Fill Up My Senses Live Blog

Another Cool Comic

I got the chance to make another comic with a different web tool, called Bubblr. This time, in keeping with the theme of the blog, my topic was snowboarding:

It's a little hard to read here, but you can go to http://www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/?id=13625 to read it in full :)

Bay of Pigs Comiq

The Bay of Pigs Invasion from ezekiell on Comiqs

For those of you who are interested in making your narratives in class more exciting, Rena and I would like to show you Comiqs, a web2.0 tool that will engage and fascinate your students! Above is our first comiq, a brief narrative of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Power Point Animation Extravagana! The Transcontinental Railroad: An epic in fourteen slides

The Godfather this ain't. Our first foray into Power Point animation yields this short, silent film about the transcontinental railroad linking east to west. We sincerely hope you enjoy it, expecially the way the entire United States jogs to the right in out last slide. I take full responsibility. Given additional time, a stirring John Williams score and a cameo by Don Cheadle would be the most important additions.

Mandatory reading

We were discussing literacy today, and I couldn't help but let my mind wander to one of my favorite topics under the concept. Calvin and Hobbes must be one of the most underrated reading tools at our disposal. I was allowed to discover the dog-eared copy of "Something Under the Bed is Drooling" on my dad's bookshelf, and at first was only able to appreciate it for the fantastic pictures. I remember being especially attracted to the sweeping alien landscapes of the "Spaceman Spiff" cartoons of Calvin's imagination. As my confidence grew, I began to read it. I was six, Calvin was six, yet we seemed to occupy entirely different worlds. Why was I doing better than hi in school, while he had such an expansive vocabulary or words I didn't know? "Salubrious"? "Snarling cur"? These were not the words of a stupid six-year-old. A lack of focus perhaps, but certainly not stupid.

Besides the immense joy I took out of reading the entire Calvin and Hobbes anthology (I typically asked for one of the collections for each birthday and Christmanukah), I learned a number of skills I would employ while reading to this very day: Contextual cues, circumlocution, ncreased vocabulary, high orders of speech, and a number of other talents. All this from, supposedly, a cartoon meant simply to be read and enjoyed by children. But it was so much more than that. It taught me to enjoy reading, to learn to read carefully, and to seek knowledge on my own. My kids will have the entire anthology on a bookshelf in the living room, waiting for the day they'll crack open the cover. In the realm of reading strategies, there's not much more salubrious than Calvin and Hobbes.

Now that the assignment is out of the way...

Holy goodness. Batman was so good. It's like a practically-better-than-Se7en-thriller that happens to feature a superhero. Heath Ledger was amazing. I could keep spitting out mini-sentences like this for ages, but if you don't have plans to, do it. Wow.

Update Friday 7/18

RSS feeds are a really interesting bit of tech for me. I only learned how to use them a few days before this class started, a friend who is a PR major is working web tools for a non-profit and has been passing on knowledge to me as she takes her crash course. She knows I am a rabid consumer of college football blogs, and showed me how to use the RSS feed to get all of my blogs on a single iGoogle page. I've never been more efficient at wasting time. In classes, I can see many applications for feeds. Firstly, students could have my blog (reflections and comments from class that day, why should the last class of the day be the only one to benefit from the insights of the previous classes?), as well as the blogs of their groupmates, if, say, they were working on a project together. Additionally, I could have an RSS of all of my students' blogs, so I could know every time they updated.
I really liked the practical applications as well, primarily the blogs in character of early American colonists. It reminds me of my favorite project I did in elementary school, the Discovery 3 simulation, in which we played exploring colonists, interacted, made war, traded, and tried to survive. It probably was a key factor in why i'm a social studies major today. I also liked the suggestion to foster discussion about topics like political cartoons. Engaging students outside of classtime seems like it could foster some really interesting points that could be addressed the next day. Just requiring a single post per night could result in many more just by piquing interest in the topic.
Addressing John Dewey's article, he puts a lot of emphasis on social aspects of teaching. In an age where social connections are wide-ranged thanks to the internet, this social side of education is becoming more and more important. Between blogging, feeds, chat, and a host of other tools (which I assume/hope I'll learn about more in 504) we can learn to take advantage of the powerful impact of the social side of the education process in a way that is more engaging at home than rote study ever could be.
Lastly, in typical iFashion, I was unable to access the page on synching up with the iKid due to a "Page Not Found" error. With web-based resources, you have to be prepared for this kind of problem, however.