Teach, Music, Travel

Newest update: I got a puppy. Watch out! I have been feeling rather isolated and depressed with working out of my apartment, and have also recently moved to a new city. It has been difficult meeting people, and I am grateful now for my new companion to open the doors to new relationships. Today we went to the dog park and made friends. Another benefit is that he gets me out of the house and motivated to start the day. The puppy is named Loki. Things have been going very well so far. He is able to hold it through the night and sleeps for around 6-7 hours. I am grateful for this! I have been teaching him to sit, and have signed up for Petsmart classes in the evening in the next few weeks. He is currently at six pounds and is said to get up to 10-12. The main issue I have been having is putting him in his crate when I am working. He often howls and gets upset, but alas, he must get used to this. Mommy has work to do! I have attached a photo of us. Say "hello" to Loki!

 Learning about Trello pretty much blew my mind today. I am definitely a list and checking off kind of person. In fact, with my graduate work, I am constantly making lists to stay on track of everything I have due each week. I also check everything off as I go and it makes me feel accomplished, and gives me that feeling of "Ahhhh, I'm done. Relax now." I can see how this tool would be useful in the world of instructional design. I would imagine there are many steps involved on projects such as analyzing, developing, designing, implementing and evaluating over time. 

 At one of my previous jobs, we did use Canva for project communication. I find it to be a very effective tool when it comes to employees working together on a project. We were able to share documents, ask questions and get alerts on when people made comments. This was very helpful for us to collaborate during the daytime. The only downside to working with Canva was that people could send messages at all times during the day. Even though you can mark yourself as "away" some people did not honor this, and expected me to be available at all hours to answer. I found this difficult in order to create a good work-life balance. Hopefully I will have a job that honors time off! In terms of using Canva in the educational world, I think it could also be very useful. Educators often have to cross collaborate with other teachers in their grade level in order to align curriculum and scheduling of events, reports, etc. Canva could also be used by principals to send messages to teachers. S...

 I enjoyed reading the journal, Effects of group reflection variations in project-based learning integrated in a Web 2.0 learning space (Kim 2011), and how group learning can be beneficial to students. While this study looked at undergraduate students in particular, I cannot help but imagine how the idea can also be applied to the K-12 setting. Collaboration and sharing ideas through the 2.0 world is a new idea for me, and I can see how it takes learning to another level in terms of technology and approaches to student-centered learning. This idea makes me think of the movie, Enders Game, as in the story, a young boy is chosen to lead a group of kids to defeat an enemy through technological based operations. The boy is at the center of command, and gives direction to his team. I think of each student as player one in this situation, each interacting with each other with them at the center of their learning. They can also respond and get feedback from those they are interacting with...

 I fell behind this week on classwork, as I was dealing with a personal situation and took some mental health time. Don't feel great about falling behind. I have been enjoying all of my courses so far (I am taking four and am full-time), and have been going with the flow nicely until this past week. I am now playing catch-up and feel a bit overwhelmed. I have assignments due today! I am hoping that I can get back on track now, and get back into that productive swing of things. There is so much to learn, so much to do, and I am excited about it all! I am wondering if anyone else has hit a wall so to speak with their learning this semester and how everyone has been dealing with the workload.

I really enjoyed learning about the various tools this week that can be incorporated into the classroom. As mentioned in one of my discussion posts, as a specialist teacher we are not always exposed to these tools and it is great to be able to imagine how I could incorporate them into a specialists classroom. One tool in particular I enjoyed learning about is Padlet. I know teachers who have used it, but I typically have used tools such as Prezi for creating boards of images to share with the class. However, I have noticed lately that Prezi has changed its format and doesn't feature the ability to map out images any longer. I believe Padlet would be of great use in the future, and in terms of working in instructional design, I think that it can be useful as a supporting tool to send to clients and workers in organizations. I can see how this can be used to outline steps and processes to present to clients in terms of explaining the various ID and HPT models to follow.  

I continue to explore various tools through this class and am enjoying getting familiar with various social media tools, and concepts behind their usage. I enjoyed writing my paper this week that compared and contrasted lurking and participating on the internet. I chose to look at the aviation industry, as I have some familiarity with it. The difference between these experiences was very clear, and I found that I prefer to lurk rather than participate as that is where my comfort normally lies when personally using social media. I usually do not participate unless it is related specifically to work. I am excited to see what we will be learning next module!

Something I have not been as in tune with prior to watching Vanessa's presentation is the idea of attributing work to their authors. There have definitely been times where I have used images in projects where I did not attribute them at all, or correctly. This is definitely something I want to be more aware of moving forward professionally, as I know and realize when putting your work out there publically, you put yourself at risk of being in the wrong. Knowing about sources such as CC Search is very helpful to use when needing to use images that are free to use and available for reuse. 

A huge issue with creating resources for the music classroom, is the copyright issue when it comes to music. I was planning on creating a lesson that included some printed music, and recently had to contact the publisher, Alfred, to get permission. I was able to have a contact reach back out to me, who let me know that the sheet music itself cannot be shown on a video that is being used for public usage. If I wanted to use it online and use music only with no images of the music, the fee would be $50 for a term of three years (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.). If I want to use the music for educational purposes, it is in fair use, and I can use the music for free. In this case, there is no need for permission or a license.  I have heard of schools and teachers being reprimanded for using music outside of their permission. Some schools have been hit hard with fines to be set as examples. Something that happens often, is the recreation of musicals without getting permission from the publisher. ...

Crowdsourcing is something that I had not truly thought about in the context of the educational realm until reading, “Crowdsourcing and Self-Instruction: Turning the Production of Teaching Materials Into a Learning Objective” by Matthew Wilson (2018). According to Wilson, crowdsourcing activities promote “the ability to delegate simple tasks that draw on students’ skill sets and to use that to guide course discussions and the application of knowledge in the classroom” (Wilson, 2018, p. 400-408). Students enjoyed the group nature of the work, an assignment where Wilson had students evaluate online content and submit knowledge to a larger project.  I can see this being incorporated into a high school level course if students are working on gathering information for a class project. Finding and determining reputable sources is important in the modern world, and this activity would benefit the learners by learning how to identify reputable sources while gathering information for a part...

I think Badges are a great tool when approaching a classroom environment. As I am going into Instructional Design, I think they could also be useful in the corporate setting if the incentive and reward is high enough. For example, if badges can also equate to certifications that can eventually be placed on a resume (such as badge for completing an online training through LinkedIn), this will be a great incentive for employees as it will benefit the company and their future employment.  Looking at the educational setting and how badges can be used, putting students in charge of assigning badges to each other rather than just the teacher can also add value. According to Hortsman et al. (2020), badges encourage "youth to interact with each other and positions them as having the expertise to recognize achievement in each other". This creates a collaborative and inclusive classroom environment. To make sure students are not left out, teacher's can assign certain students to ot...

One of the discussion questions we had this week had to do with tagging in an educational context. I had to take some time to think about this one, as it is something I have not incorporated before during my time teaching.  According to  Klašnja-Milićević &  Ivanović, M.   (2018), tagging is a  benefit when it comes to memorization and highlighting the most important part of a text. Tags presented on a website can give a learner an idea about what is truly important.  I think of applying this concept in the classroom as having students search for key words as part of a reading, having to tag them, and document what other information they find that may be associated with the tag. I am trying to relate my posts here to the music classroom, so I would imagine for a general music college class, if a research paper needs to be completed, student's could be asked to collaborate in this way with tagging and researching. This also puts the student at the center...