Wednesday, April 8, 2009

PACHOCHKA

i am putting this on my blog just to be sure that it is accessable for tonights PIZZA PARTY whoawhooooooo. it wont be very interesting to look at right now, but i mean if you want to go right ahead and spoil it for yourself. i worked hard on these slides.

final project video.

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This is the final video, it is on youtube called Lovely NB. I really hope this work b/c i don't know if i can stand another failed blog post.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Benoit.

growing up i had no pets. my mom is very allergic to fur. over the coarse of my childhood, we had one cat (that was shot by our neighbor when i was two), some goldfish, some hamsters, and my beloved guinea pigs corky jones and tasia (until my little brother stopped taking care of them so my mom gave them away, and poor corky died soon after). but never had i had a real pet that i had been attached to and loved. when people cried when their cats and dogs died, i just didn't get it, yeah its sad, but its an animal! very replacable.


sometimes i would see how long i could go without feeding my fish. one lasted six months without me feeding him, until my boyfriend found out i was neglecting them and started feeding them.


but this year i moved to regina and am living with my sister and her husband. they have the cutest cat ever. his name in Benoit. he is crazy, he runs around the house like a wild child, hides under the couch and attacks our feet, pushes the bathroom open when your in the shower so its nice and cold when you get out, runs up the stairs in front of you then lays on the third top stair and attacks your feet, lays on your face while you lay on the couch, rubs himself on your hands until you pet him, scratches and bites us, scratched holes in the plastic we put over the windows for the winter, bites me when i sing, and sleeps with me everynight.



i have never been able to say this until this year, but i love my cat!

final project summary

okay so is my THIRD attempt at creating this blog. First time that I attempted to do it, i had my complete blog typed and my final project video uploading, and i just waiting for that finish. After about an hour of waiting for my video to load a cute little box popped up that told me that the internet had to close for some stupid reason. And POOF there goes my blog, and an hour of waiting for that video to upload. The second attempt I had about half my blog written and i dont even know what i did and then POOF it was goneZO! But you what they say, third times the charm! (it better be or else i am going to snap)

So for my final project me and Robbie created a video for the website Next Vista for learning. Our video will be shown under the under the Global Views. Robbie is also posting it on youtube, but at this point I am unsure what it is titled. We created a video portraying the Battlefords, our hometown (YEYEAH represent!). As I already posting in my blog, me and Robbie drove four hours home one weekend and drove around the Battlefords and did an extensive photo shoot of our community. We had WELL over a hundred photos to sift through. So we sat down adn decided what aspects of the city were the most important b/c we were told that our video should be a happy medium between two to four minutes. So we sorted through them and got rid of a large chunk. Then we started clumping the photos together in catagories such as schools, scenic views, galleries, health care facilities, etc. During this process a lot more of the photos were deleted from our project. Once we had all our final photos we started reorganizing the clumped pictures so it would flow nicely as a video. During this whole process Robbie had a killer migrane, the screen on the laptop was down as far as it would go, the curtains were drawn and the tylenol was slowly kicking in. So then we began the AUDIO, duh duh duuuuh! We were using Robbie Mac something of other (the newest one), and we were using the movie making application on it. This made the audio way easier then i thought it would. We could record short audio clips as the pictures in the slide show played. Deleting and re-recording audio clips was an easy procedure. I think we did have the mic up a bit tooooo high b/c when you play it you have to crank the volume down, but i mean no biggie.

the Battlefords are a very unique place to live! I wouldn't say that they are a popular travel destination. North Battleford is your typical Saskatchewan small city, and Battleford is your typical Saskatchewan town! I absolutly love the Battlefords, and am always so happy to go home.

I am going to post this blog and up load my video in another one, so another accident doesn't happen and my third go POOF!

Monday, April 6, 2009

podcasts

podcasts podcasts podcasts. complex podcasts.

first thing i did was search the itunes store looking at podcasts. i was looking at ones that interest me and i found the ones pertaining to flight of the conchords and i got soooo excited. flight of the conchords is an amzingly hilarious tv show that makes me laugh till i pee myself.

I found this podcast of a four minute summary of season one of flight of the conchords, so here it is, if you havnt seen it and dont want to spoil it then DONT WATCH IT. It's just clips from episodes with a little narrative, it kind of captures the humour of the show, is a very specific sense of humour and a lot of people just think its dumb, but to me its just amazing.

Then looking for a educational blog i wanted to find one that wasnt language based. there are so many that are like learn french, english, spanish, but i wanted to find one that i could relate to a little better as i am not bilingual or interested in learning another language and this point in my life. Sooooo i went and i found the coolest videos EVER! They are about the underwater life near south australia. It is a short clip from a video that is being filmed for IMAX and its 3D. It is amazingly cool. It is much like planet earth, and i loved that. the video also looks at how they filmed the movie. so here it is check er out and enjoy!

in terms of making my own podcast, people it is not going to happen, yes i learned a lot throughout this semester in this class but this is just way to over my head. i honestly think this was a little final test from Dean to see who truely was technologically dominating, well you caught me Dean! I suck! hahah but really i talked to a few classmates who had a whole lot of trouble making podcasts, and to those of you that did them, (i know i listened to robin's) Congrats! I have so much stuff i need to do with these last precious hours of homework time, i cant spend them trying to create a podcast, but i hope one day you WILL see one on this blog! I'll work on it when i am lessssssssssss stressed.

But now that i have discovered all the incredible stuff you can get from itunes for free i am sooo excited! like i just never knew there was so much free stuff on here, man they should really not call it itunes store! more like library!

Reflection of ECMP, the ultimate social learning experience

oooh ECMP, where do i start. this class has provided the most personal growth for me out of any other university class i have taken. being a first year student i am still getting used to the university environment and classes, then i get this class thrown in my face.

when the class began, and we found out it would indeed be an online class 3 times out of four, i was like SAWEEEEET i can lay in my bed and go to class! Buuuuuut then we started these weekly gatherings in the online world and i was little overwhelmed. I would lay in my bed and listen to Dean and guest speakers go on and on, and watch as the choppy screen sharing would flash across my screen, not having the slightest clue what they were even doing. For a while in this class everything went in one ear, then out the other. i knew i needed to work extra hard in this class if i wanted to gain anything from it.

i set up my blog and started to post tech tasks, and some personal stories. i enjoyed blogging and reading other peoples blogs, but i do NOT understand how people have time for all this! Like Robin for example! She stayed on top of every techtask, had a picture of the day EVERYDAY, and was an enthuastic active member of each online session. I idolize her for that! That must have taken sooo much dedication and hours infront of the computer. It was so helpful having people posting their techtasks as soon as they were finished so i had something to look at as i did mine. I really really liked that aspect of the class, that it truely was students teaching students, sure Dean gave us the assignments but when it came down to doing it, more help was given out BY students TO students through blogs. And there is no physical evidence of this in my ECMP experience, i would go onto someones blgo check out there tech task before doing mine, but i would rarely leave comments explaining i was doing this, which now that i think about it, i should have. I also got help from Robbie, not through blogs. He would always offer help when i didn't know how to do something and that was much appreciated.

In terms of the social learning in this class, i really enjoyed that so many of my classmates are Arts Ed students like me. This was refelcted in blogs, and i enjoyed looking at the "photos of the day" and the creative videos that people came up with. It was awesome to be able to post pictures on my blog and get constructive criticism, not just someone saying OH thats GOOD. I also read, more then once, "how can i apply this to an arts based class?" This question, more then once, popped into my head too. And it was interesting reading everyones take on it. I think that it will be definetly will be a challenge but I know that the people in this class are extremely creative, maybe too creative for their own good, and will be able to do it. We are entering age controlled, consumed, and constructed by comptures. It is up to us, the future teachers of this digital world, to teach children to use this technology in a constructive positive way. I found that ECMP touched on many ways to do this, from blogging, smartboards, second life, online gaming, to creating classroom videos. It occured to me that being creative in the arts is more then painting a nice picture

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

effectiveness of telling a story, from 50wttas

agian i used glogger.com and animoto.com to tell my highschool story. neither of my videos included narration, which limited my effectivness to tell a story. animoto was a video form so it was easier to have a linear message portrayed, although the video could only be super short. i found that these short videos were not very effective in telling a story, but more effective in getting a message across. Glogger was much different in that it was one page, much like tech task of using four slides to "sell yourself", this website gave you one surface to tell your story. It also was not that effective in telling a traditional story, but definetly, agian, got the message across to the viewer.

k-12 online

When Dean did our updates of techtasks and said that i hadn't done number seven i was very confused. I went back and looked at seven then went through my blog and found the blog i had done for it, but then realized i am dumb. I had done it for TED not k-12 online. sillllllllly me!

So heres my synopsis on a presentation from http://k12onlineconference.org/.

I was going through the website and found a presentation by none of then our very own DEAN SHARESKI! Of course i then felt obligated to watch it and write about it. It's titled Kicking it Up a Notch Film School For Video Podcasters.

watching it i was a little confused, the guy in the video is not Dean, but the video is really good. It literally is a step by step how to of video pod casts. It goes through things like story boarding, like we did during an inclass activity. He talks about appropriate shots, and how to get a good shot using things like angles, and zooming. It's important for a director to know these things and have them in mind as they start to film a video. He talks about shots being aesthetically pleasing and the rule of thirds. This video focuses on making movies in the classroom, but of course applies to all videos.

This would be a great movie to watch before filming anything. It walks you through key components of a successful film and the material that you need. It has a lot of good tips. If I ever found myself in the situation of making a movie in a classroom, i know i would not know where to even start! I would refer back to this video, simply b/c it is not extremly techinical, and its easy to understand.
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For the two stories that i portrayed for the tech task 50 ways to tell a story, i chose to tell the story of my highschool career. the first website i used was animoto.com and the second (this blog) was http://www.glogster.com/. This website is literally an only scrapbooking site/blog. It was really fun to create this to tell my story of highschool. It was easy to use and by the looks of the website used by mostly by teenagers. It was interesing to look at the "glogs" that were already created on that website. A huge chunk of them were about Twilight, which made me a little nauseous. This website also provides the option of adding video to a "glog", which would have been interesing, but i have no video on my computer from highschool.

If you are into scrapbooking and fun stuff like that, i would recommend this website. I really havn't explored it further then creating this glog, but it looks interesting. My user name is deebau, WE COULD BE FRIENDS! It's pretty intense, check it out, it'll take you back a couple years of 4 hour long msn conversations and myspace and hotmail email forwards, and all that fun stuff we wasted our evenings on when in grade eight.