EDTC 300
Contributing to the learning of others6/17/2020 This has been a wonderful class, that has taught me so much and has allowed me to build wonderful professional connections! I believe I had a huge influence on my classmates learning with contributions through Twitter, blog posts and some Slack. Not only was I contributing to others learning by replying and creating discussions but I was also learning myself by developing the confidence needed to gain these professional relationships, and by reading their discussion points to educate myself more. Having a professional twitter account was something that was recommend to me by another instructor but I had not interacted with it before this class. Katia taught us so much about how to use it to benefit ourselves in the education system and one of those things was to build meaningful connections with people who are in the same field as you. During the length of this course we were recommend to make two blog posts a day, and reply to our classmates plus other teachers. I promoted the #EDTC300 about 64 times over the course (there was definitely sometimes I forgot to link it in my tweet), and I made about 77 tweets during the length of the class with many other retweets. I also participated in one #saskchat, I wanted to do more but was pretty busy or I mixed up the time zones. I believe my interaction with twitter had helped gain many new professional relationships and has helped me develop my PLN twitter network. I have also developed so many new resources to help me in my future classroom. This is a screencastify of my twitter feed while in EDTC300 but all tweets can also be found on my twitter profile. I also believe during the length of this class I educated myself and others over social justice issues; #Blacklivesmatter. I did this by sharing resources and tweets that help bring a voice to the movement. In the pictures following below I have a photo gallery of the different replies I made on twitter over the length of the class. I made 45 replies on twitter! Twitter reply video was made with animoto. Blog Comments During the length of EDTC300, we were to make about three blog posts. Two of them were about the discussions in class and the other one was about our learning project post. We were also suppose to try and comment on three of our fellow students blogs. Most of the time I found myself just commenting on their blogs to motivate them in their learning journeys and typically never found anything to correct them on. My classmates blog posts helped to further my learning, and gave me different points of view on the discussions in class. I loved to follow along with my classmates learning projects, I felt everyone did such a good job with their learning journey and we all have so many different skills! I also enjoyed getting feedback from my classmates on my blog posts. Below I included some of the comments I made on classmates blogs during EDTC300. Most of my screenshots came out very unclear, not sure what happened. So I have only added the clear ones to this blog post. I will attach one of the other screenshots for reference! Guess I still have some learning to do with screenshots! Slack This was a new experience for me, I had never used slack in any of my other classes but I overly enjoyed the set up of slack. Using slack as a classroom set up allowed me to ask questions and answer others questions so much easier. There was so many great resources that fellow classmates shared, which helped to expand my learning. I found this more difficult for myself to share as most of the questions were on blog posts and I am on Weebly which I don't believe anyone else is on. This was also many times I was very late to the discussion. Overall I made 8 different posts in the Questions and answers discussion boards. This blog post is a looking into my contribution to others learning, through twitter, blog feeds and slack. It obviously doesn't explain every detail of my contribution to others learning, but I found I had made many different posts and comments that led to the contribution of my classmates learning, and led to gaining professional relationships. I found this class a great learning environment, and learned so much from Katia and my fellow classmates. Thank you all so much for this learning journey! #EDTC300
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Summary of Learning for EDTC3006/16/2020
I hope you enjoy my final thoughts on learning for EDTC300, let me know your thoughts! Ps. The concept map would not allow me to share it as an image with my whole concept map as a picture because it was free, so sorry you have to click into two separate files. Script:
Hi! My name is Meagan Flunder and this is my summary of learning for EDTC300. For my final learning project I chose to make a concept map since this is something I haven't used before and this class is all about trying out new online tools. Before, I start I would like to share a little about me with my connection to technology. I am a fourth year education student taking an elementary education degree. When I thought about technology and social media before this class I thought of it as a personal place, where you could connect with family and friends. I decided to take this class because I thought it would be a great to take to help me better understand the use of technology in the classroom. In EDTC300, I believe the important discussions and learnings' fit into four main categories: blogging, twitter, learning an online skill and contributing to the learning of others. Now lets look further into those four categories; blogging. Before this class I already had a blog that I used in two other classes. Blogging is important for education students because e-portfolio's are starting to replace a resume. Blogging allows you to display your philosophies and past experiences in education such as lesson plans. We had so many purposes for blogging in this class such as learning a new skill and displaying our growth. Our blogs also helped to explain our views about many different topics discussed in class. I highly recommend checking my blog to see those posts. I connected the use of our blogs to important discussions in EDTC300. One discussion was about teaching in the new digital age because almost everyone is connected to social media or technology. And how important it is as educators to learn how to use technology in the classroom to benefit the students. We were also given many helpful resources on digital teaching, and how to adapt technology in the classroom. Coding was a very important discussion as this was something I didn't understand and thought it was too complicated to teach or even understand my self but Katia gave us great information and resources to not only help us understand how to teach coding in our classrooms but also to help us learn how to code. Another important discussion was on teaching about important movements going on in the world. Our main discussion was on black lives matter as we know this is something we all need to stand up and voice our opinions on. We have to help give a voice to individuals who don't normally have one. Teaching students to stand up for things that are important to them helps give them a voice and they may be the ones that end the injustices. My next category was learning a new skill using online resources. I discovered and was introduced to so many useful resources, technology and digital tools to help me accomplish my goal of learning to draw. Learning a skill has become so simple because of the impact of technology to today's world. It was a cheap resource and learning online gave me the opportunity to learn the skill from home, this allowed me to relax and get comfortable. Which could have led to a further understanding of the skill. Youtube was part of our discussion but it also is a great tool to use to help learn a new skill. We learned all about the history and impact of Youtube on many generations. Not only is Youtube an important place to learn a new skill but so are websites, videos, podcasts and more. Learning a new skill online is as easy as typing "How to..." into google. The third category of learning in EDTC300 was twitter; before taking this class I had both a personal and professional twitter account. I was not active on twitter and only created a professional twitter account because a previous instructor had recommend it. Through EDTC300 I discovered the importance of twitter and using twitter as a way to connect to other educators around the world. Twitter is also a great place to find valuable teacher resources. We learned about collaborating with other teachers by using two different tools: Twitter chats and Tweetdeck. Twitter chats are a great place to learn new viewpoints on discussions and to make new connections to other educators. We were able to participate in a twitter chat as a class, this showed me how beneficial they can be to my learning and showed me what I may still need to learn. Tweetdeck is a tool for twitter and the use of twitterchats. I think it is a more cleaned up version of twitter as it allows you to closely follow along with different discussions, hashtags or people. As I discussed in the blogging category, as a future educator it is important for me to use my voice for people who can't. Twitter is a great place to do this, to build allies with movements that need people to stand along side them. To voice my opinions on the injustices of people in our community and other social justice issues. My fourth category is contributing to others learning. In EDTC300 I learned about a new tool to use to connect to classmates. Slack was something I had never heard of before this class. I found benefits to using it and actually prefer slack as apposed to UR Courses. Slack allowed me to find out any information I needed for the class and was a place to share additional resources. Another way we learned to contribute to others learning was using different digital tools such as twitter and blogging that was previously discussed. But when using digital and technology resources we have to remember that digital citizenship and literacy is important. This class taught about the importance of having a good digital identity as a educator and the dangers that come along with a digital identity. We also learned how important it is to check resources before sharing so that we are not sharing "Fake news" to others and so that we ourselves are not believing "Fake news". After the completion of this class my views as an educator on technology and digital tools had completely changed. I know how important having a professional learning network is, I also know so many new online resources to help me better the education for my students. The internet has so much to offer for education, and will help achieve positive changes in this world. Confessions of an... Artist6/15/2020 The class is coming to a close and you know what that means. Time to reflect on our learning over the period of the class. During the period of EDTC300, we each had to pick something that we wanted to learn and learn it through online sources. For my learning project I chose to learn how to draw. I have always wanted to learn how to draw, and especially with becoming a elementary teacher it would be a great skill to learn for drawing with the students. Over the course of the class I found my skills really starting to develop, and learned many techniques to help me from pushing the pencil to hard leaving me with many non erasable lines. Using online resources was something I had never thought of and I'm glad I was able to find ones that worked for me! I believe with the growing amount of importance of social media and technology learning a skill online now is a great and easy thing to do. I didn't focus on one thing like drawing faces but I worked on many different types of drawings to learn many different techniques, what I wanted to do over the period of this time was learn enough about different drawing techniques so I could eventually create drawings without using any type of source. Overview of each blog post ~Discovering my drawing journey For this learning project post I talked about where I was at with the skill of drawing so we could watch my progress over the class. In this blog post I talked about one source that I would use which was Youtube. If you have been following along with my journey you may know that didn't work out the best for me. I used Youtube a couple times to learn different skills or objects to draw but they tended to be to fast for me, and I was constantly stopping the video or I would miss a step. I didn't have any skills with drawings, I couldn't draw a person but I could draw a turtle (only because I have a tattoo that I see every day). ~First Steps & Drawing homework These two blog posts go together. In these two I found a online drawing course called How to Draw: Free Beginner's Course. This course was great and definitely something I would have kept using if we were allowed to use the same source. The first lesson taught about just drawing and not caring about how it turned out. The teacher instructed to cover a whole page with sketches. Teaching about not caring is great because drawings are always something people thing should just look perfect. ~Are you ready kids!? For this one I will let you guess what I drew... You were right if you guessed Sponge Bob! For this week I used an application on my phone called DrawEverything, this application had so many different step-by-steps so I highly recommend it for others! The characters turned out way better than I thought even though I had to colour the pictures in and make the lines darker from how much I erased. ~Talking Photo's For this week we had a blog post that covered our learning project and the weekly post. I wasn't quite sure how to accomplish this blog post because tools like screencastify wouldn't be possible for me, or ones where I taped myself drawing because I couldn't draw while taking a video. So I decided on using an application where I could make a slideshow of my photos and then do a voice over. If you clicked on this blog you would know it failed, I tried so many different applications and when I thought I had finally found one that worked for me called "Talking photo", it didn't. The voice over worked but when I went to upload my video to Youtube it seemed my videos never transferred over! The Youtube video attached was a fail with a previous application I tried also called talking photo. Check out this blog post to see all my drawings of the week with using Youtube as my online source! ~Drawing into the week This week my focus was on drawing over the whole page with one theme, so I drew a landscape scene and a house scene. The resources I found by using google, one was on Youtube called "How to draw a house with a pool for kids", but I didn't actually open the video I just used the picture that shows up on google to complete my picture! The landscape was a step-by-step process from a page called "How to Draw a Waterfall". These pictures weren't perfect and I think that pictures like these were still beyond my skill level. ~Brightening a Gloomy week This week I was not having the best week and I was having a even harder time trying to find something to draw. So after probably at least an hour I finally decided on drawing different flowers because what is better to cheer you up than flowers! Flowers have many different curves and each flower looks different so even if I thought I was starting to understand the one drawing that doesn't mean the next flower would be perfect. The best site I found for drawing flowers was "How to Draw Perfect Flowers in 3 simple steps". I drew many different flowers but most of my post is reflected on the drawing of the poppy where I showed my step-by-step process of drawing the poppy. Benefits I found learning a skill online very useful and thought I would share some benefits of learning a skill online! Here are the Top 7 Benefits of Learning a New Skill. 1. Your brain chemistry changes. 2. Your learning speed increases. 3. You make connections between skill areas. 4. You become a more interesting person. 5. It fights boredom. 6. You adapt better to change. 7. You could stave off dementia. Personal benefits for me was entertaining me while being locked in doors for most of the class period because of social distancing and being able to learn a skill at all with everything else besides the internet being closed! Another benefit was it gave me a break from the world, if I was feeling down or upset about something drawing became like an escape for me. Another benefit was I could sit in my pajamas and not worry about how I looked while learning to draw! Learning online made it very easy to practice because there are so many different resources. Overall thoughts This was a great learning opportunity and I would love to be able to attempt to learn another new skill by using online resources. What do you all recommend I learn next? I thought I did pretty well with my drawings for having literally no skill before I started. My biggest challenge and is still definitely a challenge for me is drawing lightly so if I need to erase something it doesn't still show up on the page. One of my biggest learning was about shadows, I never thought to think about how the sun and casting shadows worked with drawings I would just shade random parts. Now I know that it's not properly shaded unless it matches how the cast of a real shadow, and where the sun appears in my picture. I struggle with trying to make sure I am perfect with everything I do, which appears throughout my drawings with all my different eraser marks. I think this is very important to show people learning a new skill or future students I have because no one is perfect, we all make mistakes and that's what allows us to keep learning! Learning a new skill through a class was also a great experience because I received so much kind feedback that it pushed me to keep trying new skills and drawings. Overall this experience was great, and drawing using online sources is something I will definitely use in my future classroom. I will also use the skills I learned to be able to assist my students in their drawings! “Am I just eating because I’m bored?”6/12/2020 I decided to use The Hour of code, from this website I actually completed two hour of code activities because I was having so much fun with it! For my screencastify I chose to take the beginning of my learning from the Grinch themed coding. For this activity my mission was to move the Grinch past different obstacles to grab all the presents or pick up Max. At the beginning I had no idea what I was doing. I hit the trees many times (which this screencastify is my second take because the first one failed to save) so by my second take I did it move easily which you will be able to see in this video. The instructions were super easy to follow and I think elementary students would easily be able to complete the first couple of lessons. I believe it was around lesson 6 or 7 that I got stuck. When jumping I would jump to far and then land or hit the second tree in my path most of the time. I also would jump over the first tree and then sometimes miss the present. One thing I liked about this theme was that it allowed the option to skip a level if you got stuck on it, which I was thinking about doing but instead of kept working at it until I finally passed the level. Skipping a level would be good for students though, because they may still understand that lesson but cannot understand the controls enough to move forward which wouldn't allow them to be successful.
As I stated in the beginning of this blog post I had lots of fun with coding, this website gives students a unique and fun way to learn about coding which I believe would keep the students interested in the lesson. I believe the teacher would just have to make sure they go over why the kids are using the website, because some kids may think they are just playing games. I also really enjoy Hour of coding because it has so many different themes that many different ages can choose from, allowing a student to find something they like will lead to them being more successful. The ages that can use this application are from Pre-readers to Grade 9 +. While reading the article "8 reasons why every child should learn how to code" I found it very interesting that students can learn how to code without even using a computer which I believe is very important because some students don't have their own computers or some schools can't afford to give every student access to a computer. One of these activities that I found interesting was the coding with magnetic tiles, at the daycare I worked at the kids loved to play with these so using them in coding would definitely peak their interest. This article also links what they think are the best coding application for kids, from using the computer or even downloading it on a phone or Ipad. There is also more than just applications, students can participate in a coding course which gives them real-time feedback from their teacher. If your not sure about bringing in coding to your class room here are the 8 reasons children should learn how to code from Teach your kids code.
I pledge to...6/10/2020 When teaching about digital literacy it is most important as a teacher to have an understanding of digital literacy and how to tell if something is "fake news". My degree focus is on elementary education so K-5. Which I believe is a super important age to learn about digital literacy with many younger children being on the internet today.
Students need to be taught digital literacy to protect them, and allow them to spot out fake news since news and facts is a big part of our lives. Students need to understand that everything has biases as in everything comes from a certain perspective. Students need to be taught to look into where something is sourced from and make sure that the person who let out the news, or article is from a reliable source. A great activity would be to bring in real life fake news articles and ask the children to spot out what is wrong with the articles. Reliable articles could also be brought into the classroom to see if the students could spot out real news from fake. I would of course just have to make sure that these news articles are age appropriate for elementary education students. A very interesting comic shared by Katia was the "You're not going to believe this" comic. This comic instructs you to just stop and listen, it then talks through different history facts and says they are wrong and then states a counter argument with links to different sources that support this argument. This comic really gets your brain thinking about what we can trust, as you might not click into the sources the first time but another argument may make you click into the sources because it is something you strongly disagree with. But we have to know that sources are not always real, there are many fake sources. We need to be able to "Stop, to listen and to change (The oatmeal)". Which I believe is a very powerful quote right now with everything going on in the world including the #blacklivesmatter movement and then Corona Virus. One important article is the "Beyond fake news" presentation, where it states ten tips for teaching literacy, evaluation and research skills. 1. Talk about what an expert is (and in what field). 2. Let students sort real sites. Hoax sites are unlikely to show up in real life. 3. Model openness and willingness to fail. 4. Talk about how sites work, how news works, how clickbait works. 5. Stress vetted sources, but give support for searching in the wild. 6. Be careful with anti-Wikipedia messages. 7. If you want students to use databases, get really familiar with them yourself. 8. Share your own thinking's and findings 9. Add more online nonfiction to your students lives 10. Move beyond the "its for a grade, its what college wants" idea I think there is many reasons why digital literacy is important to discuss with all students, and it may have become a difficult topic with the growth of technology and social media but it is something all teachers should incorporate into the classroom. If it affects a student it is something that needs to be taught! I think there is many aspects that a child's digital literacy can connect to the curriculum such as in Language Arts, teaching the students the correct skills in order to read the articles and then taking it further with being able to identify if it is a credible source. I also think this could connect to the health curriculum because fake news can really affect someone, mental health and online bullying are a huge topic of digital citizenship, and should be taught about when students are learning about digital literacy. Although, digital literacy kind of connects to every subject because students need to know about certain topics in order to develop the skills to know if the news is fake or not. There may be a fake statistic and if a student has a good understanding of graphs they may be able to spot the fake news more easily. I think NCTE is a great idea because of the growth of technology and social media today. Almost everyone has a phone or some type of electronic device that they can communicate with others. Education needs to change as society changes which is what NCTE is working towards with their goals centered around technology. They believe that Active, successful participants in this 21st century global society must be able to • Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology; Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought; • Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes; • Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information; • Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts; • Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments. Brightening a Gloomy week6/10/2020 Its getting pretty close to the end of the class, with only two more posts about my learning project including this one. Drawing has started to become an escape for me, It allows me to be able to just relax after a stressful day. Which was very great for me this week. This week I was a little down, and found a way to relax and forget about the day through my drawings so what is better to draw for a gloomy day than flowers! I found it very difficult to find a topic to draw, I probably spent over an hour trying to find something that I wanted to draw for this week. I finally came to a website with blog post called "Artist Reveals How to Draw Perfect Flowers in 3 Simple Steps". This one seemed easy to follow so I gave it a chance. Lots of these involved erasing previous lines while you furthered your drawing, which I have discussed in previous blog posts that I draw very hard so it is very hard for me to erase something without leaving some marks behind. This is something I have really been working on but am still not perfect at it. Overall I think the flowers turnout alright, but it I did not like the finished sketches of some of the flowers. Things cannot be always perfect though, and I am still learning so all I can do with it is learn from it! I found another resource that had plenty of different flowers; the website is called I chose two from this website "Learn How to Draw". From this website I chose two flowers, the Poppy and the Tiger Lilly. I chose to choose a poppy because I believe that it is something I want to be able to teach my future students to draw since it is a very important symbol for Remembrance day. I found this step by step easy to follow but I don't think it looks too much like a poppy, maybe if I added colour it would look more like a poppy. I chose to draw a Tiger Lilly because that is my favorite flower, my tiger lily turned out really well I think! Idea to take pictures of each step was from Stevie's Blog post.
For this week our blog post assignment was to partner up and digital sleuth about a classmate, I had a group of three with myself, Sarah Clark and Terrell Draude. I looked up was Sarah Clark; before this class we did not have any prior connections so I only had links from her twitter and her blog that we were given access to through EDTC300. When I searched her on google I could not find any of her accounts so I used our connection through twitter and her blog to find out a little about her. Sarah did try to help me by sending her instagram and facebook links to me but I had little luck with most of her settings put to friends only. Not sure if she has a job other than being a student but she is a student at the University of Regina, she is going for a high school math and science teacher. She is in her second year of her degree. She lives in Regina but spent a lot of her life living in Alberta. She has a couple social media accounts that i could find, she is on twitter and has a blog. It was difficult for me to form an overall impression of Sarah as I couldn't find social media accounts by searching on google or other social networking. They do not have a huge digital footprint so it is hard to form an opinion about the kind of person Sarah is, but reading her blogs she seems to be a fun person and has a great understanding of teacher things. So I believe she will be someone that will be able to find a teaching job fast after completion of her degree. I think sarah has recently become an active person on social media (Twitter), but had only became active since the start of EDTC. I believe it is important to keep up sharing on social media, and think about creating other forms of social networking accounts (unless you have them and its just hard to find). Social networking pages are great places to form connections. Also recommend adding more to your blog; like an all about me page. I found this blog post very difficult as I couldn't find any of Sarah Clarks social media posts besides the ones we were given access to through EDTC300. I still had a huge understanding of the impact that someones social identity has on a person, and how important it is to not only make sure I have a good digital identity but that I teach my future students the importance of having a good digital identity. Digital identities are an important part of a persons identity, having a good digital footprint is very important for educators. Being active on social media allows a educator to make professional connections and find professional resources. A persons social media accounts are for more than just connections, they are also platforms that are used to discuss social justice issues and be an activist for change. In the world right now we need to be activists for the black lives matter movement, an individual should not be treated differently because of the colour of their skin. A person is not defined by what they look like. If we do not voice our opinion about issues then we are not fighting for change. In Katia's blog she talked about how silence speaks louder than words. If we do not talk about issues than we are showing our students and others that these issues are not important. If we show our students this than why would they choose to be an activist for these issues themselves. "It’s about participating in meaningful ways to promote equity in networked spaces (Hildebrandt, Katia)". As a privileged individual individual I need to step up and use my voice for those who are not privileged. There may be some individuals who disagree with issues being taught to students or may have a different point of view than you but these issues and movements affect the students as well. It involves them now and they will be the ones who will be fighting for these movements in the future. In the video a Charleston protester is using his voice to advocate for the black lives matter movement. The individual is a black male, and used kind words to try and convince the police to respect him and others as a black individual. He talked about how everyone is family, no matter the colour of their skin. He talks about wanting to understand the police, and meet the people involved in their lives. He is in the middle of his speech about how everyone has bad days, but that we should look at how we are when we are on our good days. The police walk up and arrest him, many of the other protesters than voice their opinion about the police arresting him. One thing that a protester said was "what about freedom of speech". Which is correct, since when is someone arrested for voicing their opinion. Do you think if the man was white that the police would have arrested him too? We have to stand up for our black ally's and help them voice their opinions. We need to be activists for the black lives matter movement. Drawing into the week6/5/2020 This week I decided to draw different scenes, the first one I decided to draw was a house scene. For this picture I google searched how to draw a house step by step and chose one I thought looked easy and nice. The one I chose to use was from Youtube called "How to draw a house with a pool for kids". But instead of clicking into the video I decided to use the google search to base my drawing off of. So I started at the left side of the drawing and worked my way across the picture. The house I found the most difficult to draw because of all the lines, and I ended up doing my sizing wrong near the end of the house so I had to adapt the picture a bit. I also wanted to add my own adaptions to the picture by adding a swing and some apples to the tree. I found I did quite well with copy the picture just by looking at it and then drawing it on my paper, although I made some mistakes and had to erase a bit while working on the house and the pool. Another drawing I chose to do this week was a landscape scene which was a waterfall. This was done in a step to step process with pictures and writing. This website had about 11 different options of landscapes but I chose the waterfall one. The website was called How to draw a Waterfall. It was an easy to follow step by step process but I didn't like the shading technique they chose to use. As it mostly just looked like they were scribbling on the picture but I followed their direction. I think this picture was sort of a fail, as I don't think it looks that much like a waterfall unless you know what it is. Overall I think I had an okay week working on my drawings, but still have some issues with my drawings, that I hope I can work on in the future. Does anyone have any thoughts on other things I can draw?
As a teacher I have to look my role as an activist for social justice issues. Should I as a teacher model active citizenship and anti- oppressive education in digital spaces? I think a teacher is a huge role model for children, and should be modelling good behaviour. This includes how they act on social media, and around in society while they aren't at school. A teachers job isn't finished when they leave the school, they should be always modelling good behaviour and attitudes for younger generations. “Professionalism requires that we go beyond the classroom performance or classroom activity as descriptors of teaching acts to the complete and complex role a teacher fulfills. Public education needs teachers who able to not only shine in the categories mentioned within the classroom but are also able to undertake the demands of partnership with other professionals, of collaborative leadership, and of a wider role within the school (H.Sockett)” It is also important for teachers to model being an active members of society; this means they should be advocating for social justice issues. I think it is very important for children to learn about whats going on in the world because it affects them too, and they may be the ones that will change the world for the better as they get older. Children someday will be the ones that are fighting for social justice issues, so as a teacher it is very important to model active citizenship and fight for important issues such as Black lives matter. One difficulty that may occur is when parents don't believe in the same social justice issues as you. A parent may have different views than you, which can be very difficult as a teacher. It is important to talk about social justice issues and world issues in the classroom but what do you do when a parent tells you not to teach that to their child? Talking Photo's5/29/2020 This week I looked at a number of different Applications and online tools, my main focus was on finding an application or tool that I was able to add pictures with a voice over. So using the Weekly Plans I found the application Fotobabble; the first issue I had was it said there was an application I could download on my phone but when I went to download the application it wasn't available in my region. The second issue I had when using the site online is it didn't work and wouldn't let me upload my pictures, when I went to upload a picture off of my computer I would receive the message "Page you requested is not available". So this led me to search for another application or tool to allow me to add voice over to pictures I had. The next tool I found was a site called Visiblegains, the main focus of this website I believe is around business, as it had a lot of business templates. This was okay, so I uploaded my pictures to the site and tried to add voice over. Well this site did not have a spot to add voice over so it didn't work how I had thought from the description. After those two applications or tools not working I searched up on google "adding pictures with voice over". It came up with many different things, after looking through some I decided on an application called talking photo as it was something I could download on my phone which I hadn't tried yet. So I downloaded this application and I successfully uploaded a picture but when I went to put voice over it was short amount of times like their custom one "It's Time to Celebrate Christmas". The voice over also made my picture move like it was talking. Which was funny but wasn't what I wanted at all. I am posting the video of this application below for a laugh! After that application failing to meet my needs I found another application on my phone called Talking Photo, this application was exactly what I needed. It was easy to use all I had to do was upload a picture and then was able to add voice over, if I didn't like the voice over it was easy to delete and try again as well. The only issue I had was each picture was a different video, which was okay but for this blog I decided to test out another application that I found on the computer which allowed me to add videos together. This Application was called Adobe. Spark, this tool was easy to use and I was able to combine my videos in short amount of time. I found this journey for the correct tool or application long but in the end I found ones that did exactly what I needed to do. Edit: After posting this video I realized it didn't save property and only made a red screen with voice over so this application didn't seem to work as well as I thought it did. This week I focused on shading which I have talked about in previous blogs as something I was never good at. I decided to use Youtube as my learning tool this week and walked three different videos on shading. My first video was " How to shade with pencil for beginners" this video was very helpful in helping me to understand how to hold my pencil to achieve the correct amount of pressure for shading. Did you know you are suppose to hold your pencil from the top, so put your pencil on a desk and then just lift it up with thumb and pointer finger? The author of the video also talked about having to understand how light behaved in order to be able to shade correctly. Which was something I never thought about when shading, but shade depends on where a light hits an object so it is very important to learn about how it works. They showed different amounts of shade by making 4 boxes and shading each one in a bit less than the next or just adjusting pressure of pencil with lines. After I watched the video on how to shade, I found two other videos "How to draw eyes" and "How to draw easy girl drawing for beginners". Both of these were step-by-step videos without voice over, so you watched and then copied what the author of the video did. I found this super difficult, I constantly had to stop the video and move back cause I missed a spot. I was also way slower of a drawer than the video was moving. I feel like for Youtube videos to work for me someone either needs to talk over the steps as they go or they need to have the video move way slower so I could follow it easier. My proportions ended up way out of proportion, so not my best artwork but I can see my growth with in my shading skills. Overall I don't think Youtube is the right tool for me to learning how to draw, my learning needs are not met with Youtube for this purpose. Although, I am going to keep trying out other Youtube channels to see if I can find one that fits my needs. Let me know if you found anything that works for you! |
Photo used under Creative Commons from shixart1985