Assignment 1 - Posterize It

Today I decided to try my hand at one of the assignments in our assignment bank. The bank has 20 assignments, and by the end of the course, we are to have completed and posted 10 of them. I really like the flexibility given to us in choosing which assignments to do. Within each assignment there is additional flexibility, where inspiration and examples are given, but the choice of what and how to do the particular assignment is up to us as students. It took me a while to peruse through the various assignment options in the bank. I thought I would take the opportunity to try out Canva to make a poster, so I chose to do the "Posterize It" assignment. Here we are to create or remix a poster for an idea or concept explored this week. I looked through multiple examples and ideas posted, and settled on doing a minimalist poster of one of my favorite TV shows, Breaking Bad. I chose this because last week's theme was context, and time was spent getting to know each other online and sharing about ourselves. Breaking Bad was a series I really related to, being a scientist turned high school chemistry teacher (minus the illegal manufacturing of methamphetamine and becoming a drug lord...although in my last career, I did work with methamphetamine and other drugs of abuse).

This was my first time trying out Canva after it was recommended by our course instructor, so I thought this was a good place to start making my poster. I began by taking an online photo of a blue crystal that was sort of head-shaped and making it more cartoon-like using Cartoonize.net. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways to do this using Photoshop or Illustrator, but I thought I'd try using a quick online tool.

Cartoonized version of blue crystal

Then I uploaded that into Canva and flipped it so that it looked more like a human head. Next, I played around with the shapes tool and made a hat to put on top of my crystal head and uploaded clipart of sunglasses to add to my face. Finally, I added some text -- the show title and my favorite quote from the series -- and uploaded a picture of a crystal meth molecule and played with the transparency so that the show title could be superimposed on top of the molecule. Here is the final result.

There was a lot of trial-and-error learning using Canva in order to make the poster look the way I wanted, but I think I'm generally pleased with the result. The only thing I didn't like about Canva is that I couldn't figure out a way to free draw if I wanted to. Maybe there's a way to do that in Canva, but I didn't find it. I will definitely continue to play with Canva to become more familiar with it.

Week 1 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories

Here we are at the end of week 1. This is a course that has already introduced me to new technology and ways to use them in learning. We started the week with getting set up on the various platforms we will be using throughout the 8 weeks of this course.  The first thing I met with initial dread was having to finally cave and open my own Twitter account.

It's not that I'm anti-social media or anything like that. It just feels like there's so much activity going on at once on Twitter that I don't know where to focus. It is overwhelming at first (and still is for me after week 1). But once over my initial skepticism and having a starting point of the Daily Create to channel my attention towards, I took the plunge and tried out my first challenge, posting a Sgt Hulka selfie. It felt silly, but I think that starting these Daily Create challenges helps build community among fellow digital classmates through regular exposure and interaction. It also starts the practice and habit of just making something every day. Or at least thinking about making something every day. Finally, getting started on the Daily Creates helped me get more familiar using my smartphone as more than just a rectangle that receives and sends text messages, emails, and pictures.

My first Daily Create got me used to the selfie camera on my phone, and I got to practice posting on Twitter, tagging the appropriate people and using the appropriate tags. Afterwards, I dug into the syllabus and got my first exposure to using Hypothes.is. My initial impression was a very good one. I liked how integrated everything was. Being able to annotate, comment and reply to others' comments was all intuitive, and it makes having an online class discussion easy to have and easy to follow, since all the comments and highlights are directly on the document being discussed. This week we used Hypothes.is to go over the syllabus together, go over the Week 1 module's introduction, videos and Soundcloud announcements. And then we got our first article to discuss.

As I continued to work on the course content on Canvas and started to check off things from my "to-do" list for this course, I started using Twitter a bit more to get acquainted with it and tried my hand at a couple more Daily Create challenges. The next challenge was to create a "Ridiculous Latte." Here, we were to put a latte in an unexpected place. As someone who likes to take pictures but rarely edits or modifies them (except for maybe the use of a hipster filter on Instagram), I had to think about how I could get a picture of a latte into a different container. I decided to try to do this on my smartphone since it seems like my students are always making funny pictures using their phones. I took a virtual trip to the Google Play store on my Android device and found a free cut and paste app aptly named Cut Paste Photos. The app name seemed to fit my needs, so I started there. I took a photo of a grumpy cat latte online, cut the latte part out and pasted it onto a photo of a bird's nest (also taken from online).  There was some trial and error in making this, but it was a good experience overall of trying something new.

 

Third challenge was to use Talk Obama to Me to have Obama say something about the Daily Create. I tried it out, used an Orson Welles quote, and posted it on Twitter. 

I have to say that I wasn't very pleased with the result. I don't think that it was necessarily a bad challenge. If anything, it got me to try yet another new way to make something. What I didn't like is that the final video wouldn't embed into my Twitter feed. And it looked like 80% of people who did this challenge had the same issue, as the majority of my feed that day looked like what I posted above. Admittedly, I didn't really spend much time looking at other people's work on that Daily Create because almost all of them required to click on the link to be brought to the Talk Obama to Me site. And what you got when you got there was the original text with the video on top. It's more steps than I wanted to take to view other people's work, and I'm sure others probably felt the same way as well and just skipped over mine since it wasn't an embedded video. Plus, the videos became monotonous, since they were all pretty much made in the same way.

Last challenge I tried out was to use a photo of the Nordic Prime Ministers and have them summon something. I thought I'd have a bit of a laugh with this one, so I took a photo of the Nordic Prime Ministers all holding a ball and had cats pop up all over the photo. The app I used was Add a Cat . This app is very similar to an old app I had on my old iPhone, CatPaint. 

After week 1, I am still learning the ropes on Twitter and getting used to having my posts be completely public. So far, I've only really posted things related to this course, and will probably only use it for that for the next 7 weeks. In using my computer and smartphone more, I've definitely had head-scratching moments due to my lack of technological proficiency.

But I'm definitely giving it a shot. I'll undoubtedly make mistakes, but over the course of the next 7 weeks I hope to at least become more comfortable and proficient in using technology in this course, and in turn, in my own brick-and-mortar classroom. 

The theme for Week 1 was Context. This week set the stage for what the rest of the course would be like. And this technological dinosaur is excited to continue learning and growing. I'm using my time in the course to think of ways to integrate more technology into my classes and allow my students to use their creativity to tell their own digital stories. It may be tricky with high school chemistry, but I'm already getting ideas of how my students could use Hypothes.is to peer review each other's work or analyze a news article. Or how they can use Twitter to do something like a Daily Create on a weekly basis by finding chemistry all around them and posting about it once a week. Or have them do some sort of weekly reflection to stamp in their learning. It's only Week 1 and I've already gotten some good ideas. I'm excited to see how those ideas develop over the next 7 weeks. Plus, I really can't beat my summer classroom.