Back to Blogging

No Excuses 

I've been very lax in keeping up with my blogging. I'm spending more of my energies elsewhere,  I have found that sharing ideas in Google Plus is quicker than blogging, with it's ease of posting text, links, images, and videos and commenting on other's posts. But most of what I do in G+, like in Twitter,  is consume, comment and regurgitate. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it has not been very creative or original. So, back to blogging for me whether or not other's read it.  I plan to get back to becoming a producer rather than just a consumer and to writing about my teaching, sharing my ideas, recommend digital tools for teaching and learning, as well as create new media that communicates my ideas. It goes well with what we are doing in my online course this semester.

New Literacies

This is Week #3 for my online course,  CCV Multimedia Apps & Tools students are exploring what it means to be literate in our world today, what some call the New Literacies.  I've created a diagram which I think represents some of the key new literacies that students and teachers should be addressing. I'm impressed by the discussions my students are having as they watch videos and read articles about these literacies, including Doug Belshaw's TED Video: The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies.

Producers vs Consumers

As I mentioned earlier becoming a producer not just a consumer of information/media is a goal of mine, and something I have my students do each week. In Week #4 Visual Literacy, we will be creating an image that communicates an idea or strong emotional feeling. I've shared with them some tools that they might use to find copyright free images (or they can invoke the Fair Use doctrine if they can provide evidence) and some free web based photo editing tools which they can use to remix/edit their photos such as the Chrome Web Apps,  pixlr or picmonkey. I also have created some examples and tutorials for them to see how I have used the photo editors but emphasis that I'm not necessarily a professional designer, and my media isn't perfect and I look for suggestions from them as they would from each other. The example here is not a final version but it demonstrates how to remix two photos using the layers function in Pixlr.