I used twice as many slides as I would for a face to face presentation

The more words on your slide, the more time the audience will spend reading (and not paying attention to you).

 At the end of the school year, when he asked his students how many of them were writers, ninety-nine percent of them said, “Yes”.  His students had been given something that INSPIRED them.

He found that not one of his students struggled with this writing prompt.

Students were asked to describe a “place” and were given several questions that they had to answer about that place:

I also remember a teacher in 7th grade that showed me how to write about what inspired me.  

We want our students to write.  We need them to understand the mechanics.  We want our students to find their voice.  We need them to be inspired.

The article then goes on to say that law enforcement officers need to be trained to look for the signs of animal/child abuse when investigating a domestic violence case in an effort to reduce animal cruelty.

Their goal was to help educate people from being unintentional animal abusers by ways of neglect.

I am appalled at the way our society has created this disadvantage but even more upset that I am inadvertently part of the problem. I am not blatantly racist but I am white and I take comfort in the things that give me an advantage over someone of color. I want to be part of the solution and not the problem. Where to begin is the question?

The term cruelty appears to be the catch all term that encompasses all animal abuse, neglect, fighting, abandonment and veterinary practice without a license.

We are unaware/unwilling to admit to the ways in which we have advantages based on our skin color.

When I think about all that is going on in our country right now, I am in awe of the issues.

That got me thinking though because in the state of Washington is rains mainly in the winter and only snows once maybe twice a year where we live.

One major change I would make would be to include some parts in there where a person comes on and explains each season in a bit more detail.

After the video we went outside and talked about how sunny it is and that it is summer time.

Referencing my reading this week, I feel like the video was more of a ‘surface learning’ experience because it had a lot of repetition and I think she more got what the words were to match to the picture of the season instead of understanding exactly what seasons are.

It is about as easy as explain what noise a giraffe makes.

video called Seasons Song Video that had a fun tune and explained each seasons pretty basically

For my digital storytelling critique this week I wanted to try to find a video about the seasons that I could show my daughter.

The technology is easy enough, and l was pleased to see that even Whalen used the program to chart color change over a period of Van Gogh's work, it gives yet another interesting aspect to talk about in art fused with 21st c skills and technology.

The quickness of the program and the multiple outputs allows the user to make meaning and understand the program by just playing around a bit. 

Whalen uses terminology that is easy to connect to and offers explanation for those that are not, making decoding and using quite easy.

The creator created the site because there was not a user friendly site available,

focusing on questions of what is made visible, who sees what, how seeing, knowing and power are interrelated

but hindsight is 50/50 right! 

While completing a recent Ds106 assignment I stumbled on this web page that takes movie stills and turns them into bar codes, montages and plots.

1. Love and accept yourself in all your amazing glory. 2. Love people you want to love. 3. Do what you love.

There’s less risk just to go with the flow

Every one of us is exquisitely unique and normal all at the same time. Eccentricities, quirks, and personal passions bring diversity and color to a world that often appears drab and full of sameness.

Normal is only an illusion.

packaged

My world fell down around me, and almost overnight the normal world I lived in ceased to exist.

Not my own normal, but the normal that seamlessly integrated into the world around me without raising any eyebrows or rocking any boats.

I told myself that creative expression was just a hobby and wasn’t a viable career option.

My peers let me know that reading was geeky

I listened to teachers who said

I lost my normal.

“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.” ~Maya Angelou

Produce your second DS106 Daily Create

Use Hypothesis and add your first Daily Create as a public annotation to this blog post

Prince George’s County Board of Education (in Maryland)

Normal, seen through the eye of the beholder, is filtered through the lens of society.

ormal means average or standard.

We can look at a society's laws to see what's culturally considered normal, but that doesn't always give us the right clues

we usually decide how to act based on our own perception of what's normal.

This behavior is outside established parameters of what's considered acceptable, or normal, social behavior.

whether the way we think and act is the same as -- or at least similar to -- the majority of other people.

someone who isn't "normal" doesn't match up to what society (and medicine) considers standard.

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that more than 1 in 4 Americans have a mental disorder.

Almost all of us spend some portion of our lives wondering if we're normal.

smartphones can lead to a behavioral addiction that may need serious monitoring and in cases cause depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders.

claims that we are having to manage a broader range of information and communication at work and home leading to more stress.

And what does this mean for work-life balance (my focal theme)?

The pull is learners being networked, sustainable resources created and developed as needed, platforms of learning, participation, and practice.

The push is the pre-determined curriculum pushed out to teachers, the dictated information,

When focusing on how we learn we actually get a deeper sense of learning that can be altered, applied in different situations and expanded upon.

The children I taught always learned the English language way better on the playground than in the classroom.

“If we want to learn deeply, we need access to the means, contexts, and tasks that are integral to generating knowledge, not simply to content transmission and abstracted activities of application like ‘essay writing’”

This week’s Lankshear and Knobel (2011) Ch7: Social Learning, “Push” and “Pull,” and Building Platforms for Collaborative Learning, brought up some great learning theories.

I am being forced by the system to care about my kids’test scores, when in reality, it is far more important to me that they be able to apply their knowledge to life outside of the classroom in ways that will make them successful citizens of today’s world and will allow them to spread what they have learned to others through informal learning experiences outside of the classroom.

This includes the relationships between schools and knowledge, schools and teachers, and teachers and students.

making sure that our students are going to be successful members of society as a result of their education.

(if the link doesn’t take you directly there, the page the article I was reading starts on is 186)

I am still part of a social learning process as the experts who wrote the textbook would only be able to become experts through social learning – that is they must have worked within a community to learn all that they know and apply that knowledge in a hands on, trial and error way, otherwise they could not be considered experts.

can’t put that word into a sentence that makes sense, they haven’t truly learned the meaning and use  of it.

also that they are able to apply and transfer their new knowledge to other aspects of their lives and the outside world.

These ideas presented in this chapter really rang true to me and my beliefs about the teaching and learning that takes place within my classroom.

As always with teaching, she had to figure out how to convey a lot of meaning into a short period of time – again, she had to do this within the time constraints of her class period, as well as in a video that would be short enough to keep the attention of the audience

All of this helped them to become proficient fiction writers.

The other teachers in the video had a similar involvement as the featured teacher, in that they were informing her for her own professional use.

the teacher discusses how she introduced  the concept of blogging to her class and how she got them started with their first blogs.

it happened to be the first video that popped up when I got to the teaching channel!

I am not a morning person, as a matter of fact, I hate mornings.

This video has partially inspired my ds106 assignment which I’ll be posting later this week.

I also think it would have been cool if there were clips of him giving the actual speech mixed in

I am curious whether or not the author shot the video himself or if was done by a third party.

I found his voice to be pretty powerful.

This week I was looking for something more inspirational to critique and I think I found it.

Produce your second DS106 Daily Create

Produce your first DS106 Daily Create

If people turn to these devices without thinking during life’s amazing moments,

A few years ago I was part of a small group visiting a primate sanctuary near Miami. The gimmick was that the monkeys roamed free while the humans were caged. The management set us free for a few moments, and we found ourselves completely covered in spider monkeys who wanted to make friends (friends who had nuts and raisins). Our initial impulse was to pull out our mobile devices to take photos and video. We didn’t even think about it.

In fact, habitual (i.e. less conscious) mobile phone use is part of the explanation for why people text while driving.

makes it easy for us to avoid mundane boredom in daily life.

“In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation.”

Without accounting for the ways people connect in the digital realm through the Internet and mobile media, we have no way of knowing how much solitude people get, how they benefit or suffer from it, or different ways in which it is experienced.

not only for how it is experienced, but also for how it is studied.

“If a person is alone in the forest when a tree falls, but they don’t notice it because they’re texting, does it still count as solitude?”

Since that foundation was laid, times have changed, as have the possibilities for “being with” others.

This is true of both deliberate solitude and those moments of being alone that are inadvertently stumbled upon.

Being alone has many benefits. It grants freedom in thought and action. It boosts creativity. It offers a terrain for the imagination to roam. Solitude also enriches our connections with others by providing perspective, which enhances intimacy and fosters empathy.

Simply put, I am saddened that a message of such import — and injury — was so cavalierly amended to an email between colleagues.

“ensure that you adhere to the content proposed for your sessions.”

Twitter as a means for dissent, organization, and solidarity in a pluralistic society

Whatever the case may be, I am deeply concerned by the need to “ensure” that I “calibrate your [my] voice on twitter to meet the tone of COLTT as to not upset others.”

I invite you to read (and join!) conversations that are both critical of and supportive of the messages I have delivered

What, precisely, were the concerns about my Twitter activity during the 2015 COLLT Conference? Because I have not been provided with formal feedback from the committee about my Twitter activity (and, for that matter, should such feedback be provided to each COLTT participant who tweets publicly? Is such feedback even practical or ethical?), I can only speculate as to the nature of this concern

On the contrary, this message is an explicit directive to preemptively silence my voice and suppress my academic freedom.

However, I have to ensure that this year you 1) calibrate your voice on twitter to meet the tone of COLTT as to not upset others and 2) ensure that you adhere to the content proposed for your sessions.

As the proud graduate of a Quaker college, circumstances like this remind me that I must not mute dissent for fear of speaking truth to power.

Second, I reject the suggestion that I did not — or that I would not — adhere to the content of an accepted presentation proposal, and whether at a COLTT conference or any academic function.

“ensure that you adhere to the content proposed for your sessions.”

“calibrate your voice on twitter to meet the tone of COLTT as to not upset others,”

So often we forget to have our own students reflect on the lesson, and their own learning-we are so busy moving on to the next thing.

In order to improve the content of the video I would have loved to hear reflections from the students themselves on how they thought the lesson went, and what they learned.

If they aren’t they probably should be in order to make them as accessible as possible. These sites obviously limit the ability for people to see these videos.

Someone clearly took footage of the classroom and the teachers interview and edited it all together to make a cohesive story.

The teacher and students participate in the video in the form of classroom activity, while the teacher specifically narrates and reflects on the lesson.

Teaching Tolerance, a website I’ve used in the past, but it has been a while.

Classroom Activities: Moments of Courage:

young child in the voice of Molly Brown.

I would have loved to have known how much involvement Lydia had in the project.

The facts that she choose to include were interesting and informative.

You would need to know how to import pictures into a video creation as well as music and narration to complete this project.  Also, the creator used many fades from one picture to the next creating a nice flow and visual effect.

why the video was created, how old Lydia was, and where her research was done.

Lydia does a great job of telling the story.

I think the children and I will be visiting the museum soon!

some slides or some type of visuals.

I think he used his hands too much and sometimes it distracted me

I think he gives some valuable tips and some things that I will start to incorporate into my work life.

It isn’t anything new but just told in a different format.

I found the video story at YouTube and here is the link; 4 Time Management Tips for Work Life Balance.

This team values work-life balance and after two months I am still keeping my boundaries solid

Also, many overscheduled children are tired and emotionally exhausted, which can lead to illness

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find many studies about how the youth of today felt about work-life balance in the future.

The last thing we need is for amazing online tools to become systemized, bureaucratic and used in a traditional education style.

Once again I am reminded that you can’t understand from looking from the outside in but need to be immersed in order for true comprehension.

This is an enormous undertaking, and will take work considering the generation gap mentioned above.

divisive

do think it will take the generations of people who have not grown up with online participatory culture or even the internet itself time to understand and accept this concept, though.

By using hypothesis, they collaborate and improve their understanding.

In other words, they fell into old habits when trying to locate articles for academic papers.

However, the researchers also found that students require the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned to practical examples. 

In cases such as the Moby Dick example, there has been tremendous success. Instead of the typical “top down” or “read and regurgitate” model of teaching literature, the instructor emphasized the importance of engagement on a personal level. Specific examples of this include the students blowing up a page and adding marginalia as well as imagining it as a contemporary tale of a drug deal.

Jenkins points out that affinity groups (like the ones he describes) encourage learnign and skill development by encouraging participants to expand and even change their roles.

Effective learning is participatory in nature and education will only succeed on a larger scale if we (educators) take an active roll in encouraging affinity spaces both in and outside the classroom.

Stuff I read and What I think about it: Week 5 Reading Response

Produce your second DS106 Daily Create

Use Hypothesis and add your first Daily Create as a public annotation to this blog post

he has been able to encourage a sense of humor and a less self-conscious attitude in the psychiatric patients he sees for a variety of maladies

His subjects were not oddities, he realized, but living examples of people who manage to live with zest and fulfillment.

robust senses of humor

eccentricity is sometimes akin to genius.

they don't hesitate to bring up their unusual preoccupations with anyone they meet.

egotistical

they proffer profound ideas that don't quite operate within the laws of logic

eccentrics are often loners from as early as age 7,

they retain a hold on reality and have insight into their own behavior

he also hopes to familiarize mental health workers with eccentricity as a condition distinct from mental illness.

"out of the ordinary, odd, unconventional."

"The experience has loosened up my horizons," he said. "I'm less worried about what people think of my ideas. More willing to be speculative."

eccentrics have the capacity to bring healing and happiness to people with whom they're in close contact.

that zany aunt or daffy in-law is happier, healthier and longer-lived than those of us who conform to social standards.

ost families have had to tolerate at least one bona fide eccentric

those who have ostracized an eccentric in the past might want to reconsider.

I am pleasantly surprised that open annotation as social reading so seamlessly affords honest expression as acceptable.

Hoffmaca and bjauw’s social reading – their conversation with one another, with Bevelier and colleagues, and publicly before their peers – interjects uncertainty as an appropriate response to the playful appropriation of (con)texts.

And yet uncertainly can – and does – emerge as a distinctive quality of open annotation.

“invites communities of readers into an extended (and asynchronous) close reading conversation.”

The street artist Banksy not only appropriates contexts (such as buildings, streets, and parks) with provocative visual commentary, the content of this art further underscores a subliminal argument – it is appropriate, perhaps even necessary, to reimagine the Queen, or to resist occupation, or to reconsider where (and how) dreams come true.

Kelly’s actions are (to him, and to us as viewers!) entirely appropriate.

appropriation is about making something our own and making it appropriate in a context. Was told (by an English teacher) that it wasn’t “what appropriation means”.

experimentation

That is, through open annotation an attitude of playfulness can imbue a context not intended for play (like a graduate course or asynchronous online discussion) and also a text not intended for social annotation (such as a video or medical research)

As I expected many were for middle and high school students but there was one lesson designed for grades 5-8, that could be adapted for younger students.

I have to admit before taking this class I had not thought much about introducing blogging, or other types of new literacies in the elementary classroom, but I’m really starting to see the value.

I feel like I have discovered so much by reading a peers blog, then clicking a hyperlink they have included, which leads me to another topic I want to research, and so on…

They go on to explain that these varying layers provide different paths for a reader, and therefore allow for a text to be read in many ways.

While reading this chapter I was struck by how much blogging, and the internet has evolved over the years.

advancing your skill set does not have to be restricted to one are

by pointing out the gradual, sectional character of advancements in course-ware

As prime examples of academic blogging, they illustrate the fact that acceptance of the “collaborative” nature of scholarly publishing and the future of education.

They are a new type of text that requires a new type of literacy.

Print resources are “finite” in that they are self-contained and cannot be edited immediately.

Overall, blogging gives credit where credit is due.

the act of blogging acknowledges  collaboration as an inherent trait of human existence and (in turn) publishing.

blogging allows for the development of a much more comprehensive self-narrative.

“private lives in public spaces”, their output  epitomizes the act of expressing oneself digitally.

updated consistently

a WordPress site.

create work to scratch their own itch, but always with an eye for leaving space for future extension and remix.

Each image is complete in itself, but at the same time is framed for remix and reuse in a variety of contexts.

The use of images on the web is actually a pretty good guide on how to make intermediacy happen:

One of the things you’ll notice is that we have often moved away from intermediacy for a variety of good and less than good reasons.

everything from our technical architecture to our file formats to our institutional policies assume a Tempus-like product.

it’s an end to end treatment of a subject meant to be tightly coupled to a course sequence

tweak the environment to make conditions more favorable to intelligent life.

by stigmergy.

the chance of any one faculty member producing their own end-to-end course out of free materials that they stitch together is admittedly quite small,

factory precision

getting the right intermediate forms is of course crucial, as is understanding the previous forms on which you are building

stable, intermediate states.

emergent design

Changes that require these sorts of vast sequences are unlikely to occur.

not about multitasking, but about evolution.

subassemblies.

large stretch of uninterrupted time.

interruptions force the watchmaker to start over again from scratch.

an assembly of a thousand parts, and for the watch to be working these must all be assembled at once