A Bitchy Flibbertigibbet.

I am absolutely tickled pink that this is a real expression, verifiably. The next time I am offended by someone, I will be sure to call them this.

“Slaughterhouse Five” has been on my literary bucket list for a long time now. I have always labelled myself a Kurt Vonnegut fan and, until very recently, I didn’t realize that I was basing that assumption off of the fact that I read one of his books about 7 years ago.

Unlike the other book I (called “Slapstick”), I actually had a really hard time getting into this book. I have heard nothing but good things, so I struggled through the beginning. I must have read page 15 at least 7 times, as I just couldn’t get invested and my mind wandered as a result.

I am glad I did eventually muscle through it, as my efforts have been thusly rewarded.

This book, so far, appears to be about time travel. I am glad that I had no previous knowledge about the content of the book, because figuring this part out has actually been the redeeming aspect of this story for me.

So it goes.

Anyway, I don’t want to give away too much of the story, as I would be pretty unhappy to read a review that gave away the goings on of the book. Either way, at the halfway mark, I am beginning to understand why this book is a cult classic.

Response to Nancy Bailey

This reading, again, is going to cause me to become the cynical asshole of the class and question the necessity of some of this. Nancy Bailey is kind of saying the same thing that all of the other readings have discussed thus far.

Yes, technology should be used in the classroom. Yes, contemporary students respond well to multimodal approaches. Yes, teachers need to be aware of the literary practices that their students are engaging in outside of school (referenced here as a “New literacy stance” with an “insider mindset.”). Yes, this raises questions about the repercussions of the inclusion of these technologies. Yes, which technologies we should incorporate versus which ones we should not is a valid concern.

Ready for the cynicism? Here goes:

In one of my classes, I sit between 2 girls. They are substantially younger than me; it is a depressing and ongoing theme in my life currently. The girl to my right keeps her cellphone in her field of vision constantly. It amuses me to no end because the method she uses to take it out of screen save mode is a petting motion. And she checks it at least 5 times every minute, even though it is on vibrating mode and it never vibrates. I can almost hear her saying “My preeeeeeeecious….”

Ok, maybe that last part is in my head. But she covets the thing.

The girl to my left is even more impressive. She never has less than 3 forms of technology in front of her. Texting during class is an offense not even worth mentioning. One time, while my professor was lecturing, this person watched an entire video about puppies. I shit you not, an entire video about puppies. The volume was off, she was not wearing earphones, and there were no subtitles. No content was necessary, just moving images of puppies. And texting. And Twitter. And Facebook. Fittingly, I am fairly certain that the one thing she wasn’t doing was following the lecture.

While I appreciate the goals of teachers like Carol Olsen, I just can’t get completely on board with the “Spoonful of sugar” concept. I do believe that education does not have to be a boring thing. I do believe that not all children have the intrinsic desire to be educated, and that teachers must aspire to create engaging lessons for things that are sometimes not outwardly engaging. But I also believe that there is real value in muscling through something that is difficult and less engaging. There is beauty in the results as well.

End rant.

Blogger HATES my video, but you can watch it on youtube here.

In anticipation of heart-felt photo albums, Robert Frost, and ambient music, I wanted to approach this project very differently both conceptually and stylistically. As a person interested in teaching art one day, I wanted to do something I have never done before that could be useful to my future students: an animation.

I explored three different animation programs, most of which were quite disappointing.

First and foremost, I learned that this is absolutely not a project that young people should do. Honestly, even as a university task, it was quite daunting. Most websites I referenced suggested 24 frames/second of animation. That’s a lot of drawing for a 2 minute video (2,880 to be exact). To combat this, I did a few things.

1 – I doubled up the images. It makes for a choppier video, but, so long as you find a program where you can easily adjust the frame rate, it can actually be quite beneficial

2 – To take advantage of doubling up the frames, you can make subtle adjustments between the doubled frames. This is what I did for things like blinking, which makes it so that you can get things to move at different paces easily.

3 – I used a white board. This way, I didn’t have to redraw the background for the sake of making subtle adjustments.

To be honest, the time taken to make this could have probably been cut in half if I had 2 people and the proper equipment. Even though the drawing was quick, and the camera was only about 4 feet away, that commute is time consuming when you have to make it 2,880 times while also being careful as to not trip over chords or move the camera.

My advice: leave animation to the professionals. I know that I am certainly retiring.

Now for the software:

Frames: They offer a 30 day free trial on their website, which is enticing. Also, it is the full version, NOT a downgraded trial. The only qualm I have with this program is that it is clearly designed for children, thus it doesn’t let you do much. It is pretty basic, and it actually wouldn’t even allow me to adjust the frame rate to a fast enough pace. So I scrapped this program pretty quickly.

The next program I used, IKITMOVIES, actually looks rather badass. Unfortunately, the trial version they offer is garbage. You are only allowed to open the program 10 times in the trial, and each time you can only work on your project for 15 minutes before it automatically closes. I figured that 150 minutes would be plenty of time to throw together my project, so I uploaded all of my images and began working. They have really cool effects like gunshot flashing and explosions, which I had hoped to add to my introduction. However, I quickly learned that the trial version was not about to let me save/export anything. So this was a massive waste of time.

Sadly, Movie Maker was the best program by a long shot. And I don’t say “sadly” because I think it is a bad program. On the contrary, it is really intuitive. But it is clearly not designed for animation, and it saddens me that I wasn’t able to use an animation program to create this. I actually froze the program a few times because it simply didn’t like the idea of running through so many slides so quickly.

Another major drawback I didn’t like was that there could only be one audio track. I had grandiose plans of including sound effects, perhaps music, and I was even hoping to try making a version of it without the subtitles, and have the poem read. Sigh…

In conclusion: don’t animate.

Barnwell and "Saber-Tooth Curriculum" response

We are at a truly unique point in history. That seems ridiculous to say, as every time in history is unique. But when people look back on this period of time, it will be seen as the dawn of the electronic era. We are the historical transition from the pen and paper to the desktop and mobile device. And as we trek forward into progress through actions of unknown consequence, the issues churned up in our wake will be our signals of warning to the future. The Paul Barnwella article touches on one such issue.

The reason I talk about this particular technological advancement (The use of mobile devices, particularly in classrooms) in such a hyperbolic light is because we are just starting to see the impact it is having.

This is the nature of all development, really: Fast food was an effective way of mass distribution, quick service, and low cost; fossil fuels were readily available, a lucrative business, and made energy readily available; the mass production of entire cities in China was an effective means of dealing with a huge population influx; etc. Looking back these examples, we see how the initial response to each situation respectively made sense. We also see now that these seemingly harmless responses were anything but.

The same is starting to be seen in the use of mobile devices. According to Barnwella:

“I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single-most overlooked skill we fail to teach students.” 

It is true. In our quest to reject the antiquated for the up-and-coming, we have sort of lost sight in the value of foundational skills, like the conversation. I think this is the point being made in “Saber-Tooth Curriculum.” It begs the question: do the benefits of mobile devices outweigh the obstacles they present?

One World School House - Final Post

I know my posts are long-winded. This post seeks to break the streak. A quote from one of the last chapters in the book:

“…it was as if they had been taught, in two different lessons, how to use a hammer and how to use a screwdriver. Told to hammer, they could hammer. Told to put in a screw, they could use a screwdriver. But told to build a shelf, they’d be paralyzed even though it was just a combination of concepts they should have learned.”

Here, he outlines yet another issue that I have also noticed in schooling: a lack of cohesiveness between information and application. He outlines some pretty great ways to approach this, so read this book!

This book ends on a pretty inspirational note. I recommend it to everyone who is at all interested in the field of education. Below, I have attached the web address of one of his videos…this one describes how to add and subtract fractions. Also, I have attached a preview for a documentary that this book reminded me of. It’s called “Waiting for Superman,” and it also touches base on some of the concepts described in this book. Namely, it forces people to become curious about the nature of education, and why we teach the way we do. If you want the full documentary, just ask me and I’ll bring it on a jump drive. Enjoy!

Khan Academy - adding and subtracting fractions

Waiting for Superman

Book 3 - The One World School House

It is appropriate that I am reading this book at the same time I am working on edmodo.

In this book, we learn about this guy, Sal Khan, who was asked to help his younger cousin with her studies. Since he lived far away, he had to use youtube as his way of getting the videos to her. Since they could only be ten minutes long in order to be posted, he had to make sure he kept his points short, concise, and interesting. After seeing the results these videos had on his cousin, as well as feedback from random youtubers, he decided to take a deeper look into how his videos became so popular, and why they are were effective.

He brings up so many interesting points, but I would like to focus on just one at the moment. Khan describes what he calls “Swiss Cheese Learning,” which is this amazing concept that I used to talk to my own students about…but I didn’t know it was called Swiss Cheese Learning. 

In my debate classes, I would always play the devil’s advocate. Sometimes, in my quest to prove the seemingly improvable, I would actually convince myself that the nonsense I was saying was actually something to consider. This concept describes one of those moments in my debate class.

If we look at the current educational system, based on the Prussian model, it seems to be pretty reasonably assembled. Children at any given age are put in classes based on their age group, then tracked based on their ability to perform in academic subjects. Everyone graduates around the time they are 18, ready to join the workforce. Job opportunities are, of course, divvied based on academic performance.

It appears to be a fairly just system.

But, when you get down to the brass tacks, there are a few fundamental issues that we never really question. First of all, why is 18 the magical age that we should graduate? It is something we just accept without really questioning, but it is a valid point. Kids are moved around, tracked, and pushed through the system, and what does the system spit out? People approximately the age of 18 with varying levels of competence.

In this situation, the constant is the age, the variable is the degree in which they are educated.

THIS is what Khan refers to as “Swiss Cheese Learning.” All of these little “holes” in our education are put there by the very institute designed to educate us in the first place. And these examples of tracking and such are the more extreme examples. That is to say, they are easily noticeable.

If Billy took AP English and social studies, and Jim graduated late because he stumbled through remedial math, then we expect Billy to be more educated than Jim. So surely this represents the exception, not the rule, yeah?

No.

As teachers, we see this all the time, yet we don’t consider the impact it might have on our kids. Let’s say that Billy and Suzy are in math 100 together their freshman year. He gets 65%, she gets 90%. The following year, they are both in math 200. Now, Billy maintains his 65%, as he is missing a lot of those foundational concepts from the year before, so building on them proves difficult. She also performs comparably. However, they both graduate with the same NYS Regents diploma, at approximately the age of 18.

Imagine this: Education where age is the variable, and education is the constant…I wonder what that looks like?

Technology #2 - Prezi

Honestly, marks out of ten…I give prezi about a 8.0. It has its pits and mounds, but I can say that Prezi is mostly a good thing. As far as presentation software goes, however, Prezi still has some kinks to work out

First and foremost, I have the same issue with this program that I do with Macs: less buttons does not mean more ergonomic. I am not the smartest man in the world by a very long shot. But having an education that cost $42,000 and RISING…if I can’t figure out how to change the color of a circle in your program, there is something horribly wrong with the educational system, or your program is not particularly intuitive. Or both. Either way, this is definitely a frustration factor that is absent in PowerPoint.

Aside from this, though, it is pretty good. Aesthetically, it destroys PowerPoint. The templates are good, and highly customizable. Not to mention the paths, which are just much more interesting as transitions than the tradition slide format. 

Final high point: It is on the internet, and it is FREE. No need to purchase a program and no need to download a reader. It just works, which is rare in the world of software these days. Also, you don’t have to save your presentation to dropbox, or send it in an email. So many days I have shown up to class, with hours worth of work still on a jump drive, hidden and forgotten in a USB port behind my computer. That threat is gone.

In conclusion, prezi is pretty sweet. A little bit of practice, and it is more than sweet.