It's Sunday night and everyone knows what that means: my blog post will be due in a matter of hours! It's time to sit down and reflect on my week.
First, I feel I should address something that I haven't spoken about yet. Each week I write my blog post after dance rehearsal for Seven Ages' Fiddler on the Roof. Today I was doing some Russian dancing steps that I hadn't done since taking Ukrainian dance as a kid in Russell and my legs are so sore that I can't help but complain about it to the internet. Anyway, Fiddler on the Roof will be showing April 6-8 at the Centennial Auditorium if anyone is interested! I will be playing the role of the lowly tailor Motel Kamzoil.
This week in ICT we received the task of creating a short video. This is particularly interesting to me as I used to create youtube skits with my friends in middle school. I will not be sharing any of the names we went under as I am understandably unwilling to share the cringeyness that was middle school Cam. My best friend Riley and I worked on them mainly: I wrote the scripts and usually portrayed leading characters and he was most often the camera guy and editor. These roles seem to have been worth something for our lives, too! Riley has worked his way from being a camera man to an editing position for Global News Winnipeg and I've been milking all that I can out of the theatrical side of life. Not to mention that when we were able to take classmates under our wings to create video projects for school I was able to create some of my favourite high school memories.
There is a small issue with having experience on these sides of things, however. As I said, Riley was the one doing the editing. I watched and could do the simple parts but I always had him to help out. Most people aren't aware of this however. It seems that my classmates have high expectations for me with this kind of project. We will see how it goes.
There is one piece of advice in particular that I can give as someone with experience with every part of this process: set your expectations low. To reiterate, you will never think your video is funny. Even if it does end up containing some semblance of wit you will be far too focused on "oh my gosh, does my voice really sound like that?!" to appreciate anything you worked on. I hope the realisation comes peacefully to my classmates and we can all have fun making low quality audio visual entertainment!
Sunday, 26 February 2017
Tuesday, 21 February 2017
Week Six: Nanaimo was beautiful!
In case my title didn't give it away, my travels combined with the whirlwind that was the Westcast conference provided very limited time to work on ICT. Now that I've come back and I am a week behind in all my work I must admit that my anxiety levels are becoming more and more difficult to ignore. Time to get one thing off of my To-Do list at least, let's blog about it!
The conference itself was excellent. Though the Wednesday Evening Gala preceding the formal conference left a lot to desire (I mostly sat in the corner with a small Brandon University contingent eavesdropping about how students from other universities had this trip paid for in full), Thursday morning washed away the bad taste in a hurry. I attended this conference with the expectation that the key note speakers would be very sought after and far too expensive for Brandon University so I was very excited to get a taste of high quality. I was not disappointed. The first key note speaker goes by the name of Shelley Moore and is pursuing her P.H.D. in inclusive education. Oh my goodness are her metaphors on point. She really spoke to me when she described education throughout the twentieth century alongside a picture of a automotive factory in Detroit. She explained that the way we used to teach students worked great for assembly line workers, however she showed a second picture from the same angle taken from the last year or two and those workers were all replaced by machines. Her point was that we can now make machines well enough to do mechanical jobs. What we need to train students for now are the things that machines cannot do. She is an excellent human. I will be posting a video of hers onto the G+ community as well.
One of the more impactful takeaways from Westcast (at least from my point of view) wasn't necessarily any of the content but rather my impressions of education in the rest of the country. In this faculty we don't go a week without someone pointing out that Manitoba is one of the weakest provinces in terms of education so we get the feeling that the grass may be greener elsewhere. Similarly to my first year of university in which I attended Minot State University however, I realised that these people were not smarter than us. From what I could gather from a few short presentations and mingling with peers it seems that Brandon University is preparing us at a level that is at least on par with other provinces. Moreover, we have a longer program to receive certification and we spend much more time student teaching. I can confidently say that some of the presentations I've witnessed throughout the past six months in our class are at a generally higher level than some of the presentations that peers from other universities brought to this conference.
Now that I've gotten this brief blog post out of the way I am hoping to have some time to catch up on the other things I missed in ICT. I haven't fooled around with photoshop for a number of years but creating a poster should be a nice refresher. I am pleased to notice as well that tech task #8 involves the use of animoto since Miranda used some of those for our presentation. The easiest way to catch up is to find out that you were ahead before you left, it seems!
Hopefully my next blog post will be on time but if someone sends me two time zones over again my blog will once again have to wait until Tuesday morning.
The conference itself was excellent. Though the Wednesday Evening Gala preceding the formal conference left a lot to desire (I mostly sat in the corner with a small Brandon University contingent eavesdropping about how students from other universities had this trip paid for in full), Thursday morning washed away the bad taste in a hurry. I attended this conference with the expectation that the key note speakers would be very sought after and far too expensive for Brandon University so I was very excited to get a taste of high quality. I was not disappointed. The first key note speaker goes by the name of Shelley Moore and is pursuing her P.H.D. in inclusive education. Oh my goodness are her metaphors on point. She really spoke to me when she described education throughout the twentieth century alongside a picture of a automotive factory in Detroit. She explained that the way we used to teach students worked great for assembly line workers, however she showed a second picture from the same angle taken from the last year or two and those workers were all replaced by machines. Her point was that we can now make machines well enough to do mechanical jobs. What we need to train students for now are the things that machines cannot do. She is an excellent human. I will be posting a video of hers onto the G+ community as well.
One of the more impactful takeaways from Westcast (at least from my point of view) wasn't necessarily any of the content but rather my impressions of education in the rest of the country. In this faculty we don't go a week without someone pointing out that Manitoba is one of the weakest provinces in terms of education so we get the feeling that the grass may be greener elsewhere. Similarly to my first year of university in which I attended Minot State University however, I realised that these people were not smarter than us. From what I could gather from a few short presentations and mingling with peers it seems that Brandon University is preparing us at a level that is at least on par with other provinces. Moreover, we have a longer program to receive certification and we spend much more time student teaching. I can confidently say that some of the presentations I've witnessed throughout the past six months in our class are at a generally higher level than some of the presentations that peers from other universities brought to this conference.
Now that I've gotten this brief blog post out of the way I am hoping to have some time to catch up on the other things I missed in ICT. I haven't fooled around with photoshop for a number of years but creating a poster should be a nice refresher. I am pleased to notice as well that tech task #8 involves the use of animoto since Miranda used some of those for our presentation. The easiest way to catch up is to find out that you were ahead before you left, it seems!
Hopefully my next blog post will be on time but if someone sends me two time zones over again my blog will once again have to wait until Tuesday morning.
Sunday, 12 February 2017
Week five: weebly wobbly woo
HTML never intimidated me. I always figured I could pick it up if I ever needed to create a website. As it turns out however, even when I am able to ignore the coding step I am still not very adept at site creation. It seems that the visual organization and content of a web site are far more daunting obstacles to my brain. I'm already blogging about myself and now I have to create an entire weebly page about myself? Oh boy.
Though I am pretty terrible at it, using weebly is very straight forward and easy to use. I would even go so far as to say it's kind of fun to mess around with. I'm not sure if my future potential employers are going to look at this site but if they do I intend on having a product that will reflect well upon me in their eyes. In fact, it feels more likely that I'll have a well put together eportfolio than a physical binder full of glossy pages and scrapbook-style characteristics as I (try to) use technology to keep me organized.
I have been continuing to use google drive frequently though! Miranda Sadler and I are departing for Westcast this Tuesday for Westcast in Nanaimo and we've assembled our entire presentation using the google drive. I can already tell how immensely useful technolgy can be for things like networking. Anyway, I haven't much more to say this week and I still have some work to do for ELA Methods in the morning. That was my week in ICT! I'll post when I get back from BC!
Though I am pretty terrible at it, using weebly is very straight forward and easy to use. I would even go so far as to say it's kind of fun to mess around with. I'm not sure if my future potential employers are going to look at this site but if they do I intend on having a product that will reflect well upon me in their eyes. In fact, it feels more likely that I'll have a well put together eportfolio than a physical binder full of glossy pages and scrapbook-style characteristics as I (try to) use technology to keep me organized.
I have been continuing to use google drive frequently though! Miranda Sadler and I are departing for Westcast this Tuesday for Westcast in Nanaimo and we've assembled our entire presentation using the google drive. I can already tell how immensely useful technolgy can be for things like networking. Anyway, I haven't much more to say this week and I still have some work to do for ELA Methods in the morning. That was my week in ICT! I'll post when I get back from BC!
Sunday, 5 February 2017
That Owl was Superb!
Hot diggity. I was cheering for Atlanta, but how can a football fan hate an overtime Super Bowl game? (One that will likely spur the change of the ridiculous overtime format the NFL currently uses.) Anyway, ICT this week went well.
I won't lie, when I heard there was another speaker coming I was not very excited. I didn't want to be the one complaining last week but holy cow did I dislike her presentation style. She didn't let her colleague speak and all she did was read from the slides. Please don't get her to present again. This week however i found myself actually engaged as he explained Maple to us. I think that might prove useful by the way. I don't see myself relying on Maples groups for inspiration but it's certainly helpful as a tool when we're stuck. I was bothered by one aspect however. As he was addressing some of the early content on Maple (before he knew that we were a senior years course) he mentioned a number of planning guides set up specifically for K-8 teachers. It seems that there is so much more for early years teachers. Most PD days seemed to be geared toward them and now it seems a lot of online help exists for them as well. Why is there nothing specifically for high school teachers?
Admittedly, I am starting to get down with the social aspect of this blog assignment. It's kind of enjoyable keeping up with my classmates' blogs and I won't lie and say that I'm not pretty flattered to be included in some of them. When Sonya messaged me to ask what I had mentioned in class earlier in the week so she could quote me in her blog I felt pretty good about myself!
I've got a good amount of nachos left over from the game so I'm going to put some work into that before bed, but thanks for reading my weekly ICT (and NFL playoffs) update!
I won't lie, when I heard there was another speaker coming I was not very excited. I didn't want to be the one complaining last week but holy cow did I dislike her presentation style. She didn't let her colleague speak and all she did was read from the slides. Please don't get her to present again. This week however i found myself actually engaged as he explained Maple to us. I think that might prove useful by the way. I don't see myself relying on Maples groups for inspiration but it's certainly helpful as a tool when we're stuck. I was bothered by one aspect however. As he was addressing some of the early content on Maple (before he knew that we were a senior years course) he mentioned a number of planning guides set up specifically for K-8 teachers. It seems that there is so much more for early years teachers. Most PD days seemed to be geared toward them and now it seems a lot of online help exists for them as well. Why is there nothing specifically for high school teachers?
Admittedly, I am starting to get down with the social aspect of this blog assignment. It's kind of enjoyable keeping up with my classmates' blogs and I won't lie and say that I'm not pretty flattered to be included in some of them. When Sonya messaged me to ask what I had mentioned in class earlier in the week so she could quote me in her blog I felt pretty good about myself!
I've got a good amount of nachos left over from the game so I'm going to put some work into that before bed, but thanks for reading my weekly ICT (and NFL playoffs) update!
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