Blog Post 8

This is How We Dream

This presentation by Richard E. Miller describes writing not with words but with multimedia--doing away with word processors and essays in favor of "composing" (possibly Miller's favorite word) a work that is a combination of videos, articles, sound, film--whatever you may find on the internet. He describes this as something that could replace the need for writing essays or research papers in schools. The only problem, he says, is we don't have a method for teaching this, it needs to be invented.

This is really what websites do every day, though. This isn't something new. I get on Tumblr every day, and I can find blogs dedicated entirely to one thing, with all the makings of the kind of project Miller desires for us to use in the class--videos, news report, images, articles, .gifs, sound files. And these blogs aren't run by university professors or teachers (well, not most of them), but by ordinary people, usually from the ages 12-25.

We don't really require teaching, because we are learning on our own. No one had to teach me--I saw the video and I knew instantly the kind of thing Miller wanted because I'd seen it so many times before. Not just on Tumblr, but on Livejournal, and, so far, Blogger. The only difference is the content is being brought there by more than just one person--it's the effort of hundreds or thousands of people working on one blog dedicated to one specific thing (LiveJournal). Or it's the culminated effort of them finding the information and simply placing it in a spot more accessible to others so that they may gather it all up and put it in one place (Tumblr).

But I don't really think it's something that needs to replace essays and research papers in school. Those papers aren't just written to combine all the information about a subject into a single word document--in schools they're proof that a person knows the information well enough. I could make a multimedia presentation and not know any of it, just scan the information to make sure it's the right subject and put it all in one place. But with a research paper, the writer has to know the information well enough to construct their own re-telling of what has happened.


Blog Post #12 by Carly Pugh

Carly Pugh's blog post almost embodies the kind of multimedia presentation Richard Miller described. I say "almost" because it's not really multimedia. In her post, she was required to think of an assignment that Dr. Strange might assign, and she came up with making a YouTube playlist of ten videos following certain guidelines. Teaching by example (an excellent thing to do, by the way), she created her own playlist featuring inspirational videos about creativity and celebrating or differences and similarities (Disabilities Means Possibilities was my favorite); instructional videos, like how to write an autobiography (which was very funny); and informative videos on some of her favorite authors, as well as a humorous video about one of her favorite characters, Mr. Darcy, and a preview for the 2008 BBC drama Little Dorrit (which I will definitely be checking out, as Russel Tovey is in it).

But as I said, it's not really multimedia. It's two at best, if you count the blog post she put it all together in. One if you're just watching the playlist on YouTube. But I think it's close enough to make no real difference. I think it's a great idea, making a playlist like that, as long as you can get the point you're trying to make come through clearly.


The Chipper Series and EDM 310 for Dummies

These videos are about students in EDM 310 becoming so frustrated with the class their willing to give up. In "The Chipper Series," the eponymous Chipper quits, but after a series of misadventures that involves starting a piloting school and getting fired from various jobs, she decides to join EDM 310 again. In "EDM 310 for Dummies," two girls go crazy over all the stuff they don't understand in the class, but luckily they can turn to EDM 310 for Dummies to help them get through. I suppose the message is, though EDM 310 can be quite frustrating for those not used to doing their own work, and learning on their own, since you can't just regurgitate everything you've learned onto tests for grades, once you understand the point of the class, and how to use the various websites and really become a part of it all, it becomes less like work and more enjoyable.

If I had to do a video on EDM 310, I'd want to do mock horror movie. Start off with a normal teacher, just teaching his class, when all of a sudden something a student says triggers a flashback to his days in college, taking EDM 310. The homework. The stress. Suddenly, everything in his life reminds him of the class. He can't stop thinking about it. He wakes up at night to the ghostly images of tweets to people he barely knows. He thinks of trying to escape, cutting himself off of technology, becoming an old-fashioned teacher who uses only books, pens, paper, and chalk. But it doesn't matter, because it's already infected him...


Learn to Change, Change to Learn

The ways people learn are constantly changing, but schools aren't. 21st century learning isn't about memorizing information--it's about what you do with and how you use it. But schools are still stuck on the memorization part. For schools, as long as you can repeat information back to them a few times, you're ready to move out into the world and face everything in it. But the world is not like that at all. You can't just memorize some facts which you will forget as soon as they are no longer useful for you. You have to be able to find information, make sure it's true, pull it all together, communicate with it, solve problems with it, work with it. But schools don't teach how to do that, they just teach the facts themselves and don't expect anymore out of you after that. I completely agree with all of this, but it's going to take a long time for the teachers of today to get the message, that learning has changed and they're the ones being left behind.


Scavenger Hunt 2.0



1.) Locate a tool that is similar to Twitter/Facebook and provides a social platform for teachers,
parents, and students. Create an account as a Teacher and write a paragraph or two about how
you could use this site in your classroom. Here's my post! (Well, actually, it's in my profile, because I couldn't figure out how to make the post public. I'm still working on that.)


2.) Locate the tool that most likely created this presentation.  Once you find the site, look at the
top right and click Pricing. Write a paragraph about the nice deal they make for students/
teachers.

I believe Prezi was used in that presentation. They have a really good deal, too, for educators and students. For absolutely no money, you can have what everyone else has to be $59 a year for, and you get all the same tools. But if you do want to go pro, and have that extra storage space and have it available on your desktop, you can upgrade to Pro for just $59, when it costs $159 for everyone else. Being and educator has its advantages.

5.) Find a tool to create a poll anywhere and at anytime. Create your first poll and post it here.

PollEverwhere.com has the answer!

Make your own poll voting question with Poll Everywhere

Project 12

Project #11

Project 10 (First Post)

So far in my PLN, I can include the class' blog, many of the teacher's blogs I've had to comment on so far, the creators of the videos we've watched for our blog assignments, my classmate's blogs, and the assistants in the computer lab.

Project 9b

C4T 2

The first post I commented on at Burrow's Art was a collection of drawings done by the students for various projects. Most seemed to be famous people--Angelina Jolie, Biggie and Tupac, and another I didn't recognize--but the other three consisted of a group of three people wearing masks, a cartoonish rabbit's head on a spinal cord, and a shadowy close-up of a person's hand. I said that I liked the shading on drawings of the hand and Biggie and Tupac, and that my favourite was the rabbit head. I liked the detail in the fur and flesh, and the over-sized teeth. They're all amazing artists, and I expressed my regret that I could never do what they seem to do so easily.

The second post was another collection of drawings, this time done for Black History Month. It included such famous people as Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama, and Rosa Parks. This was done while their teacher was away for court duty, and he was very proud of them. I thought they did a really good job on these, and I really liked the Rosa Parks one for how simple it was, yet it still managed to convey plenty of detail with just a few lines--like the wrinkles on her neck and the stubborn look on her face. Everyone did great, and I'm glad they used their art to celebrate the month.

Blog Post 7

The Networked Student

This interesting video by Wendy and Alex Drexler uses humorous little paper cutouts drawn by Alex Drexler to illustrate the uses of a Personal Learning Network. It uses the example of a high school student taking American Psychology whose class doesn't use a textbook and whose teacher doesn't give lectures. Instead, she helps him to build a Personal Learning Network (PLN), which he uses to acquire all of the information himself through various resources on and off the internet. Then the question is posed: why does he even need a teacher? Of course it's because she helps him to build this network, take advantage of it properly, guide him when he needs it, shows him proper communication with experts, and shows him how to recognize a legitimate resource.

I think a PLN is a great idea--it allows freedom for the students to pursue channels of information that really interest them, and will get them excited about learning. That's one of the great things about the internet--just about every single opinion about something is represented here. If you don't agree with something, you can always find someone you do agree with. It's kind of what's going on in EDM310, now that I think about it. Dr. Strange isn't just giving us the information--he's not saying, "Here, this is how we should teach with computers." He's showing us how to access this information, these differing opinions and ideas for the use of technology in the classroom.

I just can't see most high school students being interested in doing this. They'll just want their grade; they won't care about the quality of the work as long as it's "satisfactory," and it's hard to make someone like something when they're just not interested. Perhaps if it could be turned into a competition, or if there was a reward for completing a PLN to the teacher's satisfaction, of if they did a practice PLN on whatever they wanted first before doing one on the topic of the course, the students could be persuaded. It's a cool idea, though, and I'd like to be able to do this with my own students one day.

A 7th Grader's Personal Learning Environment (or PLN)

This 7th grader shows us, in her video, the PLE she had set up for her science class, which she organized using Symbaloo. She had links to her class's blog, her own blog, learning games, sites about animals which she used in her research, a note taking program, and the email addresses of scientists who she consulted with about her "Glog" on the Box Jellyfish. My favorite thing was the note taking program, Evernote, which allows you to save anything from the internet and links back to it so you can give credit. Her PLE is similar to my PLN, in that we both have our class blog and our own blogs in it, and I am now definitely using Evernote. But mine is still growing the more I'm in this class.

Blog Post 6

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dream


"When you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that means they've given up."

Randy Puasch had a lot to say in his Last Lecture, but these four things stood out to me the most. This first quote was from his experience on his high school football team, the closest he got to achieving his dream of being in the National Football League. His coach was riding him one practice, and another member of his team told him that it was a good thing--because when you've reached the point that no one is commenting on your screw-ups and trying to help you, you've reached an ultimate low. I can't just promise to never do that to a student of mine--I have to make sure that no student of mine ever comes close to a point where I would give up on them. It's my job to teach them, so I'll keep criticizing and trying to get them to learn the material as long as they're receptive to it.


"You can do better."

This anecdote was one of my favorites. Randy Pausch was speaking about a course he had taught, one that was brand new, never done before, in which students paired up into five groups and, for two weeks, worked on creating a virtual reality world. At the end of the first two weeks, he was blown away by what they'd created, and didn't know what to do next. There was no precedent for the course. So he called his old mentor and asked what he should do. His teacher told Randy that, the next time he went into the class, he should tell them that they'd done some good stuff, but he knew they could do better. I thought this was wonderful. How else do you push people to do better than their best? You tell them that you know they can do better. It may seem a little mean not to tell them right off that they did amazing work, but it will motivate them. They'll think to themselves, "That was amazing, and he just calls it "good"? I'm going to astound him next time." It will make them want to be better, to give 120%. What better way to motivate kids to work harder?


"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted" and "brick walls are there for a reason."

Brick walls separate those who merely want something from those who are determined to get it. When you can't get past that brick wall, at least you'll learn from it. It's something important that kids should learn, and, while they think they understand the concept, they might be surprised with how little they do. Because brick walls aren't just meant to weed out the weak from the strong, it also teaches you a little about yourself. You realize what your own priorities are when you find your brick wall and determine how willing you are to surmount it. If you want something bad enough to fight for it, you realize how important this is to you.

When I was a drama major, we were required to audition for shows every semester. I was pretty awful at it, and the only way to get better is to practice. Which I didn't do. Theater turned out to be something I didn't want all that much after all, and I realized this when I couldn't get past simple auditions. I've been in plays before, and auditioned before, but it's different when you're doing it in front of professionals rather than high school teachers, and I messed up a lot. I realized it because it wasn't a wall I was willing to work to get past. But this class is. Because this major is what I want, because it will help me along to my ultimate goal. So if kids understood this, they could learn to take advantage of it, to determine what they consider most important in their own lives.


"And that is the best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to become self-reflective."

In that same class in which he'd split the students into groups, he measured how easy students considered it to work with each other and graphed it. Some students were, of course, considered better group mates than others, and when you see where you stand among your classmates in terms of how likable and easy too work with you are, you realize you need to step it up a notch, especially if you're at the bottom. If I could get my students to become friendlier, better people, that would be amazing--because that's not necessarily in the job description of a teacher--you don't have to improve their ability to socialize. And just flat out telling them that they're not very good when working in teams isn't helpful unless you can get them to think about it themselves and how they stack up against others. When they come to the realization on their own, they're much  more likely to try to change themselves.

C4KSummary for February

I commented on a post by Jordan A. from Pt. England School. Jordan talked about how he played Cricket, and how lucky he was he didn't get hit while playing. He also talked about trying to find the ball. He had a good drawing of him in his uniform, next to a bright yellow wicket. I introduced myself and I told him I'd never played Cricket before, and asked him if it was fun. I'm glad he didn't get hit when playing, and I told him I liked his drawing.



I next commented on Riley C.'s post titled LMFAO's Sexy and I Know It. Riley wrote about the group LMFAO, and had some pretty interesting information about the number of charts their song "Sexy and I Know It" has topped. Riley also talked about some of their other songs and their albums, and embedded the music video for "Sexy and I Know It" into the post. I said that I didn't know LMFAO was such a famous group, and that the only songs I'd heard by them were "Sexy and I Know It" and "Party Rock Anthem." The video was interesting, to say the least, and I thought it was cool that they knew so much about the group.

My next kid was Eric P. whose blog post Diary of Wimpykids was about a game in the book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. In his post, he explained that the main character of the story was told to go eat some cheese they found on the ground, but he refused and pretended to have a cheese allergy. Somehow it evolved into them chasing each other, pretending they had the cheese touch. He even drew a picture of someone chasing someone else, trying to catch them and give them the cheese touch. I told him I liked his drawing. I mentioned that I've read that Diary of a Wimpy Kid books at the behest of my younger brother, and I'd liked the part of the book he described. I asked if he'd seen the movie, which I saw with my brother, and said that they're making another soon (if they haven't already).

My next kid, known simply as "5p13," wrote in his blog post I Love Being In Bed a poem about how much he loves to sleep. When his mom wakes him up in the morning he's mad the whole day. But when night comes he's happy again, because he gets to sleep more. I really liked his poem since I (and most anyone) can relate to that, and let him know in my comment. I hated it when my mom woke me up in the morning, but I hate it even more now that I have to get myself up in the morning. If only I could sleep all day and night too. But then I'd miss out on a lot of fun things.

Podcast Project #8