Why do I HAVE to learn this?

Well, I have to be honest – I had a really rocky start to my #learningproject. I started out with the Rockstar Academy lessons, which are slow and steady. However, Lesson 1 taught the parts of a guitar, the chords C and G, and some strumming exercises. I got through it, but even though my head knew what to do, my fingers hurt! Now I remember why I never learned how to play before, guitar is hard!

I was deflated. Why did I pick guitar? I could have picked something so much easier than this. A hundred things ran through my mind. And… I stalled. I didn’t have much motivation to practice and a mountain of lessons didn’t seem surmountable. But, I figured, ANY learning project is going to have some hurdles, setbacks and times when you are just unmotivated. So I figured I better jump back in and DO THIS!

I needed a little motivation, so I skipped ahead to lesson 3, which introduced E, D and A chords and suggested strumming these and adding in C and G, which I remembered but wanted to see the fingering. Rather than flipping back to lesson 1, I skipped over to Google and easily found a Guitar Chord image. It’s handy to have in front of me when I am trying to play a song and learn the chords.

Woohoo, now that I knew what my fingers were supposed to do, I wanted to try to play something. I abandoned the lessons for the day and googled easy guitar songs, settling on this site. I figured Brown-Eyed Girl by Van Morrison wasn’t too hard, too fast and I could sing along!

It was a pretty rocky rendition, since there are lots of chord changes, but hey, it’s a song! After feeling pretty bummed, I am actually believing that I will be able to learn the guitar well enough to enjoy it!

So, stay tuned for my next video, where I will actually reveal my progress.

In the meantime, do you have any tricks to overcome lack of motivation? How do you jump start yourself?

 

Matthew Leupold, a work in progress

So my task this week was to cyber-sleuth a classmate, the lucky guy being Matthew Leupold! A simple Google search of “Matthew Leupold” brought up his Twitter handle and his blog. My guess is that these are the pages he updates most frequently.

In addition, Facebook generalized with a link to ALL the Matthew Leupold’s on the site. Being able to eliminate the others based on location (BC and Wisconsin were both out) and occupation (I wasn’t aware of Matt’s history as a Plumber or Drywall Hanger), I was no closer to finding a link to the Matt I was looking for, since his name is different on Facebook. If I wasn’t already friends with him, I would be hard-pressed to find him on Facebook.

When I searched ‘Matthew Leupold’ without quotes, I had to sift through the tennis player in California and the weight lifter in Akron, Ohio. That seems tedious, so I added double quotation marks around his name, along with Regina. The results were MUCH more likely to be our Matt, and in fact, mostly Education-related  as well. Same thing in Bing – matthew leupold without quotes returned a billion optical scopes – for rifles, I think. Add in the quotes and Regina, and you get a much better picture of our Matt!

Matthew Leupold… without quotes.  A Leupold scope, I presume!

 

‘ “Matthew Leupold” Regina’ search… Much better!

As far as Matt’s academic career, there were a few discoveries I was able to glean from the internet:

• He graduated from Luther High School in 2007
• His fall 2014 placement for ECS 100 was at St. Bernadette School
• in 2015, Matt uploaded a cool video reflection for ECS 302 on his YouTube Channel
• He was recognized by the Faculty of Ed on April 6, 2016 for his achievements in the program.

And I can also share a fun fact about Matt:

• In 2011, Matt played hockey in an adult rec league for the “Keg Sparkens” team. The player stats show that Matt scored 5 goals and 1 assist that season. I am guessing that was while he was employed at The Keg.

Overall, I found that Matt’s online presence is mostly about Education – through Twitter, his blog, and I can confirm that he attended U of R. I don’t think Matt has anything to worry about if his students, or a potential employer, want to dredge up his past.

 

 

Striking a pose, and a chord

So the #learningproject I decided to tackle is playing the guitar. I decided to dress the part, because as Edith Head said:

So I am dressing for it, at least today!

I am finding that there are many other skills I need to learn in order to document my learning! Just in preparing to learn, I needed to get really familiar with the Screencastify extension for Chrome… and found out that I can do tab, desktop AND cam recordings!  I recorded the video below all at one time, but I am not sure what I will do if I want to combine bits of video together or add voice overs afterwards.

I also needed a place to upload my videos to, since I have never uploaded videos online. During my pre-internship, April Hoffman and I recorded video reflections, like this one after “Wacky Wednesday” at our school. We just used April’s channel. Therefore, step two to produce this video was creating my own YouTube channel.

Lastly, I managed to upload my video to my YouTube channel, and edit the title and description. I even changed the video thumbnail photo using YouTube Video Manager and found all kinds of other things I could edit! Despite our course title, I was not expecting to have so many types of technology to catch up on in order to learn something that’s not technological! Also, I came into this thinking I was pretty tech-savvy. Even for an online learning project, there is a lot more to it than just googling resources!

So without further ado, here is my first video. You may have seen that I can “strike a pose”, but you will have to watch the video to witness my first chord.

 

Stay ‘tuned’ for more of my learning reflections, and please comment if you have any suggestions for me on the guitar learning. Oh heck, even the wardrobe is fair game.

 

Twitter: from “It’s Complicated” to BFFs

I first met Twitter in 2009. Looking back at those first few years, it was a casual relationship. I would occasionally follow, tweet and retweet (RT!) local professionals and friends that would help me grow awareness of my Kumon Math and Reading Centre. In our tight-knit town of Georgetown, Ontario, it was another way of marketing a local business. Looking back, however, I wasn’t very good at it! I was rather like a high school friend that you hear from every year or two and hope you have something in common.

Fast forward to 2015. I’ve closed my business, was accepted to the University of Regina for my B.Ed, and am moving halfway across Canada. Social media has blown up, and Tweets, Instagram and Facebook have all gone through several overhauls. All of a sudden, I have become acutely aware that Tweeting is a thing! Radio and TV stations use it for contests! In what seems like overnight, people are connecting online constantly. More than that, at least in Saskatchewan, it seems like Twitter is THE WAY to connect in education: with your PLN, through class to class engagements, and keeping on top of new #edtech trends and educational news.

I liked this new Twitter! And for the following reasons, I rekindled my relationship with Twitter:

• I found lots of Educational Publications to follow – @edutopia, @MindShiftKQED, @MediaSmarts, to name a few.
• I love connecting, and now there were SO many like-minded individuals and organizations sharing educational innovations – for instance,  @ONTSpecialNeeds, @kwhobbes, and @MmeSanders.
• Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that before I even started my first class for my B.Ed, I was instructed to tweet and blog by a very persuasive professor – @kbhildebrandt.

Almost 9 months later, I love Twitter. We are BFFs, and I am on it several times a day. I am learning new ways to use it in my #ECMP355 Technology in the Classroom course, and still have a lot to learn. I know there are many opinions on how to use (and not use) it, but I like to:

1. Quickly find the news that I want to read about. Yes, there are other apps, but why not multitask and get my news at the same time?
2. Retweet and favorite lots of cool ideas and articles, showing support for my PLN.
3. Use it in the classroom to connect students to others

This last one will be important as I move forward into internship and teaching. There are many articles on this, but here are 30 ways to use Twitter in the classroom. I think using Twitter to connect with other classrooms is really important, especially in rural Saskatchewan where the local highschool draws students from 3-4 feeder schools from different small towns. In a grade 8 class, why not engage two or more classes from different schools in discussions or problem solving activities and start building relationships before joining up for Grade 9?

Do you have cool problem solving activities that can be done over Twitter? Other ideas for connecting students? Please let me know!

 

 

 

An old dog… and some new tricks

I have acquired a lot of skills, both technical and professional over the years. As I mentioned in my flipgrid video, I have quite an eclectic history with technology. Using technology in the business world for the past decade has made me quite proficient in Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and Publisher, to name a few. More recently, I have been an avid user of Twitter.

So my interest in educational technology is piqued, but where to begin? I hope that by taking this course I will learn how to navigate the many apps that are available, know what can be valuable and effective in the classroom, and be confident in knowing how to use them!

Most of all, I want to catch up to my 10 year old son, who has used YouTube to learn how to bake a lava cake, make a homemade blow gun, and uploads videos to his own YouTube channel. His goal is to have one million subscribers*. My goal is to know a lot more than I do now! So, what do you say? Are you ready to jump into the deep end with me?

Photo Credit: San Diego Shooter via Compfight cc

*edit 05/16/2016 – I’ve just been informed by my son that his goal is actually to have more than 1o million subscribers – apparently you get special play buttons for reaching different subscriber numbers (?) Something to look into!