Got Editing Skills?

Digital Video Editing....Sounds like a mouthful doesn't it? Especially if you're not too sure what it entails. It's actually quite easy once the process is demonstrated although it takes a long time.

If I were to integrate this as a project into my classroom, it is highly feasible starting in 2nd grade, but there are a lot of little steps to take before the whole process is finished. If students are motivated about the project, then the steps can be cut down day by day and finished as a class instead of separating into small groups.

If I was doing camera editing as a whole class, it would be easier because there would be fewer steps. Either way you choose should be fine. As a rule of thumb, know what method would work better with your class.

Tweeting Yet?

Tweeting is still a very foreign way of social networking for me. I will probably be forever connected to Facebook and Instagram, but I have no idea where Twitter fits in.

I would probably take tweeting into my classroom as another method to gauge understanding in learning, but for my personal life, I feel no need to announce what I'm thinking or feeling at every moment of the day.

My brother is a huge fan of Twitter and loves to use hashtags. I don't get why I need to add hashtags to everything I post. It's a huge waste of time for me. I like seeing what everyone is up to, but do I really need to add a tag onto everything my post is related to?

Somebody please explain why I need Twitter in my life?

Will You be My Friend?

Whenever I meet someone new the first time and it seems like our conversations clicked, I would get an invite on Facebook to be their friend. I'm not really complaining, but at the same time, I don't feel the obligation to add that person right away as my friend.

If you think about it, you upload personal pictures of your friends and families onto Facebook. You don't want a person you've met once to see everything about your life in a matter of minutes. Because chances are, they are extremely curious about knowing every detail about you.

I have heard that high school teachers get friend requests from their students. Even though it's cool that your students have facebook, it's not a good idea to friend them. First of all, you want to keep your personal life private and second of all, you don't want parents getting on your case about that party you went to last weekend and having your students know that wild side of you.

If you really want to use Facebook, I would recommend starting a new Facebook page without your personal information on it and then adding your students as your friends. Then you can integrate Facebook somehow into your class curriculum. 

Yo Yo Yo, My Name is Joe!

The title of this blog entry is actually from my brother whose name isn't Joe. I started with that because from an early age, my brother loved rapping. He would try to rap everything and it always started out with Yo Yo Yo, my name is Joe.

In a way, this reminded me of Podcasts. As an educator, we stress listening skills in our classroom. In the old days, before TV, citizens of the United States used to listen to radio broadcasts as a family. They would gather around after dinner and listen to news or a Western story. Children and adults alike would try to imagine what is going on in each episode.

I personally think imagination is a lost art now. Because children are passively receiving too much information, they have become like little robots. Now when teachers ask students above the age of seven to imagine something, students are often stuck and because imagination requires a lot of thinking, they will generally give up.

Recently, I asked a 2nd grader to write about anything he wanted to and he came up with nothing after five minutes of thinking. Nothing. I prompted him with questions about his life, his family, things he like to do... NOTHING came to mind.

Finally, I launched into my own made-up adventure where I was an invisible person and I could fly around the world, sneaking up on people...THAT'S when an idea hit him. When I came back to check on him a few minutes later, he basically just copied my adventure and added more words to it.

I think of Podcasts as an oral story. Think about all that can be done if teachers integrated this into the classroom. Students with avid imagination can take this to a whole other level. They can integrate music and sounds and then play it in the classroom.

Challenge of the Week: Integrate some form of Podcasting in your own classroom! See if this new project leads your classroom to new heights!

Are Wikis the same as Wikipedia?

When I was in high school, Wikipedia was a banned resource for research. Every teacher I have ever had would scold us severely for even putting that up as a site being used.

Actually, unbeknownst to the teacher, I used Wikipedia as a starting resource for my research. I would scroll down to the bottom and find the links that other people posted.

As I learned in class, Wikipedia is harder to change now because people are diligent in monitoring every detail now.

You are probably asking, "What about Wikis?" I think if we are using Wikis in classroom projects, it's okay. You just have to use tight security and informing students your ultimate authority over it. That would include telling your students that you can see everyone's edits and you get e-mails that tell you who added or subtracted what.

Wikis like Wikipedia is a good resource for students to pool their thoughts and what they researched on a particular topic. It's also an easy way to track class participation.

Blah to Blog

In my last post, I was struck by how people rush around these days. There is no time for direct conversations anymore because social media is taking the society by storm, which leads me to writing this post.

Many people use a blog today as an online journal because there is no one listening to them.

Since the Web is full of people searching for themselves, they find it consoling to pour out their feelings to an anonymous audience. Apparently, it's very gratifying when an anonymous person leaves a comment of sympathy to one of your posts. 

In graduate class, our professor used Will Richardson's book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts to inform us about the general use of blogs. As she was discussing the many uses of blogs and how we could incorporate it into our own classrooms, I was struck by the fact that our students could use this to blog across the school.

Much like getting a letter from a pen pal, a blog could be about anything and given the right guidance in using this tool, students could talk about anything they want and have other students in the school give feedback to each other. Students would be more engaged to write if they knew that other students in the school and even the staff would write comments about their posts.

The Blah nonsense that students talk about could be used in their blogs as building blocks in their writing. As I thought about all the creative uses for a blog in a classroom, I was overwhelmed by the ideas flowing into my head. 

As Will Robinson said in his wiki, these are challenging times for educators:

"We are entering a time of deeply personalized, passion based learning. The amount of information is overwhelming. More and more, the expectation is to create, not consume, yet we're not creators." 

The Rushing World Around Us

Car horns are beeping,

Impatient people are rushing here and there.

Teens with their windows down,

Playing their music loud and clear.

The traffic light doesn’t turn green fast enough.

Noise is inevitable,

Crowds of pedestrians crossing,

Traffic slows down to a crawl,

Time just freezes,

While the world passes it by.

What do I care about?

How do I even begin to answer this vast prompt? There are many things I care about as an educator, as a as a future parent, and finally as a life-long learner. Where do I start from?

Since I am first and foremost an educator, here are the things I care most about:

• There are too many tests for students to take. Every day, co-workers are talking about data, data, data. Data does nothing but displays numbers. How does that compare to the student's personality or their strengths?
• Students are expected to sit and concentrate too long during the day. Students do have PE about twice a week and recess for 20 minutes. But for those other days, students only have 20 minutes of free time.
• The class size is too large in non-Title I schools. How can teachers personalize teaching to students with classes up to 33 students? 

As a future parent, I am worried about school being more academic and playtime is being substituted for more work. 

• I read an article about public schools vs. homeschooling. The mom whose kids were in public schools and taken out to be home schooled are now very successful in life. She took her children out of public school because social time was being minimized during the school day. Children were expected to only interact with each other during appropriate times of the day. They were only allowed to talk about school subjects during school hours except during the 20 minutes of recess.
• Another issue that concerns me are the reasons that prompts people into the education field. When I was an undergraduate student, all the other students who failed in their own major were encouraged to apply in the education field. Where does that leave America's future?
• As a future home-school parent, I can personalize the curriculum to match my child's intellectual abilities and let them create models and structures using items such as toothpicks and marshmallows as shown in the picture above. But in the classroom, teachers have limited budget provisions and cannot let students freely use toothpicks and marshmallows due to safety reasons.
• As a future parent, it seems there are only a handful of teachers who care about their students and how they learn. The other teachers in the school seems to just be collecting a paycheck and doing the minimum each month for their students. 

Finally, as a lifelong learner, I am concerned with those around me who seemed to have stopped learning because they seem to be stuck in a rut. I have a friend who does the same routine thing every day of the year. She wakes up, goes to work, goes home, eats dinner and goes to sleep. Day in and day out, there are new technologies being developed and new research being tested. Yet these things seem to fly over her head because she is stuck in survival mode.

As a person whose goal each day is to learn something new or discover something in a creative way, this is a very concerning matter for me. Even for those who do these routine things, I feel that each day something is happening in a special way. It's just not being recognized as being special. It just feels like the same old thing day in and day out. 

Who Am I?

Who I am cannot be summed up in just a few words

Everyone has a different word for me

My mom would say creative,

My dad would say musical,

Whereas my brother would say athletically challenged

My name is Rhyan

Can that be a characteristic in itself?

Can a name define a person?

Looking at these few letters

Sounding manly

Made up of miniscule letters

Creating a word of five letters

Sounding out the word

Does that even fit together?

There seems to be a name in Rhyan

When taking out the letter h

It becomes R-y-a-n

Can it be?

A boy in disguise?

Wait a minute, you say

What about the h?

Ahh…that small, almost invisible letter

Makes the masculinity seem distant

You see, the letter h makes all the difference

The difference between a boy and a girl

The girl in the h makes the word whole

It is special, yet unique

Masculine-sounding

But prettier in the appearance of it all

That’s not all I say

A name is just a name after all

A person is not just a name

It’s the personality of the person

Examining the qualities will take ten years

Making a person go into a dream world with dancing ponies

A person is much more than words could describe

They cannot portray the special person that God especially made

In His image, His child,

Therefore, I’ll leave the task to you

Please peel the layers and find out for yourself

The kind of person I really am