End of Week 3

How to summarise this week?

A lot was done, yet not necessarily what the tasks instructed to. I used quite a few sites related to drawing, images and making things with them. I stayed up all of last night making a 30-second Animoto and a slideshow with photos I'd already taken. But I watched most of my classmates' videos and slideshows and I feasted on them. They were really good and interesting.

Now someone wasn't seeing much point in using Animoto for teaching and learning; I think it may be one of those tools you use occasionally, when the time is just right. It's not a tool that will save you time, or that you can keep under your sleeve an whisk off a lesson plan in a few minutes. Mine tried to be a wrapping off of 2009 with one particular student. I think it works that way.

I missed my Plurk friends this week because I wasn't able to spend much time with them...But from the time we did spend together my other blog (see my blogroll on the sidebar) Journey Journal began to take shape.

I'm still woking on a cool project with a colleague in Brazil, and this week was also positive in establishing human connections. And I don't mean "contacts". I mean finding rapport with people I perhaps hadn't had the chance to interact with previously.

I missed Mark Pegrum's talk -my heart was in the right place, but I was only deluding myself thinking I'd be able to get up on a Sunday for a 10 am talk, no matter how interesting it could be (and I'm sure it was). Especially since I stayed up all night working on other things -and trying to draw a cute secene for the Cute App in Sketchfu. What do you think? It's called: Can you see the giraffes yet?

I also stayed up most of Friday night designing my own avatar and characters for a comic strip, including a first strip. It was lots of fun and time flew by -later I noticed I'd spent 3 hours on it!

I also did some free writing to get some things out of my system; not because they were negative but, as my PC will often say I was having "low virtual memory capacity". I fed the text into Wordle and here's what came out:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1605788/Free_writing_1

For this version I chose not to leave out common English words. Apparently there was a lot of adding in my week!!! There was also a lot of misspelling and I decided to leave it in the Wordle because lately when I'm typing I have to delete and retype even the commonest of words -I tell myself it's because my typing speed's increasing. :)

Here's the other version, leaving out common English words:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1605799/Free_Writing2


Seeing, waiting, tweeting...(tagging would have appeared but I leftnospaceslikeI'm doing now so it looked like one word. It's interesting to see how what we can see changes if we tweak certain parameters/variables.
I'm just beginning Pegrum's first chapter From Blogs to Bombs, but I think this post, as I write it, brings home to me his concept of "lenses" -as I read his text the story of the blind men and the elphant also came to mind...

So this could perhaps be a beginning into the Multiliteracies course for me. I have to admit I've monitored the activity in it, but haven't got fully engaged yet.