technology – Assignment Bank

Is Stoicism Appropriate in Ed Tech?

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I’m supposed to be an educational technology cheerleader for my school district. I’m supposed to champion the unrestrained exploration and adaptation of technology in all areas of K-12 learning. I’m supposed to network with individuals that have an insatiable curiosity and enthusiasm for educational technology in all of its many forms. And yet, the older I become (or perhaps the farther I get from the classroom), the more restrained I find myself when it comes to pursuing new technology.

I feel like the stoic Samurai in Yojimbo, or Clint Eastwood’s character in “Fistful of Dollars” (minus the penchant for violence and gunplay). I feel reserved compared to more fresh-eyed techies that make Kermit’s signature arm flail celebration look tame when they gather at large ed tech conferences. I’m not sure if this is a natural evolution of thought, practice, or just a result of where my professional path has taken me (farther from pure tech, and more towards curriculum and facilitation of groups).

I can’t help but feel like the “man with no name” when it comes to educational technology at times.

I’m quite comfortable with this development, but it makes me wonder if a healthy dose of stoicism is appropriate for those managing and driving the use of instructional technology. I’ve found myself drifting towards celebrating and uplifting transformative teaching and learning practice, regardless of whether it utilizes technology or not. At the same time, I don’t see many educators that have become “edu-famous” for their contributions to the realm of instructional technology transitioning to a more openly thoughtful reflection on instruction and learning in general. It makes me beg the question if perhaps I’ve drifted too far away from my old enthusiasm for instructional technology to truly be effective with it anymore.

I’m excited about where I’m headed, and still confident that I can edu-craft my way to successful use and implementation of instructional technology; I just don’t see it as the end all, be all means of education transformation that I was thought it to be. I hope I’m not alone in these thoughts, as it would make me more than a bit forlorn to be drifting away from so many educational technology enthusiasts that I call friends.

At the very least, I still have ds106, and excellent digital storytelling friends like Michael Branson Smith, to prompt me to write reflections like this with the help of some clever animated GIF challenges.

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My #ISTE2015 Animated GIF Day

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For many years I protested that I had no clear need to attend the annual International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference. From the social media streams and vendor receptions, it has the appearance of an ostentatious event focused on selling the latest and greatest gadgets, apps, and technology solutions to educators. Many of my colleagues and educator friends have protested, “but Ben, the connections?! How can you be missing out?” Truth be told, I’ve been intentional about the individuals that I’ve networked with; I’ve prioritized developing relationships with educators that I have the opportunity to collaborate with face-to-face at state-level or regional events. Many in the ISTE crowds would likely see my actions, and choice not to attend in previous years, as shortsighted, professional unsound, and otherwise snobbish of me.

All of that may be true. Regardless, I didn’t want to attend this major event until I had something to offer to the collective whole. I’ve been to conferences with national scope before, but they’ve all been smaller gatherings focused on specific topics (games, STEM, social activism, etc.) and I’ve played a role in either presenting, volunteering, or leading a workshop. This last year, I finally found a hands-on presentation model that I felt was unique enough to bring to the bigger ISTE table without using the words “best, app, tools, or epic” in the title. On a professional level, I’m prouder than I should be about that.

I’ll be writing about the presentation, and reflecting on how it was received by attendees, later in the week. For know, I wanted to have a bit of fun documenting my first ever day at the ISTE conference with a classic “Animated GIF Day” post! If you’re curious, check in on this post throughout the day for updates.

3:34 AM – I got up at what I like to call “stupid early” and took care of shaving, showering, and heading out for the airport. The last time I can remember getting up this early was for an ill fated attempt to score a Black Friday deal several years ago…looking back, the crummy free webcam I got from Best Buy really wasn’t worth the dark circles under my eyes by 10 am. I’m guessing ISTE will prove to be a much more worthwhile reason for getting up so early.

4:30 AM – I can’t remember the last time I drove down such a lonely stretch of road. Other than a few garbage trucks getting an early start on the day, the road was rather empty. I live 45 minutes away from the South Bend Airport, so I had a nice peaceful drive, caught up on a bit of This American Life listening, and fought the urge to stop at McDonald’s (fast food is not good food).

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30 Days of Work Stats in 90 Seconds

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I’ve written about speeding up my work day in the past. I even took the time to turn it into a rather simplistic ds106 video assignment. For me, altering the speed of a video clip feels like a cheap emotional trick (not that I’m not above easy emotional manipulation).

So I wanted to give 60 minutes of my time in front of computer a twist that would hopefully give it a more thoughtful glimpse into my work day. It also gave me an opportunity to see what I could glean from Google’s Account Activity tool. It’s a terribly useful (or frightening depending on the results) cursory look at the number of emails sliding on and out of your inbox, videos you’ve watched on YouTube, and a few other bits of analytics. In the last 30 days I’ve received more than 1200 emails. That’s an average of 40 emails a day finding their way to my inbox, and while that’s a startlingly high number, I suspect there are many people in positions like mine that would consider that just one week’s worth of email traffic. I dedicate this video to them.

The stats provided by Google, and a few that I gathered myself, gave me the opportunity to reflect on how much time my job requires me to spend on clerical, bureaucratic, and otherwise administrative communication. This communication is the cornerstone of how I’m able to get anything done. While this video doesn’t reflect the much larger amount of face-to-face time that I spend working with students and teachers in my district, it’s the digital dissemination and collaboration that serves as the glue between the joints of physical meetings and one-on-one instructional time.

I’m curious now to look at my data for the next 30 days, to see if there’s a drastic difference between the first month of the school year and the second; we have standardized testing happening throughout October, routines have been established and require much less monitoring to work, and I’ll be transitioning into more face-to-face time for lunch and learns and small group meetings. I’ll have to try and remember to come back and revisit this post, or at the very least, compare the stats to see if I can establish a baseline of what a “normal” workload looks like for me.

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Remix #1: Time of Day from My Window

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My New Appreciation for Photo Editors
I’m not going to lie…When asked to edit an image in Pixlr or Photoshop, I was a little nervous. I have never done anything but a collage. In fact, the biggest difficulty I encountered while trying to complete this task was figuring out how to navigate the picture editing program, Pixlr. However, after I figured out how to navigate, it was pretty easy. YouTube tutorials help a lot, even though I did have to figure out some things on my own still.
I knew I wanted to do the option of Time of Day because the beach picture was beautiful, and I love nature images. Although I would have loved to travel to Jamaica and spend a week on the beach gathering different images throughout the day, I settled on a tree in my backyard. Usually, there is a beautiful sun set in my back yard, but I did not luck up to capture the images on a night that was red, orange, pink, and yellow. However, I still am very happy with the final image.
For those that would like to try this on their own, I hope these instructions are easier to follow than anything I found online.

How To:
1) Take multiple pictures throughout the day and upload them to your computer.
2) Log on to Pixlr, Online Editor.
3) Click on the “Open Pixlr Editor (Advanced)” link.
4) Click on the “Create a New Image” link. It’s the first option.
5) You then have to chose a size. You can manually set the size, or there are some options to chose from. My images were 2448 x 3264. I had to load an image first to see the size. If your size is not set the same as your images, it will crop out a large portion of your image, which gets frustrating. After that, a white blank working box will appear.
6) Next, click on “File” and then select “Open Image.” Find the base image (mine was the image on the far right) from your documents on your computer and upload it.
7) After that image appears, you need to unlock it. There is a box on the right, middle side of the screen titled “Layers.” There will be white box with “background” written next to it. There is a lock next to that. Double click on that lock. You will need to repeat this for all images and the initial blank box.
8) In the toolbar, there will be a Marquee tool, found under the crop button, that you need to click. Then use that tool to select all of the first picture. (You will select less and less of each subsequent image, subtracting an equal amount from the right side of each image.) After you have selected the portion you want to use, press “Ctrl + C” to copy that portion.
9) Click on the Blank box and press “Ctrl + V” to paste that into the working blank box. If you need to move the image, which you probably will move more as you paste each subsequent portion into the box, click on the Move Tool and then move the image into place.
10) Repeat steps Step 6 – Step 9 for the number of different images that you want to include. Make sure you divide out the space equal to however many images you want to combine. Don’t forget to unlock each image that you upload so you can copy and paste it.
11) Last, go to “File” and select “save” to save your image.

Boarder: I then entered into the “Open Pixlr Express (Efficient)” mode, uploaded the image, and added the feather boarder to smooth out the edges that didn’t line up perfectly.

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An Album Cover

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First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article is now the name of your band. Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover. Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.

Not usually one for the visual assignments, I saw Jeff McClucken’s effort to capture the essence of his new band, Swiss Emigration to Russia, and succinct breakdown of how to create the album cover and went through the brief process of creating a band and finding an image.

After being introduced to the Dactyloceras lucina – a species of moth of the Brahmaeidae family found in central and west Africa – I went a little further with the image search, consulting Flickr’s the Commons under the search tag for Interesting and found my base layer, which I then uploaded into pixlr.com, an online photo editor that let me add text and diffuse the picture to give it the grainy/painting effect.

Other than not creating a square image – as I believe is one of the requirements – I also think I could have done a better job capturing the essence of my randomly generated quotation, which I’ll share in full here as a fond greeting to my camp and bunkmates, but also an acknowledgment of Camp Macguffin’s initial honeymoon period (I mean, not in Bunk X, but for the other campers):

The only thing that lasts longer than a friend’s love is the stupidity that keeps us from knowing any better.

Randy K. Milholland

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Gleneagle Radio Bumpers

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Though I’ve been something of a stranger in the DS106iverse this time around so far, I have been thinking about the brilliant evolution of the course design – which Jim tells me is (at least part of) the genius of Martha Burtis. Specifically, I think the Assignment Repository is a glimpse of open classroom learning that simply establishes a framework for student/participant-choice and teacher/peer-facilitation that (much like the ds106.us site architecture and aggregation that I’ve written and spoke about before) I am eager to incorporate in my own classroom(s).

Which is where this post finds me, sharing not only my effort to produce a few Gleneagle Radio bumpers, but also a glimpse of the setup in this semester’s group of guitar students, who are able to fulfill their course work by choosing from a variety of assignments across several categories (and, if they don’t like what they find: go ahead and create their own). In addition to documenting their goals, and completed work on individual wiki pages attached to the class site, they are also encouraged to add their work to the corresponding Assignment page to create a repository of exemplars of the various projects, recordings and videos.

As we’ve made a habit of broadcasting from Gleneagle concerts, classrooms and other events, I hope that our school’s three guitar classes create ample fodder for our upcoming shows.

For my part, here are my first forays into the Bumper-business:

Gleneagle Radio Bumper #1 by Bryanjack

Gleneagle Radio Bumper #2 by Bryanjack

Live Presentation from @GleneagleMusic – Radio Bumper by Bryanjack

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An “Average” Day with DS106

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averaged composite of colors taken from 50 recent ds106 images on flickr.

For those that have been sending me tweets, e-mails, voicemails, and carrier pigeons trying to figure out what exactly ds106 is……I’m sorry. It really can’t be explained.

That’s not to say I haven’t tried! However, the sheer preponderance of ds106 means that describing a typical day of one’s participation involves explaining the use of no fewer than 5 pieces of desktop software, twitter, blogging, youtube, streaming internet radio, and live TV broadcast via the internet. I’ve tried the very conservative approach with colleagues:

ds106 is a digital storytelling course, where we get to experience using a bunch of different tools like Photoshop, iMovie, and Storify to tell stories.

Honestly, that answer gets the most nods of understanding from people, but it makes me weep a bit inside every time I say it. So to those a bit more savvy when it comes to technology I can comfortably tell them:

ds106 is an exploration of story telling, media design, and the influence that creativity and design has over our lives and attitudes.

That’s a much more pleasing answer to convey, and it usually does a pretty decent job of expressing to those that are more experimental with technology that ds106 is more of a test-bed for media interaction and creation, not a primer. Still, it doesn’t get to the very core of ds106. At it’s heart, ds106 is an amalgam of ideas, emotions, connections, and community. Imagine if you were, to take a snapshot of all the wonderful moments in your life from the previous year, mash them together into one hazy, swirly image of contentment, and that’s actually what ds106 is all about. Whether it’s the active role playing that occurs heavily within the course, or the incredibly awesome tutorials for creating pretty things with computers, ds106 is all things to all people. It’s not just what you put into it, but the connections and familial feelings of fondness and fraternity that come with going just a bit too far down the rabbit hole with an amazing group of highly creative individuals.

ds106 is a way of life…..a lens with which we perceive the world around us, and while I would LOVE to explain it to you, I can’t; you have to experience it for yourself (although some of you most likely already have without even participating in the course). There’s nothing “average” or typical or regular about the way ds106 takes shape, it is what it is, each and every moment of the day.