I think the video says most of it, special thanks to Kenna, Matt, Nick, and Aaron as far as the musical instrument part goes
Click here or on the “Piano” tab on this blog to see all of my piano posts, have a nice day!
Well I guess this is it? 😦
🙂
Here is my Summary of Learning video, I tried to incorporate my learning project into it, please feel free to sing along!
After taking mandatory education classes for years, I have no idea how this class could possibly be considered only optional with the way that schools are beginning to cater to this new reality of technology that our society has become submersed in. This should definitely be a mandatory class.
In this class I’ve joined together with Cynthia, Matt, and Nick for the learning projects (I would’ve hung out with Colby more, but he doesn’t return my texts…
I’ve made a good deal of comments on my fellow students’ blogs, and this blog has had 52 approved comments (it’s crazy how prevalent Spam is everywhere in the web).
I used iMovie, iPhoto and some iTunes to make my Summary of Learning video, and have some websites and computer resources that I will post more of in the coming days, that I will incorporate into my future classroom. This is my blogfolio after all, so I’ll make it a resource including some of my classic lessons and unit plans.
Thanks for watching and singing along!
Here are the lyrics:
Well I found myself in the classroom, Alec Couros, came to me
He said to join in Twitter, let it tweet
And In our hours of classes, Matt and Nick, tried to distract me,
Always, always asking: “see my tweet?”
“Follow me, see my tweet? Please retweet, oh follow me”
“Watch this video with me – GET KONY”
***
So I started blogging, YouTube, Google, WordPress,
Accounts are free
A digital identity, for you and me
I’m so insightful, and u know, so are my tweets,
I made an Xtranormal movie,
Bromance veeds, iMovie, a Door Scene, oh iMovie
There are Rant Show podcasts, check my tweets,
***
And if we teach our students, to harness technology,
They’ll shine into tomorrow, let them free,
Garageband, Edmodo, Goodle Docs, DropBox, Kidblog’ing,
cause they’re neat,
Speak these words of wisdom, let them free
(pause)
Let them free, let them free, let them free, oh let them free,
Schools must answer the future technology
Let it Be – I can play the piano a little bit now
I can’t tell you how empowering it feels to finally understand some stuff about musical notes and how songs work via instruments a little bit now after all these years of musical pages being complete mysteries, I feel like it’s an open door to walk into now
Big thanks to Kenna N or Kenna D – one of them really helped me out with my learning goal!
I’m looking forward to trying more songs now
Improving…
I’ve heard that I look serious when I play and the story checks out
My Dad came into the city today to do a couple things and he stopped in to check out the 
bidding on an auger, it ended up going higher than he expected so he didn’t buy it, but I was pretty blown away by how advanced the technology is for local farm auctions.
The auction is done with a live-feed and the prices are updated throughout the process with a large button that you can click on to bid, once you’ve registered for the website.
I have known about the text messages that he gets from the elevator on grain prices for a while and have always had some fun about those.
I was raised within a farming community, and I spent a lot of time on all kinds of farms, and I still have misconceptions about the technology being used today.
I’m not even talking about the engineered crops, sprays, and the incredible variety of machinery, I’m just talking about the incorporations of technology into what the farmer does.
We have a sprayer that runs off of a satellite system. Since so much money goes into fuel and supplies, the satellite system tracks exactly where you have been, you attach it to the steering wheel, and it drives for you. It’s pretty incredible; all you have to do to configure a field is to loop around the outside a couple times, and then the satellite does most of the work from there.
It’s pretty helpful because it can be tough to tell exactly where you’ve been in all of the dirt, with the sun glares, the rolls of the land, and eventually you get tired of looking back at where your “wings” are.
If technology can be incorporated into the farm world – if old men can learn new tricks with grain stalks in their mouth and dirty, oil-stained work clothes on, looking at the sun rise and set like it’s the only clock that matters – then it should definitely be incorporated into a classroom.
It’s been a slow progression but I’ll have an opportunity to make some good strides hopefully this week, this is where I’m at on Monday.
So Nick Barnes, Matthew Bresciani, and I got together to try another classic – Let it Be by the Beatles. We played for a while and I think we’re really close on this one, I think by the next video we may even have a gig or two to consider and I really hope that artistic differences don’t break our band apart before we really have a chance to reach people with our message!
We hope you enjoy the latest from KiNiMa productions:
The excellent Nick Barnes and Matthew Bresciani came over and we did our tenth tech task in podcast form. You could say that we set the bar pretty high with our last podcast (incredibly, incredibly high in fact), but you could also say that we pulled a hamstring before we did this one 🙂
Nah, just kidding, it’s great like always – we hope you folks enjoy!
I had my last piano lesson session on Sunday with the wonderful Kenna at the University and she has set me up well to tackle the song that I hope to play with a little bit of elbow grease.
Asides from the piano though, other conversations rattled around and we talked about how difficult a problem it can be to teach for the students that pick certain things up fast and the students that take a little longer with some stuff, and to do it at the same time.
We are obviously generally the only person available to teach content at any time as the teacher in the classroom, and while I was not actively thinking about this problem I thought of a couple things to consider, and they involve complete fundamental changes at the start of the school year.
1.Why don’t we illuminate the curriculum for the students? What if the entire first couple of days in the school year we went over what we are going to be learning in each of the subjects? I don’t think I was ever aware at all about the upcoming material that we were going to be taking in school, but why not show them the stuff behind the scenes? If anything the only problem would be that the students could challenge us as teachers – but isn’t that a good thing? We could even show them how their learning is going to link up to what is going to take place in their next years.
Curriculum is set up to be like learning each letter of the alphabet – start at A, then learn B, then proceed to C, and etc. By the end, the students will have the alphabet of learnings deemed acceptable to enter the working/secondary schooling world, and we’ll have done our jobs as schools. So we could show them what the plan is for the year (C) and tell them we might miss some and some might switch, some might get added, but we are going to be working our way towards the next level (D). This would empower the students to know what’s up.
2.After seeing what we are to learn, we can get the students set up on independent learning projects of their own choice. The students can even group together once in a while, but the most important part is that the students would have new challenges that they would set up themselves. It would be in an extra binder, and the students would have to list what they are curious to find out about, or they could list projects that they would like to start on. Depending on how serious the students are going to take them, a lot of freedom could be given in their free-work projects.
A student could want to write a movie script, and research why people snore. Then these would each be listed, and when the student has available time they can check in and work on either. Their progress would be checked and if they fooled around too much and never took it seriously enough, their rights could be revoked temporarily. When they are finished something, more could be added. A student could want to write a comic or record a song or make a presentation or design a hairband. Anything that is creative that the student is genuinely interested in doing themselves.
When would the students do these projects though?
3.As long as a student carried a certain average in a subject, they can bypass the general lectures, do the work quickly, then get back to their projects. Obviously no teacher is perfect, and no student is going to grasp and remember everything, so why are we always so worried as teachers about the students working on their own? Why does it matter if they’re listening if they’re not learning?
If they mess up a concept in math and fail an assignment, they will no longer have free-work time until they can catch back up. If their average is not high enough, they cannot have as much free-time work.
We always learn about how much more valuable the need-to-know content is. So with biology or social studies, why don’t we show what work will be expected, then lecture to whoever wants to listen? If people want to approach things on their own they can, but for some things the whole class will be expected to be involved.
As long as students are not disrespectful about their free-work, and they are not disruptive to the class what would the problem with this be? It sounds good to me: To first write down what the math assignment is, THEN go over how to do the math assignment.
Extra – all kinds of systems can be set-up initially, like free-work presentation time and rewards for accomplished goals. The most important part of course would be to have the students choose exactly what they want to try learning about. They will know what the learning plan for the year would be, and if they wanted – they could even try to set up a unit for the upcoming curriculum themselves. Or improve on what the teacher has.
Expected classroom behaviors and consequences would be worked on a lot as in any classroom. Peer-teaching would be rewarded with free-work time, and I feel like there is some potential in this idea to develop into a working scale. To translate this idea to the classroom.
This would help the faster students belong in their classroom and take the pressure away from the slower students to fake learning, or pressure learning.
Many creative things could be created, many new skills could be developed, school could become an even more positive concept, and it could all be done with the freedom of student choice.
What are schools around for in the first place? To develop capable learners, to develop classroom communities, to prepare students for their upcoming challenges, and to teach basic content. Right?
Feel free to poke holes in anything or give more ideas to everything. Thanks for your time.
Stephen Colbert is a giant 🙂
I watched the Remix Manifesto but have to admit that I never really bought into the momentum that it was trying to build despite the big pushes it was trying to make:
1.Here is this guy GirlTalk and people have a superfun time at his rave/parties, with a bunch of talk that it is only possible for them to party to music with the creativity and freedom of him sampling other existing content.
2.Ordinary people are getting sued big money by cold lawyers trying to cash in on stolen, downloaded content. Some people are getting sued ridiculous amounts of money by the faceless corporations when all it is – is just some songs for CDs. And maybe a movie here or there.
3.Brazil refuses to concede to copyright and used this to manufacture their own synthetic drug to help manage Aids. Without having to pay rights to the parties that developed the drug, their Aids medication is incredibly cheaper. They have a politician that jams out, and during one of these great sessions, the movie asks if this beautiful scene is the face of a world free from copyright? Where ideas are available to everybody.
4.If Mickey Mouse is so good from stealing other classic content, why can’t everybody steal? And especially – why can’t anybody steal back from Mickey and the giant corporation of Disney?
These are my thoughts aside from this movie’s subjective take:
a.I have not paid a penny to Blockbuster for years after finding that I can download movies, put them on a USB stick, and watch them on my PlayStation 3 for free, I used to rent movies all the time for $7 each. Pretty much all of the Blockbusters and Rogers Videos have shut down in the last couple years as a result of people downloading content.
b.I’ve spent maybe $40 on music in the last 5 years, and have never gone through more musical content in my life. $40 used to be 2 CDs. Where is this money going now? What kind of advertising dollars do websites like “Isohunt” generate?
c.Have you ever had a joke stolen from you? I have since I’m a guy that creates them, and it’s frustrating hearing your own joke from somebody, then that somebody giving the credit for it to somebody else. I’ve heard my own stories told back to me from other people. I own those stories from having lived them and people are taking credit for them?
d.What about when Facebook and Twitter were about to claim ownership of the photos that we post on their sites? And everybody freaked out? We’d still have the rights to use our own photos, but this way Facebook and Twitter could be free to use them too. And everybody freaked out… no? Maybe I don’t have all the information on that, but isn’t that hypocritical of the public saying that the studio’s content should be free to use?
e.Why stop at music samples, songs, and movie and television clips for copyright? What about clothes? Where anybody can slap a Nike symbol on any shoe and it’d be impossible to navigate shoes available for sale on eBay? What’s real and what’s fake? Imagine a world where WalMart would be free to sell Quicksilver jeans for $20? Anybody could use anybody else’s logo and style, and our fashion status’ would be more skewed? Wouldn’t that creativity and freedom set us free from all of this crap socioeconomic status that we have to deal with in our society? Where people would buy expensive high-fashion items simply for the quality and not for the visible brand name? Haha
f.If there is no copyright law at all – can I download the new Kanye West album, add in a sound effect every once in a while that is hardly noticeable and then burn and sell a ton of CDs? Should people really be able to profit off of other people’s content?
g.If a recording artist/studio/production company makes no money off of general public song sales, and then suddenly nothing off of copyright, and then any commercial can play any song for their product… is this what we are going for?
h.Context. If we create a story and characters, shouldn’t we have some kind of ability to control their context? What if porno got their hands on every character out there? What if what we make is taken completely out of context and ruined/cheapened in our own eyes?
i.If Universal Studios makes a Miracle Man movie, can Warner Brothers make the sequel if they’re quick enough?
j.If production companies wouldn’t have to buy copyright use from other production companies, what would that mean?
k.With copyright law as it is, is it preventing new ideas from getting out? If there were no copyright law at all, would new ideas continue to get out at the same rate? Would creativity go up or down?
l.How much energy would go into creating and sharing new movies/shows/music/productions if it would take less energy to just blatantly steal and remix other stuff? What if there is no profit to be had to reward the great ideas that work? Because the bad ideas usually lose a LOT of money.
End Part:
We must adjust to a new age of content, that is clear.
Obviously it is nice to see a bunch of young people going crazy for music and say that the moments are only made possible by the creativity and freedom of no copyright law. There are three realities behind this: As shown in the movie; would it really be fair for GirlTalk to pay over $400,000 for each of his songs due to copyright? (NOPE). Is it right that GirlTalk got to play at Coachella for ripped off samples? (Probably I guess, I say we let DJs do what they do). Would the young people be partying with un-sampled music? (Yup).
Think about the mother in a modest house getting sued hundreds of thousands of dollars for making herself two CDs. That’s ridiculous. So therefore, it is obvious that something must be done to update an outdated policy on copyright, but it is also obvious that it is a complex issue with an inherent slippery slope if we buy into the idea of it too much. We must do something, and we must stop vilifying the process of downloading content that we are pretty much ALL doing.
So yeah, and despite what this movie implies – I still see a LOT of creativity and freedom of expression in the world even with copyright law as it is right now. I don’t know about you, maybe I’m crazy 🙂
Feel free to dissect any of my random notes.
Is there a better way to end a post on available content?
Mr.Fiege 