisis, people were quarantined and social isolation became the new norm.

Students and I learned together how to do fieldwork when being in person was no longer an option. Trying to finish up the semester with high quality learning experiences for my students was my first priority (as shared here in a blog I wrote April 2020 - click here if you want to read it). The pivot was something we did together. We were not alone. The most magnificent community partners, like cooperating professionals who were supervising our college students, partnered with us. So many new and different field activities were explored. One of them was creating digital content for children and families. That is how we started.

I learned what our early childhood programs were doing and I brought it back to my practicum students and encouraged them to consider creating digital content too, if it fit their practicum placement. My friends at the Seminole County Early Learning Coalition invited my students and me to create videos reading picture books that they could share with families.

The first video I made for them was me singing, The More We Get Together, and then reading a story about routines like brushing teeth. Not my best performance, but heck that’s how we learn from experience. Right?! Rita Mae Brown said, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” My second video was using the same format, but this time instead of doing it indoors I took the show on the road and recorded the video in my backyard.

My reasoning for moving the location of the video outside was that I wanted to show children and their families that outdoor reading could be a fun activity. Bring your books outside! I cringe just a little when I watch that video and hear the garbage truck in my neighborhood.

The Early Learning Coalition invitation inspired me in other ways too. I had been creating audio podcasts for BUTTERCUP. I still was making the audio podcast, but during the pandemic I started to use video podcast format since I was getting more comfortable with making digital content. However, I had no idea how the consumer was experiencing these videos that I was making. It is sort of a similar experience when I write and have no idea what the reader is taking away from the words I write down. When I teach, I can see my students’ faces and read their body language as a way to monitor their reaction and pace course content. With digital content, we may not understand or know the user experience.

User Experience (UX) is an important consideration when designing an engaging environment. Especially in the case of virtual environments, consider UX. Thinking about what the consumer sees is the visual design aspects of development. In addition to creating a visually interesting aesthetic, we also need to focus on the information architecture and interactions of the UX.

The ups and downs of the pandemic helped me to learn new ways of doing things. I still use the video format for my podcast. I have been learning a lot about lighting, cameras, and sound. Even two years after using this new approach to the podcast, I still struggle and that’s okay. We learn by doing is what Dr. Emer Ring recently said on Episode 52 (click here) of the BUTTERCUP podcast.

During my interview with Dr. Ring, the unexpected happened and my power went out. While she was talking, I quickly used my smart phone and logged back into the video conference without lights and camera.

I decided to keep Dr. Ring’s episode of the podcast as-is and not edit out the messy parts. WHY? I’m trying to model for my college students that on the merry-go-round of life there will be things that don’t go perfectly. Let’s give ourselves some grace. Things do not have to be perfect to be good.

So in the words of my Dad, “Make it a good one, my friends.” And by the way… it does not have to be perfect to be good.