Snapchat Story

I love Snapchat. I really do. I saw that one of the Weekly Play options was a video using Snapchat as opposed to Vine. I have created Snapchat stories before, but hadn't thought about creating one for a unified purpose. The one I created this week doesn't have much of a meaningful purpose behind it. …

Youth Creativity

When reading the articles "Black Teens are Breaking the Internet and Seeing None of the Profits" and "Poor Meme, Rich Meme", I found myself thinking about my students and their own internet usage. As mentioned in the articles, black culture is widely expressed online and creativity is abundant and visible. However, the media they create …

Mediated Writing

Completing this mediated writing piece was a very unique experience that I feel I learned a lot from. As a writer, I found that my writing wasn't at all created to be merged with images. When it came time to find images that would work, I was really surprised at how difficult it was! I …

Making a Gif

This week I wanted to try a play that I've done before but honestly couldn't remember how to do correctly. After reading about the HPA , I thought about the lessons I've been teaching surrounding Harry Potter. I've been trying to figure out how to teach Harry Potter well, so I've been structuring it similarly …

Civic Engagement in Fifth Grade

Reading about the Harry Potter Alliance was really fascinating and inspiring for me. The Harry Potter series has always been influential in my life. I read the series about once a year and may or may not have multiple Harry Potter tattoos. This year, I did what I've wanted to do for years. I started …

Information Online

When reading Networked this week, I was thinking about many of the points they brought up. Some of which I agree with, others that left me wondering. The first point that the chapter mentioned was the idea of linking within digital text as opposed to the limited text features available in print media. I thought about …

Text to Music

This was the weirdest play I have done yet. The results were absolutely not what I expected. I found the idea in the collaborative "make bank" titled "Turn Text into Music". This page takes you to a music generator where you can input text and generate sheet music. You are given personal choice in the …

Media Literacy Twitter Chat

Tonight I participated in a live chat on Twitter surrounding integrating Media Literacy with Social Studies education. This chat was lead by Renee Hobbs, author of Discovering Media Literacy: Teaching Digital Media and Popular Culture in Elementary School. I read this book last quarter and dove into teaching media literacy in my classroom. I've followed her …

Twitter Official – Next Steps

It's official now, I'm good to go with Twitter! After having a conversation with two district leaders and my administrator, it looks like I'm ready to move forward with Twitter! The district provided similar feedback that they had with blogging. It's all about student safety as well as purpose of use. I haven't shared any …

Image Layering

One of the "makes" that I found in the make bank was a practice in layering images and seeing the differences created by the layers. I chose to commemorate this snow day by layering four different filters on top of an image of the view outside a window. The original picture is below. I wanted …