Around, Here

Ahhhhh, yes, young adult literature. FINALLY we are talking about literature for kids that is accessible and relatable , unlike most of that Shakespeare garbage (unless, of course, it is transposed into a younger and more hip articulation  - thanks Morgan for showing us all the magics of these videos). We as prospective future educators have got to make sure that our content is culturally diverse and accessible to our students to ensure that they get the most out of it. Consistently beating works into their heads that were written by old middle class white male authors does not make for culturally diverse pedagogy. I have outlined my small-town, conservative high-school experience numerous times through various assignments and conversations with fellow members of the cohort, but I’ll re-up it here - growing up in a town of 1,500 people went exactly as you’d think it would. My upbringing was by-and-large white conservative in nature, as this small-minded frame of thinking wa...

In hindsight, if I were to update my Task 7 lesson plan to make it more SAMR friendly, I would scrap many of the ideas that I had the students performing through Google Slides/Drawings and I would facilitate these projects through Nearpod, a program on which I will be presenting tomorrow. This website can essentially serve as a total replacement for Powerpoint and other similar programs, as it fulfills the basic “slides” aspect of a presentation while also presenting many other interactive features, such as polls, quizzes, and slides that the student can draw on. As a fair portion of my unit was focused on the students’ interpretations of events in the text and how they can articulate them, they may be able to use this drawing or open-ended question portion of presentations to draw quick renditions of how they visualize or interpret certain scenes within the text. These Nearpod lessons would be great alternatives to Powerpoint presentations as they are also accessible to students t...

This concept of the filter bubble is fascinating as it pertains to the news (and how Eli Pariser relates it to news in 1915) and how it is catered to our own content desires. This TED Talk video came out in 2011, which goes to show just how long that this data-mining process has been going on through websites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and anything else. It is one thing to open YouTube these days and have it catered to my interests of seeing a FIFA video of 11 Ronaldo's versus 11 Messi's, but it is another to have any click I make be data logged and have it affect my browsing. However, there are certain limitations on my browsing that I can choose myself: I can unfollow and block people on Facebook and Twitter, and on Twitter I can even block certain words from showing up in my newsfeed. This can, however, be surpassed by advertising that is catered to you individually through your browsing history. This is in conjunction with  the total control that is exerted on brows...

It has been SO LONG since I have had to edit audio myself - the last time I did anything like this was back around 2013 when I recorded an EP in a basement with only concrete walls to "dampen" the sound. I spent a couple months tinkering with EQ and audio levels on Pro Tools for what turned to only be a two-track shin-dig. It was terrible, but I had a lot of fun doing it and was proud of the finished product - this project was more or less the same feeling. I used Audacity this time around, but using this software was just like riding a bike. It was tedious to go through the original interview track and cut out all the little "um" and "uhhhhh" moments (I probably cut about 2 minutes from an originally 12 minute track, not counting the ones that I left in there for artistic value), but I believe the end product turned out well enough. I initially chose to interview Mitchell because he is my roommate/bandmate so it was easy in that sense, but he's a...