There have been many studies for instance done about girls who believe that because they are girls, they are not good at math. This belief causes them to give up a little sooner on tough math problems, opt for the regular instead of advanced course when on the verge of being able to do either, and pursue jobs in less STEM related fields. It's a subtle thing, but it adds up quite a lot over the years. Now think about who else this happens to. It's not just girls that lose out on opportunities because of this, other stereotypes include those about race and the lower class. Because people think they are not worth giving opportunities to, they do not get these opportunities. Fast forward to high school and you get a participation gap, certain students that do not participate because they don't want to display how 'bad' they are, and by now they actually may very well be bad at the subject because they haven't put in the effort over the years that others have by participating. I would love to see this gap be overcome, but when there is one teacher and twenty students per class (not even considering multiple classes per day) it is difficult to devote enough attention to be able to build that bridge once the gap already exists.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Participation Gap
To begin with, I'm going to give a bit of context on my teaching experience. Thus far I have only ever taught or assisted teaching in college setting courses, primarily in the field of math and physics related subjects. As such I am familiar with students who do not participate, but I'm also seeing them at a later period in life than many here with high school experience are used to. When I see that a student is not engaged is the lesson, it seems to often have to do with the fact that they don't understand what's going on. Whether the lack of understanding is the cause of non-engagement, vice versa, or they both share some common root is something that I've always struggled to determine. I've always gotten the sense however that it's a feedback loop where not being engaged means they don't pay attention enough to understand the material and since they don't understand the material, they disengage from the lesson even more. More so, I don't think that this is a cycle unique to the class I might happen to be teaching. I get the sense that this cycle is one that has developed over many years and they have come to see themselves as someone who simply just isn't good at school. This is something which seemed to be described by Halverson's "Film as Identity Exploration" as a 'narrative' (pg 4). This self narrative is about who you tell yourself you are, which is often influenced by who other people tell you that you are.
There have been many studies for instance done about girls who believe that because they are girls, they are not good at math. This belief causes them to give up a little sooner on tough math problems, opt for the regular instead of advanced course when on the verge of being able to do either, and pursue jobs in less STEM related fields. It's a subtle thing, but it adds up quite a lot over the years. Now think about who else this happens to. It's not just girls that lose out on opportunities because of this, other stereotypes include those about race and the lower class. Because people think they are not worth giving opportunities to, they do not get these opportunities. Fast forward to high school and you get a participation gap, certain students that do not participate because they don't want to display how 'bad' they are, and by now they actually may very well be bad at the subject because they haven't put in the effort over the years that others have by participating. I would love to see this gap be overcome, but when there is one teacher and twenty students per class (not even considering multiple classes per day) it is difficult to devote enough attention to be able to build that bridge once the gap already exists.
There have been many studies for instance done about girls who believe that because they are girls, they are not good at math. This belief causes them to give up a little sooner on tough math problems, opt for the regular instead of advanced course when on the verge of being able to do either, and pursue jobs in less STEM related fields. It's a subtle thing, but it adds up quite a lot over the years. Now think about who else this happens to. It's not just girls that lose out on opportunities because of this, other stereotypes include those about race and the lower class. Because people think they are not worth giving opportunities to, they do not get these opportunities. Fast forward to high school and you get a participation gap, certain students that do not participate because they don't want to display how 'bad' they are, and by now they actually may very well be bad at the subject because they haven't put in the effort over the years that others have by participating. I would love to see this gap be overcome, but when there is one teacher and twenty students per class (not even considering multiple classes per day) it is difficult to devote enough attention to be able to build that bridge once the gap already exists.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Curating Copyright
For this week's prompt, I found myself doing a lot more research on copyright law than I really expected was ever necessary. In the end, I think that what most spoke to me was the Fair(y) Use Tale and Fair Use School videos on what copyright law /does/ allow you to do. Thus for this week's video critique, I will be looking at Day at School, which I found to be cute, but unhelpful. As works go, it was a fun video to watch, and called back to the advertisements of the 1950s, however I found it to be what I would expect for a great contest entry, but not a great informative resource. Disregarding aspects that I just didn't like (I feel like they picked several of the worst aspects of the 50s to model while leaving out other things that reduced the effect of resemblance) in this video they inform you of three things which you can't so and alternatives for what you can do in place of those. These three points were good to address because they're the most common things that educators think are okay, but this really didn't paint a whole picture about what actually can be done. After watching that video first, I was left with the impression that copyright law is extremely restrictive. It seemed like the only things that an educator is allowed to do is show something they've already bought which is directly related to the curriculum, use only /very/ limited clips, or outright make their own content.
Something I found much more helpful however, was http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml which talks about what can and can't be done. Their link to the five major topics provided for easy navigation to important topics such as where the line between stealing and fair use for educators is, the cans and can'ts of fair use and copyright, and how the matter gets complicated by newer technologies. In fact it was in the new technologies section where I found evidence that my use of a song by Kevin McLeod would have likely been okay even if I hadn't found it at a royalty free site with a creative commons attribution license. On a more critical note however, the education world website is... cluttered. White space might not be bad, but they have wasted space on either margin of their site which they could really have moved their content into to give it more room. The navigation bar on the left is a reasonable size, but on the right column is a couple of unrelated tools that take up way too much room given that it's not the primary focus of the website. This page's actual purpose is the article itself and the tool column on the right is almost the same size as the actual article. Worse, the tool column is only one page deep while the article itself extends several pages down into where it is an isolated bit of text with more space /not/ being used than the article itself takes up. This makes their site look unprofessional and like it doesn't actually have useful and important information which can be very unfortunate because they really do.
Something I found much more helpful however, was http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml which talks about what can and can't be done. Their link to the five major topics provided for easy navigation to important topics such as where the line between stealing and fair use for educators is, the cans and can'ts of fair use and copyright, and how the matter gets complicated by newer technologies. In fact it was in the new technologies section where I found evidence that my use of a song by Kevin McLeod would have likely been okay even if I hadn't found it at a royalty free site with a creative commons attribution license. On a more critical note however, the education world website is... cluttered. White space might not be bad, but they have wasted space on either margin of their site which they could really have moved their content into to give it more room. The navigation bar on the left is a reasonable size, but on the right column is a couple of unrelated tools that take up way too much room given that it's not the primary focus of the website. This page's actual purpose is the article itself and the tool column on the right is almost the same size as the actual article. Worse, the tool column is only one page deep while the article itself extends several pages down into where it is an isolated bit of text with more space /not/ being used than the article itself takes up. This makes their site look unprofessional and like it doesn't actually have useful and important information which can be very unfortunate because they really do.
Friday, February 24, 2017
Mini Art School Part 4
I definitely had a lot of fun with the 60 second video which you can see below. Also I can authoritatively say that while it's a huge pain to learn and it takes much longer to export files, I am super way more happy with Lightworks than I was with Filmora. Though seriously, it takes a very long time to export files. That's the main reason I'm posting this so late, some things popped up in the exported file that I had to go back and edit before re-exporting... several times. But since I'm really happy with the end result it's all good. (Edit: Ahahaha... so it does not take super long to export. I was just exporting 29 minutes of blankness which meant a 30 minute video over and over and over again. *facepalms*)
As for my story board, I'm still working on that, but it goes something like the following:
1. People looking at a swingset thoughtfully, titled, "Finding something interesting to examine"
2. People jumping from the swings with a tape measure on the ground. "Observational Experiments"
3. People with pen and paper. "Form a Hypothesis."
4. People strapping on padding and weights. "Design an Experiment to Test Hypothesis"
5. Nailing a stake in the ground at a certain point. "Use Hypothesis to Make Prediction"
6. Person midair with large question mark. "Reflect on How Well Hypothesis Held Up"
The above storyboard layout is representative of how the students will be making their projects as opposed to what I will be doing this semester. My end of things is almost a test drive of showing how this could be done for a group. Incidentally, do please let me know if I'm way off base about how that's supposed to go.
As for my story board, I'm still working on that, but it goes something like the following:
1. People looking at a swingset thoughtfully, titled, "Finding something interesting to examine"
2. People jumping from the swings with a tape measure on the ground. "Observational Experiments"
3. People with pen and paper. "Form a Hypothesis."
4. People strapping on padding and weights. "Design an Experiment to Test Hypothesis"
5. Nailing a stake in the ground at a certain point. "Use Hypothesis to Make Prediction"
6. Person midair with large question mark. "Reflect on How Well Hypothesis Held Up"
The above storyboard layout is representative of how the students will be making their projects as opposed to what I will be doing this semester. My end of things is almost a test drive of showing how this could be done for a group. Incidentally, do please let me know if I'm way off base about how that's supposed to go.
Friday, February 17, 2017
Multimedia Project Proposal
1) Purpose/Goals: This project will be for high school students to investigate their phenomenon of choice and record their findings in a digital format.
2) Rationale & Summary of Project: One important skill of scientists is to be able to make your own data and share it with others. As such, students in class will be set in groups where they investigate some phenomenon of science of choice and share their findings including data of their results, video of their experiment, and a writeup on a blog.
3) Audience: My audience is high school physics students. They'll probably already be familiar with many technological tools already, and at the end they'll give a presentation about what they looked into.
4) Overview of Your Instructional Plan and Your Learning Objective/s: Students should be able to pursue their own avenue of interest and take quantative analysis to come to a conclusion about what their results mean. By using an online wikispace, students can share their results with other students and that uploaded project will also be used to assess that they were able to form a hypothesis, test it, and come to a conclusion about the results.
5) Technological Tool/s & Rationale: Students will use video recorder technology, any video or audio editors they feel are useful, and a wikispace that I'll have set up for them to upload their projects.
6) Learning Theories/Principles: Using the Next Generation Science Standards, this project will support cross cutting concepts of 1. Patterns and 2. Cause and Effect. In the 21st Century Skills, this will assess Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Collaborating, Communicating, and Technology Literacy.
7) Timeline: This would be a project which takes place over roughly a month. In the first week students would give a suggestion about what they would like to investigate. I'll consult with them about the appropriateness of their project and help them come up with alternate ideas giving them a week to conduct their preliminary experiments which they'll use and analyze to make a hypothesis about the patterns they've seen. Following that I'll give a bit of a buffer so I can look over their results and give feedback while students look at each other's posts, suggesting critical tests which might disprove the hypothesis or put it to a real test. In the final week, students will choose one suggested test or make their own and make a prediction about what will happen according to their formed hypothesis. Finally after actually performing the experiment which they should record and post online, they'll decide if their hypothesis actually held up or if they disproved their original hypothesis.
List of 21st Century Skills can be found here: https://k12.thoughtfullearning.com/FAQ/what-are-21st-century-skills
NGSS Crosscutting Concepts: http://ngss.nsta.org/CrosscuttingConceptsFull.aspx
NGSS Core Standards may apply depending on project chosen.
2) Rationale & Summary of Project: One important skill of scientists is to be able to make your own data and share it with others. As such, students in class will be set in groups where they investigate some phenomenon of science of choice and share their findings including data of their results, video of their experiment, and a writeup on a blog.
3) Audience: My audience is high school physics students. They'll probably already be familiar with many technological tools already, and at the end they'll give a presentation about what they looked into.
4) Overview of Your Instructional Plan and Your Learning Objective/s: Students should be able to pursue their own avenue of interest and take quantative analysis to come to a conclusion about what their results mean. By using an online wikispace, students can share their results with other students and that uploaded project will also be used to assess that they were able to form a hypothesis, test it, and come to a conclusion about the results.
5) Technological Tool/s & Rationale: Students will use video recorder technology, any video or audio editors they feel are useful, and a wikispace that I'll have set up for them to upload their projects.
6) Learning Theories/Principles: Using the Next Generation Science Standards, this project will support cross cutting concepts of 1. Patterns and 2. Cause and Effect. In the 21st Century Skills, this will assess Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Collaborating, Communicating, and Technology Literacy.
7) Timeline: This would be a project which takes place over roughly a month. In the first week students would give a suggestion about what they would like to investigate. I'll consult with them about the appropriateness of their project and help them come up with alternate ideas giving them a week to conduct their preliminary experiments which they'll use and analyze to make a hypothesis about the patterns they've seen. Following that I'll give a bit of a buffer so I can look over their results and give feedback while students look at each other's posts, suggesting critical tests which might disprove the hypothesis or put it to a real test. In the final week, students will choose one suggested test or make their own and make a prediction about what will happen according to their formed hypothesis. Finally after actually performing the experiment which they should record and post online, they'll decide if their hypothesis actually held up or if they disproved their original hypothesis.
List of 21st Century Skills can be found here: https://k12.thoughtfullearning.com/FAQ/what-are-21st-century-skills
NGSS Crosscutting Concepts: http://ngss.nsta.org/CrosscuttingConceptsFull.aspx
NGSS Core Standards may apply depending on project chosen.
Mini Art School Part 3
For
this week's art school, I picked exercises from Color Echo and Thematic
Agreement. For the second of these, the task was to create a book cover
for something called 'Flirting with the Bully'. The theme, age group,
etc was completely up to us and I decided to try subverting the
expectations a bit with this. Instead of 'flirt' as in romance, I opted
instead for a takeoff of 'flirting with death'. In my mind's eye, this
book is about a teen who has frustrations in his life and ends up taking
them out his peers who don't deserve it. This person finds himself
walking down a line towards being a person that he doesn't like, but at
the same time he can't quite stop himself. I thought this picture on the
right had a lot of promise, so I cropped it to focus only on the
skateboarder. This worked perfectly for what I wanted by not showing the
person's face, the person departing from the viewer, and the prominent
display of his shadow or 'darker side'. This book is an urban look at
some of the darker themes of growing up. It's not a fluffy look so for
the wording I chose simple black with thick lettering. The fonting on
the lower case ls keep it from being too boring and the author's name is
completely overshadowed by the title. It felt like it needed just a bit
more than that though so I added a quip in a lower corner. Just to make
sure, I tried showing this blindly to a couple of people with the
prompt 'if you saw a book like this and didn't know the summary, what
would you think its about?' and they all more or less came up with what I
was going for which I consider to be a big success.
The
other two prompts were the mandatory crop and Color Echo. You can see
the results of the cropping at the bottom which I'm happy with but don't
have much to say about. Color Echo was about taking an image and
selecting colors from it to use as a background. You can see how I
progress from left to right. I'm much happier with the right most
version since that's where I realized I could accentuate the swirling
parts of the bottles with ovals. For the cropping I did some mixes
between medium far and close shots and posed them all together. I saved
them in a .gif with a transparent background, but it seems this blog
doesn't like those. I will continue to struggle with the white
backgrounds on this blog but in the meanwhile enjoy the corn, wheat,
barley, and other crops.
Friday, February 10, 2017
Mixed Digital Media Critique
Below I review the three tools in order of Gimp, Audacity, and Filmora. I don't know if you guys can tell, but I used Filmora to touch up all three videos and put them into a uniform file format. It's subtle. Add that to one additional item for the 'con' column of that program. That said, go ahead and check out the three screencast reviews below for various tools. They go in order as I actually use successive tools to edit screencasts of the previous tools, but the most ridiculous one is the third. If you only watch one of these, watch that one. On a side note, I only used Audacity to clean up the audio track of the first screencast so see for yourself if it makes much of a noticeable difference.
Gimp (Still Image Manipulator):
Audacity (Audio Manipulator):
Filmora (Moving Media Manipulator):
Gimp (Still Image Manipulator):
Audacity (Audio Manipulator):
Filmora (Moving Media Manipulator):
Mini Art School Part 2
I had so very much fun with this week's assignment. Gimp might be really awkward to learn in the first place but boy howdy was it helpful in making my art posts for this week and you'll actually see me use it in my screencast to start making one of the two following pieces. So first I want to start with the one that took me much longer and that I only just finished because I want this to be the image that the google plus post automatically pulls for you guys to see.
So a brief explanation of what you're looking at up there... I chose the challenge from the Design Basic Index book on page 145. Basically using only repetitions of a simple image that can be rotated and resized, make three images for each of four categories. As you guys can perhaps tell, I ended up doing more than just that because I had so many good ideas when doing the sketchwork. So first of all to start, the simple design that I repeat is the one all the way in the upper left hand corner. Everything else on that page is built out of that one image. The other two up in that corner are other basic images that I thought it might be useful to keep on hand so I could quick copy them whenever I needed that particular design. The right one of the three in that corner I ended up not using, but it can also be grouped with the starburst type designs to its right. In the upper right corner are five velocity designs. You can probably tell that three of them are variations on the same idea but with pointing into, along, and out of the circle they form. In the lower right corner, the fern, flower, and bug are all part of my serenity designs. Honestly these ones are kind of my favorite, followed by the starbursts. Finally the three sets lined up on the left side are all strength based designs. I found that category to be the trickiest to conceptualize and wound up going with 'strength of unity' although the bottom left one makes me think of scales when put upsidedown so that could be an angle too.
The second challenge I chose was from the White Space book in Chapter 7's type related challenges. I chose #6, to make a restaurant menu. I wanted a nice, but not super fancy pizza place so I used Sans type font for the cover while using various Serifs for the inside spread. By bolding menu item names and using a smaller italics for the item description, I was able to emphasize grouping and make things visually distinct. I further grouped concepts by using some free dingbats I found online and you can actually see me putting those in with gimp in my screencast. For the background, I borrowed a few pointers from chapter 8 on color to go with a pizza-ish yellow. Since this seemed boring on it's own and I had a rather large space under the restaurant name even after the dingbat underscore, I thought about putting something to spice it up. White space isn't my enemy, so I didn't want to fill it so much as accentuate it, meaning I decided to go with an idea to sprinkle 'oregano' across the cover but I don't think it ended up working for me. The sprinkles weren't distinct enough and ended up just looking like a greasy blur. In retrospect I should have used the paint tool instead of the airbrush and chosen my particle shape a bit differently, but I'm not going back to fix it right now. Additionally by the advice of chapter 8, instead of just using green, I may want to also balance out with yellow's other complementary color orange. If I have reason to revisit this later this semester I might take the advantage to do something with that, but for now this is what I'm showing you guys.
So a brief explanation of what you're looking at up there... I chose the challenge from the Design Basic Index book on page 145. Basically using only repetitions of a simple image that can be rotated and resized, make three images for each of four categories. As you guys can perhaps tell, I ended up doing more than just that because I had so many good ideas when doing the sketchwork. So first of all to start, the simple design that I repeat is the one all the way in the upper left hand corner. Everything else on that page is built out of that one image. The other two up in that corner are other basic images that I thought it might be useful to keep on hand so I could quick copy them whenever I needed that particular design. The right one of the three in that corner I ended up not using, but it can also be grouped with the starburst type designs to its right. In the upper right corner are five velocity designs. You can probably tell that three of them are variations on the same idea but with pointing into, along, and out of the circle they form. In the lower right corner, the fern, flower, and bug are all part of my serenity designs. Honestly these ones are kind of my favorite, followed by the starbursts. Finally the three sets lined up on the left side are all strength based designs. I found that category to be the trickiest to conceptualize and wound up going with 'strength of unity' although the bottom left one makes me think of scales when put upsidedown so that could be an angle too.
The second challenge I chose was from the White Space book in Chapter 7's type related challenges. I chose #6, to make a restaurant menu. I wanted a nice, but not super fancy pizza place so I used Sans type font for the cover while using various Serifs for the inside spread. By bolding menu item names and using a smaller italics for the item description, I was able to emphasize grouping and make things visually distinct. I further grouped concepts by using some free dingbats I found online and you can actually see me putting those in with gimp in my screencast. For the background, I borrowed a few pointers from chapter 8 on color to go with a pizza-ish yellow. Since this seemed boring on it's own and I had a rather large space under the restaurant name even after the dingbat underscore, I thought about putting something to spice it up. White space isn't my enemy, so I didn't want to fill it so much as accentuate it, meaning I decided to go with an idea to sprinkle 'oregano' across the cover but I don't think it ended up working for me. The sprinkles weren't distinct enough and ended up just looking like a greasy blur. In retrospect I should have used the paint tool instead of the airbrush and chosen my particle shape a bit differently, but I'm not going back to fix it right now. Additionally by the advice of chapter 8, instead of just using green, I may want to also balance out with yellow's other complementary color orange. If I have reason to revisit this later this semester I might take the advantage to do something with that, but for now this is what I'm showing you guys.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)