Sean Astin and Kevin Bacon starred in a film back in the late 80s titled White Water Summer. What starts as a rather innocent summer camping trip meant to help shape a few young men’s outdoor survival skills while teaching important life lessons, turns into a battle of wills. Alan, a teen more focused on sports, computers, and isn’t entirely excited about "roughing it" begins to butt heads with Vic, the lone adult leader of this wilderness adventure. Alan, played by Sean Astin, tries to use his wits and crafts several "smarter" ways of getting things done in the great outdoors, one of the more powerful scenes being his creation of a fishing trap, catching a horde of fish for dinner. Vic, the "do it the right way" leader, admonishes Alan for using his brains rather than his brawn, and after berating him in front of the other campers, he forces Alan to gut all of the fish himself (something Alan doesn’t seem excited about), and leaves him on a small island in the middle of the lake, telling him to signal when he’s done. Alan of course, becomes disgusted, and not only doesn’t signal that he’s finished, but sleeps outside in the rain just to spite Vic’s harsh "life lesson". The battle between the two only escalates from there, to the point where Vic severely injures himself while trying to teach Alan another lesson. It then turns to Alan to see the entire troop safely down the mountain, using a mix of both Vic’s survival skills and Alan’s ingenuity. Other than being a rather rudimentary and rushed description of the scene, it’s an excellent metaphor for how I see myself as a learner. It’s not that I want to be obstinate, and purposefully look for ways to "circumvent" what it is that any of my teachers have asked me to do (I asked my 5th grade teacher if I could dress up as an actual flag-pole sitter for our class musical about the roaring 20s rather than dress in a white shirt with a bow tie). I’ve recognized over my 33 years on this planet that I have a fierce independent streak within me, and quite often it shows itself in the learning environment. I want to learn "my way", reflect upon and build new knowledge in ways that make sense to me, whether they mesh with a given assignment or not, and I’ve butted heads a couple of times with instructors who don’t seem to "get" that what I’m doing is not only helping me learn, but doing so in a much more personal and meaningful way than the assignment they’ve doled out. That’s not to say that I don’t get along well with my teachers and colleagues, but when your 7th grade science teacher yells out across the room as class is being dismissed, "that’s another nail in the coffin, Rimes" it makes you wonder whether or not you should dial back just how independent you are. So as I write this letter to any other obstinate learners out there, I say strike a balance! Work with your teacher, but just don’t accept assignments and tasks given to you by your teacher as the simple tasks they may be, completing them without question. Find ways that you can make some of them your own; find ways to inject your own personality into them. Case in point; this letter was supposed to be written as a letter home from camp. Not an actual camp that Alan had to endure under Vic’s leadership, but a virtual one. I’m helping out as a "Camp Counselor" for ds106′s Camp Magic Macguffin for the next 9 weeks (go bunk 5!), and while I was supposed to write this letter to those "back home", I choose to write it instead as a reflection for those that might struggle with either obstinate learners, or for those that might be obstinate learners themselves. Teachers, please find ways to let your students add their own personality into projects or regular assignments. You might not always get the best academic work out of them, but they’ll be much more engaged in what they’re doing, and the good will you’ll earn usually pays off later when you have to ask them to complete a particular assignment the ways it’s written (because eventually they have to conform at least a bit). So to all you obstinate learners out there, develop good relationships with your teachers, whether you want to or not. Those relationships will help you in the future. And teachers of obstinate learners, try to find ways to mingle what you need your students to accomplish, with how they want to accomplish it. Sincerely, Ben P.S. Camp is great! I already have several baskets woven and more leather punched money pouches that I have pockets!

Of course, Captain America would choose the BGY-11 as his background. They're both as American as apple pie. What does Captain America do when not saving the world from crazed Nazi scientists? We know he served his country as a part of the U.S. armed forces, and is an integral member of The Avengers, pontificating on what is or isn’t righteous in a rather old-fashioned Americana way. Most recently he spent a few years thought to be dead, only to be reborn in mid-2009 when it was deemed that a character of his moral fiber was needed once again (translation, he had been dead long enough to capitalize commercially off of it). But what does Captain America do when he’s not busy stomping enemies of the USA and being six feet under? While I might have a Herculean task comparing what most public school teachers do for a living to Captain America’s exploits, the question I found myself pondering today was what do teachers, much like super heroes, do "behind the scenes" that the public doesn’t get to see? How do we unwind ourselves in such a difficult time (at least here in Michigan), where it seems as though all of our traditional foundational structures are shifting out from beneath us? Captain America and the rest of the Avengers can hang out in cool secret flying military bases for only so long before they must have to seek out something to stave off the boredom in between world-ending evil plots. As the summer looms large for many educators, some already on break, I wonder what my colleagues do in their "off time". I know that some tend to small family farms, others do driver’s education (more teaching), and tutoring (ditto), but I’m always curious about the teachers that have jobs beyond what you might expect. I used to work at a small independent children’s bookstore in the summers, which actually complimented my growth as an elementary educators, but I do know a few that have tended-bar, played "dj" for the summer, and one recent discovery was a teacher who has taken a 2 year leave of absence to join the Peace Corps. Those are certainly "un-teacher" like in much the same way that Captain America typing away on a computer doing data analysis or input would seem rather "un-hero" like (even if it is just a tiny LEGO model of him). I don’t have the luxury of unwinding anymore; I work almost all year long (save for July) in my position as an instructional technologist. The summer is different, where I get to develop and work on curriculum and plan for the coming year, but it’s still in the same environment as the rest of the school year, and I miss that "down time" of being able to turn off teacher-me and do something completely else. Which is probably why I’ve been so enamored with ds106 this past year, and plan to spend a great deal of time this summer learning a lot of new tech tricks and tools thanks to creative assignments such as the "comic book effect" image above. I hope it can get me through the rather lonely weeks of late June and early August when the buildings are close to deserted and I have to force myself to stay on task, with only the clock as my closest reminder of any deadlines. For those curious about creating the  comic effect above with Photoshop, I found a rather ridiculously easy tutorial on YouTube that you can watch below.

In honor of Jim Groom, who can’t quite seem to keep the H.M.S. DS106 in ship-shape (it’s hard, all of us passengers are always banging on the hull and tossing vital equipment overboard). As the counselor of Bunk House 5 at Camp Magic Macguffin this summer, I thought it be best if I lead by example. For starters, I’ve invented a new camp game, called "ds106 technical difficulty art" and for this week only it’s worth 36 stars! That’s right, 36 stars, which means I’ve topped Mr. Groom’s star count for this week of Visual Assignments. I will gladly add this to the official ds106 assignment repository once it’s back up and running. UPDATE I’ve now added this as an official assignment in the ds106 assignment repository, which means I fully expect a whole heap of ds106 technical difficulty warnings/labels/macguffins by the end of the current incarnation of the course. I really wanted to place this assignment in a "free form" sort of category, as you could easily complete it with a wide range of media (especially given ds106radio doesn’t handle images too well last time I checked). In the end I felt a visual assignment would be best because you can create a still, or the illusion of a video with an animated gif (which is what I did above).

lazy weekends call for lazy art, right? It’s the weekend, time for a few errands, grocery shopping, mending a bit of that landscape edging you promised your wife you’d get to a month ago, and spending some time with the kids. Truth be told, our weekends are usually all sorts of busy here in the Rimes’ household, and I’m sure any other family with younger children will agree, it’s far too easy to find yourself working harder on a Saturday than you might have during the week. We’d like to think of Saturday and Sunday as "lazy" days in which we can relax with our family and friends, and just enjoy the brief time we have before heading "back to the edu-coal mines" on Monday. Reality though, typically means that we plan more activities and structure instead of playtime on those two precious days (at least it feels that way in our house many weekends). So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by capturing a silly moment, and completing a ds106 assignment (yes, even ds106 can feel like one of those weekend chores if you’re trying to "play good" and complete the right number of assignments). But that’s beside the point! How in the world is this applicable to the classroom? Quite often I see teachers in my district using Photobooth for one of two projects; either photos of everyone at the beginning of the year to go up on walls or special bulletin boards, or "special effects" photos for big projects. It’s a shame that they don’t have access to the Macbooks more often (each elementary only has 2 MacBook carts, the MS and HS 3 carts apiece), because Photobooth would make an excellent visual journaling tool for capturing daily learning experiences, moods, and just the general well-being of learning going on in a classroom. Photobooth does stills and video, so you could switch it up from day to day, maybe even taking subsequent shots to stitch together as an animated gif, or create a series of video reflections from a bunch of students after a rather large project. Today, I just used it to capture the kids and me being silly around the breakfast table. The "Warhol Effect" was appropriate, and rather than print it out, post it on a nice bulletin board to make the hallways or classroom walls "more presentable" like I see at school, I’m just going to post it here in a quick "this is what’s going through my head right now" manner. No doubt the kids and I will stumble across it in a few years time (I’ve dumped it into my iPhoto album as well) and have a nice memory of this morning.

The end of the school year is always difficult for me. Whether it’s due to the fact that I’ve lived my life by the typical North American school calendar stretching back as far as my memory will take me (K-12, then college, followed immediately with my first teaching job), or if I just have a difficult time making transitions, the creature of habit within me gets a little melancholy when the halls empty, and there are no more "in the moment" teaching tasks or challenges to tackle. Were I a bit younger, and prone to more publicly venting my weariness with the world at this time of year, you might mistake me for a rather pessimistic being, but truth be told, I’m usually the first to try and find the silver lining in most situations. Which is why I decided to write this morning (that and there’s another 14 minutes left of upgrading on the machine I’m working on). Usually the start of June is a time when I’m trying to not crash and burn, having flown at high altitudes for most of the school year, and try to slide gracefully into summer with my creative and productive fuel tanks holding only fumes. I’m not sure if those outside of education understand the mentally and physically draining demands of the "always on" work flow of those in education, although I suspect I could be a bit biased, not having experienced the world world outside of academia (a reality that I’m sure some would say is not real cause to complain). The truth is, it usually takes me a few attempts to really relax into summer, and I had my first good attempt this past weekend in the backyard with the kids. We got playing with a new app for my iPad called Echograph, an incredibly powerful cinemagraph creation tool. I created the animated gif above of my daughter sliding down into our backyard using it, and while it certainly doesn’t quite create the high quality animated gifs that can be achieved through the use of a professional tool like Photoshop and a very nice DSLR camera, it does a rather serviceable job for being a $2.99 app on the iTunes store. I won’t go into detail on how to actually use it (it’s dead simple and the app itself walks you through each step of the process), but I really appreciated the concept behind the actual app. The creators wanted to make sure that the technical process of creating such striking digital art didn’t get in the way of digital artists, whether they be casual weekend dabblers like myself, or professionals fine tuning their craft. There’s even a way to import high quality media from a camera (a DSLR with a nice lens) to produce high quality animated gifs that do much more to codify the digital artifacts as actual art, and not just a way to "dress up" the art by calling it a Cinemagraph. Check out one of the developer’s videos as they explain the importance of how I see tools that "get out of the way" for the creator, rather than provide a barrier. Here’s to hoping that a 3 dollar purchase can help ease my landing into summer, and let me refuel some of the creativity I’ve lost/spent/shared over the course of the last 9 months. My guess is though, that spending more time with my kids will most likely have a much more lasting and substantial effect For those interested in the app, you can check out the link below. It’s well worth the money for a tool that can create something in less than 5 minutes that would normally take me anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes using Photoshop to meticulously stitch it all together.  

I’m not much one for creating "how to" videos, at least not ones that I share publicly on a regular basis, but I felt as though I owed it to some of the people whose blogs I’m following to help out a bit with the monolithic application that is Photoshop. Don’t get too excited though, I am far from being a Photoshop expert, most of my skills having waned since being a heavy Fark.com Photoshop Contest participant in the early 2000s. When I saw Melanie Barker complete the quick, but fun "Slide Guy" assignment (which coincidentally remind me of a lot of the Fark contests), I was impressed. When she said she did it because she was afraid of Photoshop, I wanted to share just a couple of simple tools that I use for cutting and pasting elements from one image to another. Below is the image I created for the ds106 Slide Guy Visual Assignment using a still from a rather famous movie and a shot of Tim Owens joyously sliding down a child’s playground slide. Look at that slide guy having so much fun trying to crush poor Dr. Jones! Again, please bear in mind that I am an absolute novice when it comes to Photoshop, and the tools I show may very well be the worst tools to use for cutting, copying, and pasting images as far as a professional graphic designers are concerned, but these tools are super easy to use, and don’t really require that much to figure out, just a bit of practice to master. If it benefits you at all, please enjoy my 6 minute walkthrough of using the magic lasso tool in Photoshop. You can view it below or click here to watch via YouTube.

cat by Nickym007 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License Your browser does not support the audio tag. kitten19.wav What you’re seeing (and possibly hearing) above is the result of some rather clever code & mashup work done by John Johnston, an amazingly creative ICT Development Officer (which is U.K. speak for "educational technology nerd who likes to create nifty tools for others"). I’ve been finding it difficult to get back into the groove of things after last week’s rather anticlimactic end to the school year (we had lots of layoffs and the mood was grim). I thought I’d try a few simple tools found over on the ds106 assignment repository to just play around and see what I could find that I haven’t tackled before, and wham! Here I find this amazingly little tool that John cooked up called FlickrSounds! The concept of FlickrSounds is rather simple; enter in a search term, let’s say "cat" from the example above. John’s little magical tool scours two popular sites for an image and a sound that match that term. Once it’s found media tagged with your search term, it delivers a Creative Commons lisenced image from Flickr, and an equally Creative Commons lisenced sound from the Free Sound project (a fantastic site that I highly encourage you to go visit and use for all of your audio needs….just as soon as you’re done reading this post!). While I was a bit skeptical of how I might actually create something of interest beyond the early elementary set of learners (look, a cat, and you can hear it meow!), what my search returned greatly astonished, entertained, and excited me! While I expected the Flickr search to return an image of a cat, I got a picture of a Catterpillar brand excavator instead! I was estatic! What a fantastic way to not only violate the expectations of learners, but also help them explore the world of language, meaning, homophones, and more! The connotation of the word "cat", while most universally accepted to mean a small furry pet, has other definitions in certain circles (construction and excavation work obviously). What a fun way to help students grasp the idea that our cultural and personal experiences with language help shape our view of the world through the mental images we bring up when we hear words. This is more easily identified when working with homophones (deer/dear, meet/meat, etc.), but the juxtaposition of the imagery and sound with the FlickrSound tool is astonishingly more eye opening! As proof, I give you 4 more searches I submitted using the same term, "cat". You’ll find what you expected, some cats and soft cat-like noises, but you’ll also find the electronic sound that "Nyan Cat" makes as it flies through the air leaving a rainbow trail (don’t ask, just go watch, it’s a Japanese thing). You’ll also find some "cat" beats from snares, and while I didn’t include it, there are plenty more images of construction equipment. I’m half surprised I didn’t find some "hepcat" jazz musician via the random Flickr search. cat by Castaway in Scotland Attribution-NonCommercial License Your browser does not support the audio tag. rawdata4.wav cat by WebSphinx Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License Your browser does not support the audio tag. cat (Betty McDaniels 3).wav cat by WebSphinx Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License Your browser does not support the audio tag. CatBeat_Snare.wav cat by MiNe (sfmine79) Attribution-NoDerivs License Your browser does not support the audio tag. CatBeat_Hit.wav If you work with English language learners, either as their primary or secondary language, the FlickrSounds tool developed by John would be a must in my bag of teaching resources to provide a really nice visual and audio twist on helping students explore the quite fluid nature of the English language. It’s free, it’s fun, and best of all, it has a real nice embedding tool that will let you add multiple searches to a preview window, so you can embed multiple creations all at once (as I did above). Think it’s just for younger learners? Ha! Check out the searches I did for the word "rough"! Talk about a great way to build up vocabulary through visual and audio interpretations of a word! There’s so much imagery stored deep within our brains that a single word can conjure up, this tool might also be useful in illustrating just how easy miscommunication can happen, especially when conversing with just text across the web. rough by Robert Hruzek Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License Your browser does not support the audio tag. MPC2K59.WAV rough by Capt’ Gorgeous Attribution License Your browser does not support the audio tag. MPC2K59.WAV rough by Doun Dounell Attribution License Your browser does not support the audio tag. snap.aif rough by henna lion Attribution-NonCommercial License Your browser does not support the audio tag. MPC2K56.WAV

Kid these days… They can text rings around us adults, figure out the most complex of technical devices, and multitask so fast that keyboards are in danger of spontaneous combustion from all the furious clicking of keys, right? Wrong! I have yet to see any students exhibit on a mass scale the skills and innate abilities that those labeled "digital natives" are supposed to have (note, I never used the term digital native, I thought it was bogus from the start). The truth of the matter is, some students are more apt to be able to figure out complicated software, dart in and out of multiple windows, but no more so than the number of students who excel at football, complex differentials, or playing the guitar. I’m not saying that students can’t adapt, but rather the myths of multi-tasking (aka acquired inattention) need to be laid to rest, and replaced with actual shortcomings of attempting to multi-task. Which leads me to the following audio snippet I captured earlier this evening at my piano (warning, I’m not that great at piano). To me, the ability to multi-task doesn’t impress unless someone is attempting to accomplish two rather difficult cognitive tasks (completely dependent on the individual’s talents that is). For example, I have a terribly difficult time trying to play the piano and talk at the same time. Thus, I present to you, my attempt to "Multitask This!" Download: 12-bar-blues.mp3 Imagine how much fun it would be to showcase your shortcomings the first day of school by sharing a small piece of audio like this? Let your students know up front that there are some things even teachers have a hard time accomplishing (and maybe get a few laughs out of it). A bit more seriously though, the idea of multi-tasking is that it’s either HARD to accomplish a few tasks well, or it’s EASY to do a pretty crappy job at a lot of tasks. Would you rather have your students struggling to accomplish something monumental, like creating effective and moving persuasive video essays of their written work? Or would you rather keep them busy with an endless litany of mindless "edu-games" that mostly just serve as distractions? If you’re interested in creating your own "Multitask This!" audio snippet, I’d love to hear the results. Just capture some audio (unedited of course) of you trying to accomplish two tasks that seem rather basic, perhaps even elementary when completed in isolation, yet present quite a challenge for you when combined.

I’ve been following Jim Groom’s "Name that 80s movie" 4 icon challenge series, and while he promised that they would become more difficult, I think the many summers I spent glued to the TV watching HBO for hours on end gives me an unfair advantage (I totally nailed the Flash Gordon one). I thought I’d try to up the "name that obscure movie" difficulty level, and while it was entertaining for myself to put together the following 4 icon challenge (I learned how to make a parchment-like background in Adobe Illustrator), I’m not sure if I did actually come up with something that will stump anybody….at least not anyone who is halfway decent with Google searching. Think you can name the this movie? I continue to fiddle with the 4 icon challenge concept, this time blending both icons and actual images, one of those images laying over another. It’s not that I think it adds to the piece any, I’m just having some fun as I mess around with trying to visually represent the major elements of the story. If you haven’t read any of my previous posts about the 4 icon challenge, you can check out how visually summarizing a movie, book, or other story is both really easy using tech, and is a great way for students to summarize major story elements, while having a bit of fun. image credits: vitruvian man - http://thenounproject.com/noun/vitruvian-man/#icon-No2532 gold brick - http://www.officialpsds.com/Gold-Bricks-PSD31100.html mask - http://www.denbigharmysurplus.co.uk/army-stores/balaclava004.jpg cup - http://thenounproject.com/noun/coffee/#icon-No16

When I was young, I remember the often corny, yet well-intentioned, motivational and inspirational posters that my teachers would tape to the walls. Whether it was kittens, scenes from nature, or celebrities telling me how cool reading is, I noticed that some posters appeared in more than one classroom. Throughout my formative years, certain posters crept up more often than others, and whether it was just that those posters were more popular, or if the teachers just got a bunch of freebies throughout the district of the same ones, I always thought it would be fun to make your own. And that’s just what I did today during one of Rushton Hurley’s digital media workshops. Since I use most of the tools and resources extensively that Rushton talks about, I thought I’d use my "exploration" time to use a piece of creative commons media, rather than just find an example to save for later. I thus present to you, my own "super-cheesy" inspirational poster made with the help of this creative commons licensed image created by pfv on Flickr. Knowledge….it’s cheesy. I know that images of books or monitors with bright lights illuminating someone’s face are trite and overused, most likely because the metaphor is so easy to convey via visual media. The point is, in about 5 minutes I was able to create my own cheesy motivational image using a Creative Commons Flickr search and Adobe Photoshop (although GIMP or even Preview on your Mac would do this for free). I didn’t spend any money, I can most likely print this off for less than 25 cents at my local library or school, and I can create new ones each month, week, or even every day if I get bored easily…which I do. Feel free to create your own "lazy" inspirational posters and share them!