Yesterday I shared a quick "how-to" video about exporting your Google Reader subscriptions. It’s the first step for users looking to find a new RSS feed reader with the announcement this week that Google will shutter the service on July 1st. I shot out a tweet asking for alternatives to Google’s Reader service, and created the Storify below of some alternatives. Hopefully, the second step of getting your exported subscriptions into a new RSS reader goes well. A quick run down of alternative RSS feed reader alternatives to Google Reader, as collected from the greater Twitterverse! View the story "Alternatives to Google Reader" on Storify

The annual conference for the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) came to a close last Friday with a rousing call from Steve Dembo (@teach42). He urged educators and schools to dare to be first; first with new ideas, first with destroying traditional classroom notions, and first with charting new paths to digital learning and collaboration. Somewhere between Steve calling out the "crazies" amongst us as being the ones with the greatest potential for positive change and being urged to avoid policies dictated by fear, I got an idea. I decided to have a bit of fun and "meme-ify" some of the main elements of the closing keynote. I brought up the MemeGenerator site and brought up a few choice image memes. A word of warning, it’s probably not a good idea to use MemeGenerator with your students; while the site attracts some of the funniest users on the internet, it also attracts some of the web’s bottom feeders as far as humor goes.   With such a diverse crowd of educators in attendance at the MACUL Conference (over 4,200 this year), we could certainly spend a lifetime arguing over the nuances of what traditional classroom notions are. I’m confident there’s a strong consensus that desks in rows, teacher-centered lectures, students regurgitating others’ work, and no connection to digital tools or the media ecosystem omnipresent in our lives today covers most of the big definitions of traditional classroom notions. So how do we try to innovate our learning environments without being labeled as one of the "bad crazies"?   I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to avoid being labeled crazy (whether it’s the bad or good kind.) If you’re the teacher who’s encouraging students to ask open ended questions and challenge the traditional notion of lecture, skill acquisition through repetition, and mastery determined through high stakes assessment, you’re going to get called on it. If you’re not called out as crazy by your colleagues, then perhaps a principal, parent, or community member. That’s alright, Steve suggests; brilliance is often mistaken for crazy in most cases before the big "shift" occurs pushing everyone else into the "crazy" bin. It’s happened already with our culture Steve pointed out; who would have thought 5 years ago that "checking in" at stores and restaurants using your mobile device, and sharing pictures of what you’re eating with the rest of the world would now be considered normal? A few crazy people that are now selling their start-up companies for billions of dollars to the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.   The inner critic in me begged the question, "But how do we know the "good" crazy from the "bad" crazy?" Not every notion of how to move past traditional classrooms leads to greater knowledge acquisition and empowering learning environments. Khan Academy was heralded as a "personalized" learning environment for every student, but drives a farther wedge between districts and communities that have access to technology and those that don’t. The Common Core State Standards have refocused the integration of technology into all content areas, but many parent groups are now pushing back on the idea of students all being put into the same "mold". There’s a dangerous game we play within our learning communities when we paint ideas as being crazy or brilliant with such bold brush strokes, so I’d advocate that all of those willing to take the "crazier" path of learning, make sure you still have lines of communication back to home base. It’s not bad to be crazy, but it can be extremely detrimental when we breed fear of the unknown in those around us.   The point Steve made about fear was earlier in his talk, but I saved it for the end. He made an excellent point about the fears that legislators, administrators, and even our colleagues use to justify poor policies, and discourage sharing of what others might deem crazy. Fear is a big business in many industries; personal and corporate liability insurance, web content filtering in education, anti-poaching policies and deals among corporate rivals. To build on that point, how do we build encouragement and excitement about breaking down our classroom walls, sharing what our students are accomplishing (both the process and the end product) without creating new atmospheres of fear? I’ve seen the "bright spots" of sharing in my district push teachers and students to greater depths of understanding and achievement. I’ve also seen those same bright spots of sharing breed resentment and fear in colleagues around them. What sort of strategies can we employ to combat those fears and anxiety of "I’m not doing enough?" Do we herald and champion the success of every teacher and student, no matter how small? Do we pour what little resources we have left (in Michigan at least) into hiring more instructional coaches, or steal create time for more dialogue and conversation among teachers? These are the questions I’m curious about, and I hope others are asking the same. I certainly want to help the exciting learning continue to happen in our more non-traditional classrooms, but I’d love for the rising tides to truly lift all boats in this situation as well. How do we do this, before we miss the boat entirely, and find ourselves on a sinking ship? Or worse, wind up like "Bad Luck, Brian"…with no "ship" at all.      

My three year old son stole my wife’s iPad yesterday and took more than four dozen photos before we knew what was happening. I’m not sure what he was taking pictures of, but I created an animated gif from the images that showed up in my Photostream this morning. It’s quite serene, creating the illusion of something breathing, or a heart beating. Enjoy the end of the week (almost).

It’s April 12th! It’s my Birthday! What better way to celebrate than a special edition of "My Animated GIF Day"! Come back throughout the day for updates with new GIFs…if you’re into that sort of thing   5:56 am I’ve been up for about 30 minutes or so. I woke up before my alarm went off, putting me in a slightly off mood. Sometimes I welcome an early start, and sometimes I feel as though I’ve been cheated out of a few minutes sleep when my body decides it’s time to wake up before the alarm. Regardless, toast helps right any early morning grumpiness, especially toast with butter and jam. Yes, my toaster is a bit grubby. It’s my birthday today, I’ll clean it tomorrow.   6:24 am In the last year I’ve taken up running 3-4 days a week with 50-60 crunches, 20-30 push ups, and a few other exercises on most days. I’ve lost nearly 25 pounds, so while I’m not terribly fit, I’m getting there. Yes, I know I have terrible form. Yes, I know my bedroom looks cluttered. No, I will not show you my pathetic attempts at push ups.   6:38 am My wife started teaching nearly full time again this week after 3 years of being laid off and part time teaching gigs. I’ve been trying to pick up some extra chores in the morning to help make sure the family still gets moving and ready for the day. Packing lunch for the kids is one of my new chores in the morning. It’s fun to help pack some healthy lunches for the kids, but today held an extra treat for me; my daughter (7 years old) decided she wanted to make the sandwiches for her and her brother this morning, so we got to pack up lunch together and chat about the day before we all rushed off to school.   10:15 am After a relatively quiet morning (Friday mornings are when I usually catch up on a lot of emails, paperwork, and other clerical work), I got to help one of our school board members setup his new iPad. Our district purchased the devices for the school board members to ensure they had a simple way to communicate and access all of the important school documents and files through the school’s Google Apps account. After setting up the board member’s email, calendar, and contacts, we chatted a bit about technology in the district (it’s decent), how well our money was being spent (we think we’re getting the best bang for our buck), and what the future holds (we both agreed it looks grim for public schools in Michigan).   11:34 am The Tech department treated me to lunch and homemade desert for my birthday! It was a great lunch at a local place that makes everything from scratch. Country smoked ham and split pea soup on a chilly rainy April day is poetic lunch perfection. As an added bonus, the Systems Administrator at our school has his birthday on Sunday, so our most wonderful co-worker made flour-less chocolate cake and raspberry cheesecake for dessert. My belly is full as I snuggle into my warm chair; it should help me get through the rest of this report I’ve been trying to digest all day amid my other tasks.   2:47 pm I’ve spent a good portion of my day working through the school district’s Technology Profile Report that Apple helped facilitate for us. It’s not the most exhaustive report I’ve ever seen about technology, but it’s certainly one that you want to look through a couple of times with several highlighters and a full pad of sticky notes. There’s a lot of data covering faculties familiarity with various forms of technology and a great cross section of where staff falls on the continuum of technology infusion with their instructional practices. Some of the data is skewed a bit due to a lack of universal access to the tools that every teacher wants, but it’s still a good look at how far along our teacher are with their technology skills. Besides an overview of the district, I can look at each building’s results of the profile survey, and I’ve been surprised with how well one of our buildings is doing at moving the majority of their staff members through the process together. The other three buildings have bright spots as well, but they’re much more scattered along the continuum of Entry/Adoption/Adaptation/Appropriation/Innovation. The stand-out building seems to be clumped together along the continuum in a positive way. This will certainly help shape some of my strategies in the coming months and into next school year as I look to implement some new professional development with staff.   5:14 pm I’m so close to a 30 minute 5K. Another 30 seconds faster and I’ll be there. For now, let’s pretend I can run as quickly as I can tie my shoes in this GIF. It was a nice birthday treat for my wife to let me run when I got home from work. She’s actually been quite supportive of all the time needed to take up the past time; 60 minutes three to four times a week is a big commitment to getting healthy, and we’ve supported one another as she’s been running more regularly as well.     6:03 pm My family went out for a nice birthday dinner at a local restaurant that usually caters to a slightly more upscale crowd than we’re used to dining with. My wife and I usually reserve such an evening for date-night without the kids, but we took them along and we had a blast. The table was covered with thick brown butcher paper that we wrote all over with crayon, and plates piled with chicken nuggets and french fried were a welcome site on the kids menu. They have a pizza oven near the front on the entrance powered by a gas log burner, so while it isn’t terribly authentic, it still gives off a nice glow as you walk in.

Google has been having a rough go of keeping their cloud services up and running smoothly for all users lately. Today is just another example of the sporadic nature of Google Apps "up time" as of late. Google Drive is down, this too shall. Although, would be nice if Google’s 3rd shift janitor updated Dashboard google.com/appsstatus#hl=… — Ben Rimes (@techsavvyed) April 17, 2013 Besides the general headache of lost instructional time that an important educational cloud-based server being down causes, Google’s customer service (or lack thereof) isn’t as robust as many would like it to be. That leaves many Google Apps users to take to Twitter and other social networks just to figure out what’s going on. In my mind, that’s pretty crummy, and leads to all sorts of back and forth speculation as to the cause. Some individuals experience no outages whatsoever, while others have sporadic use of some of their apps. Enter the Google Apps Status Dashboard. It’s not the best tool in the world for keeping up with service outages in real time, but at least it’s a place to start. While it did take at least 45 minutes from the time outages started appearing this morning and the first "problem" was indicated on the Apps Status Dashboard, you can rest assured that if there’s any hint of an orange or pink indicator light on one of the apps, there’s certainly a problem with other apps in Google’s stable. Granted, this gives little comfort to those of us savvy enough to br prowling Twitter for updates on the situation. @kjarrett The Apps Status Dashboard is such a joke. It will be updated at 3pm today after all is cleared up. — Daniel Rezac (@drezac) April 17, 2013 I’m with Daniel on this one, Google could REALLY step up their reporting of outages and real time status updates of Google Apps. However, there are many educators and technical folks in school districts that are completely in the dark when Google Apps go down. Either they aren’t connected on Twitter, or have other re-occuring problems in their district with bandwidth, filtering, or some other internet related malady. For them, the Google Apps Status Dashboard is at least a starting place to make sure it’s "not just them" when Google’s services go down. From there, it’s wise to head over to Twitter to check out the situation. And then complain a bit (or a lot) to Google that offering up more timely information on what’s happening would be appreciated. If anyone else has a starting place for checking on Google’s outages, I’d love to know! Until then, someone get back to work on getting those servers back up and running! Update @techsavvyed Ben, downrightnow.com seems to do a better job of reporting outages than Google or other services. — David Prindle (@dprindle) April 17, 2013 David Prindle shared an excellent website that I hadn’t seen before called Down Right Now. It appears to list more than just Googles services, including Facebook, Tumblr, Skype and many other social and cloud services. This is certainly a great "go to" for future outages across a number of sites. While it doesn’t seem to offer the exact details as to the nature of each outage (you would still have to visit the service provider’s site for that level of information), it does have the great advantage of individual internet users being able to report outages.  

I’m sitting in a classroom on a Saturday morning…learning. That’s right, while all of the #satchat people are busy tweeting, sharing, and collaborating online, I decided to take it to the next level and make the trek to Jackson, Michigan to participate in a casual, participant driven conference focused on connecting educators, not just lecturing to us. The following are my notes, reflections, and thoughts on the day; my apologies for rambling and "stream of thought" composition. Updates throughout the day will hopefully occur. 9:53 am Typically I’m busy watching Saturday morning cartoons or getting ready for the weekly grocery run, but today I’ve already been introduced to GoSoapBox, an interesting Socrative clone that looks to offer a much more robust set of tools for student discussion response. Students can be directed to respond to reading selections, be given polls in class, and even submit questions and participate in quizzes in real time. I enjoyed the ability for Gary Abud (the BYOD session facilitator), I noticed that the while the tool is amazing for quickly generating rich classroom conversations, it’ still limited by your students’ literacy skills. I’m not the world’s best reader (or writer for that matter), and I found myself lagging behind the rest of the group when Gary gave us a short reading assignment to respond to in the workshop. Of course, typing up these notes is hindering my ability to focus as well, so I was glad when Chris Stanley brought up a great point of being able to revisit conversations points throughout the GoSoapBox "event". Sure enough, Gary followed up with a simplistic tool that GoSoapBox has to offer in that participants can simply use an "I’m getting it" or "I"m confused" check in poll (it’s persistent throughout the event) that only the teacher gets to see. So in a way, even though students might be struggling based on their own limited cognitive abilities, the teacher still gets at least an indicator beyond the "vacant stare" as to how well the classroom is getting it. A participant in the session brought up a great point about need the granular knowledge of which students aren’t "getting it" to which Gary responded with a great response; it’s not really all about the technology, you’ll still need some simple "thumbs up/thumbs down" or other face to face strategies to gain better fidelity of where students are at. I’m sure the last two paragraphs sounds like an advertisement for GoSoapBox, but it’s just me trying to work through the tool, finding some interesting features and applications for the teachers I support. It looks like GoSoapBox isn’t so much a Socrative clone as it looks more like an advanced and feature-rich application for learning. Gary went on to share a few more applications for helping students organize their learning (Evernote, Google Drive, InFuseLearning), but I was more interested in the elegant was he framed his BYOD session. Far too often school districts are focused on making a myriad of devices work on the school’s infrastructure, interoperate with shared resources, and make the tech "hum" as best they can. Gary’s BYOD workshop focused on the learning and tools that can happen across a wide number of devices (laptops, iPads, Android, etc.). I’m going to call it "Gary’s" ways to incorporate BYOD. Gary Abud’s 5 Ways to Incorporate BYOD Facilitate Class Discussions Share & Take Notes Interactive Instruction Collaboration Assessment That’s a much simpler framework to build a BYOD program atop. Focus on the instructional practices that need to happen first (something that I’m always advocating for), and then find the technical solutions to help make that happen. Starting with devices is a recipe for "tribalism" and conflicts that won’t get you nearly as far as starting with the instruction first. 10:44 am Gary finished up his workshop elaborating on the "interactive instructional space" that he’s created through blending his face to face instruction and conversations with digital tools. Socrative helps anonymize student responses, alleviating peer pressure that stunts curiosity in the classroom. I agree, and subscribe to this theory. Creating discrepant events for your students helps capture curiosity (Gary did a couple of simple physics demonstrations for us, having us pretend to be high school students), but that interest can quickly be squelched when the possibility of incorrect responses could potentially be used to "judge" anyone’s ability to learn. Finding the right "mix" of tools to help create this environment, but still deliver the type of individualized student responses and data we need as educators, can be difficult. Should we focus our scant time and resources into pushing students to use a single LMS like Edmodo or Moodle, often pushing those tools past their intended uses? Or should we find ways to blend some of the tools mentioned in this brief reflection (along with face to face learning opportunities) to create a much more flexible, yet slightly scattered, learning environment? Click here for Gary Abud’s presentation slides about BYOD. 11:46 am Lunch time…and trivia! Go team Imagination Dragons! We bombed out, but we had a great time doing it, and I got to chat more with Anthony DiLaura and hear about his work at Zeeland schools (a recent one to one iPad district). 12:27 pm Saturday afternoon, a time to finish up chores around the house, catch a quick nap, wrestle with the kids, and do a bit of grading for the online class I’m instructing currently….usually. This afternoon I’m headed into another round of sessions before leading my first ever Video Story Problem workshop. I’m a bit nervous about what participants will be able to accomplish in an hour and 15 minutes. I’m going to quickly re-hash my Video Story Problem presentation that I put together for the K-12 Online Conference, and then move into "lab time". I’m hopeful that participants will be able to capture some video, and still have enough time to edit it to the point of "ready to share". My ultimate goal is to have at least one video that someone feel good enough to share out to the wider audience of the internet. As an added bonus, Michelle Dubois, one of the awesome Michigan teachers whose great student video story problems I mentioned in a previous post, is here at the conference! And she’s brought a few teachers with her to start working on their own! 12:37 pm I’m sitting in Andy Losik’s session on iMovie, Keynote, and MacGyver. For those not familiar with the television show, MacGyver is a DIY mastermind, capable of turning a few scraps from your average workshop junk drawer into a torpedo. This was a great session choice right after lunch, when my capacity to engage in serious intellectually rigorous conversation is typically at a low point for the day.  Not that Andy doesn’t have a lot of great to talk about in the instructional arena. This session was more focused on the mechanics of creating some fun and engaging media. In addition to showing off how to create your own custom "video" titles for iMovie using Keynote, he also showed up the PopcornMaker tool from the Mozilla foundation. It’s a fascinating web-based video editing tool that lets you add your own custom overlays, "pop ups" and other media to your videos. He used it to create a fantastic lip dub video in the style of VH1′s old "pop up" videos. Check it out here or watch it below:   2:28 pm I led a rousing workshop about Video Story Problems. Well, I led a small workshop at least, with some good conversations. Not so sure about "rousing". It was an interesting experience as I got to work with some language arts and social studies teachers (a group that I would love to start exploring video with). They had some wonderful thoughts about how to bring in elements of the real world into their classroom via video to help illustrate concepts, and I was excited they saw ways to incorporate video into the classrooms that wasn’t just "flipping". Not there’s anything wrong with flipping, it just takes up a lot of the edtech conversation space that it’s difficult to make inroads with other forms of instructional practice. Here’s to "widening the plate".   2:41 pm And now I’m no longer in the dark on the "Pep Talk from Kid President" video. I have no idea why I hadn’t watched this video before. I had seen it go past my social media streams, but just never clicked on it. I’m glad I finally saw it. Share it widely!

For regular readers of my blog, you may have already guessed that the dancing mushrooms above can only mean one thing….I’m about to succumb to another intensive 5 weeks of DS106, the best digital storytelling course in this universe, although I’m told it will soon be available in many of the other multiverses. For those that many be unfamiliar with DS106, or have only recently stumbled across my musings here on the web, pull up a seat for the next few weeks, as this simple GIF is just the first small speed bump on the road to the digital storytelling dimension known as the DS106Zone!  

Let’s keep this relatively short and simple shall we? I’ve spent just a month shy of 10 years in education, and I feel as though some days I know just about as much as I did on day one in the teaching field. I’m not going to call it an industry, because that term would only serve to acknowledge the increasingly perverse ways that educational institutions are being transmogrified (or at least attempted) into for-profit institutions that no longer server the public, only public shareholders. No, let’s not tap that keg of dynamite….yet. Instead, let’s take a few moments to lament that the more things change, the more they stay the same, including technology. It would seem that the more creative, collaborative, and integral technological tools become to education, the quicker people are to turn these new tools into nothing more than digital pencils. Desktops and laptops quickly become "electronic typewriters" despite their ability to edit movies, produce music, manipulate imagery, and reach out to the web. iPads and other mobile devices become "portable televisions" despite their feature set begging these devices to be mobile digital video production units and windows capable of capturing small glimpses into the educational progress of learners. We’re given Google Docs, and we find new ways for students to share writing and comments with JUST their teacher. We ignore the precipice of unabridged transformational writing that real-time collaborative and revisioning tools like Google Docs offer. We’re given iPads, and we find new ways for students to play rote math and emergent literacy games. We ignore the sublime valley of digital storytelling and learner narration of the world around them through video, audio, and text. We’re given electronic interactive surfaces covering our walls, and we find new ways to present slideshows. We don’t even risk allowing learners to build their own simulations and interactives to share with the rest of the class, demonstrating how they perceive the world. Before you fire up some flaming hot comments below, especially if you work with me currently, please understand these are not the realities of every classroom that I observe. But they are the reality in many more classrooms than should be the norm. Even as we profess our desires for every student to have access to a device for learning and growing numbers of educators clamor for professional development "our way, meeting our needs", far too many of us are too slow on transforming our own learning environments and realities. When we get access to the technology, we find ways to replace or substitute analog learning quite rapidly, many of us even going so far as to adapt and transform activities and units in subtle and slight ways. Then we start to slip. Instead of trying to push forward to some sort of true transformational experience, the "shininess" wears off. The grind, or the test, or the standards, or some other mass of excuses stunts our growth. We find ourselves slowly sliding backward, unable to make the final leap to some new level of deeper understanding of how the small rectangular pieces of plastic and metal on our desks will truly help our students in new ways. We go back to waiting for the next push; the next new thing. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still moving forward, we’re still growing, we’re still discovering new instructional realities in ever so incremental steps. It’s just that some days it feels like we’re only retreading a path we’ve already pushed forward down once before, and will likely retrace yet again. Our RSS readers and inboxes are full of links from "the best" educational technology resource sharing blogs, many of which seem now to merely present rehashed tools, websites, and apps that only re-arrange our sandboxes for learning, rather than create new ones. The tools, social networks, and silver bullets of yesteryear become the digital dust beneath our feet as we trod along the weary paths. Perhaps I’m being too melancholy, or reacting poorly after a small string of failures. I can’t help but ask though if I’m not too far off the mark, or if there truly is some large upswell of transformative teaching and learning through technology that I’m missing. Perhaps one more trip around will tell.

It’s the end of the school year, end of term work is piling up on your desk and inbox,  it makes more sense to count the remainder of the instructional time you have with students in hours rather than days, and you feel like if a panic button magically appeared on your desk, you’d smash it without a moment of hesitation. That’s sort of where I am right now. I’ve been failing miserably in keeping up with the DS106 assignments for this past week (I managed a lowly 3 animated GIFS), the end of year PD plan for technology is falling apart, and I’m chasing the loose ends of all the conferences I’m attending his summer like a neophyte teacher with wide eyes. That’s not to say I’m not enjoying the experience! But after watching the pilot episode of the Twilight Zone, I’m desperately seeking a panic button for a few hours of escape. Titled under the misnomer of "Where is Everybody?", the fledgling episode of Rod Serling’s seminal program about the paranormal explores the depths of human sanity with the deprivation of all contact with other beings (sorry, no spoiler alerts for a 60+ year old television program). The premise starts simply enough; a man with no recollection of who he is, or where he came from, awakens to find the world completely devoid of other beings. Tea kettles are left boiling on stoves, jukeboxes playing, and automated recordings are all that’s to be heard when dialing the operator. As the main character attempts to pass off his uncanny solitude with jokes and monologues delivered to himself in the mirror, it becomes painfully obvious that someone, or something is watching his every move. The feeling of being under careful watch, something that all teachers in Michigan can most likely identify with these days, becomes apparent. Before long, our protagonist is reduced to a sobbing heap of a man, finding a crosswalk signal, and desperately mashing the button as though it were some sort of "panic button" capable of ending his torment. It’s a fantastic story, and worth watching if you haven’t experienced the joys of the Twilight Zone. Provided Hulu is still allowing embedded video, you can watch it below. I’m glad that I’ve jumped into this abbreviated term of DS106. It’s a great release for the stress that builds up at the end of the school year (my own personal "panic button" if you will), and it’s a great chance to explore and mine a lot of really great vintage media from the Twilight Zone; the theme of DS106 this go around is the DS106 Zone, a riff on the black and white series of yesteryear. If you haven’t ever watched the original Twilight Zone episodes, or if it’s just been a nice long time since you caught them on TV, slide over to Hulu and watch a few episodes! I had anticipated watching a few minutes in order to produce the animated GIF at the top of this article for the Twilight Zone animated GIF assignment, but I ended up watching nearly an hour of terrific classic sci-fi and paranormal story telling, a great release for any teacher at the end of the school year, when some of the stress and duties put upon us feels as though some omnipotent being is orchestrating the very demise of our sanity.

DS106 is a magical and serendipitous course. There’s really nothing else like it. The recent Education Technology MOOC that Alec Couros and Alan Levine, among others, helped facilitate this Winter came close to matching DS106. It had awesomely silly collaborative experiences, and fantastic conversations based around the educational use of technology that helped introduce a host of educators to blogging, but it just wasn’t DS106. There’s something about the student generated assignments, and creative constraints placed upon participants, that scratches a particularly fantastic itch for me. Enter Brian Bennett, young educator and "Flipped Learning" expert. After some early prodding, some video story problems, and a few exploratory GIFs, Brian decided to jump in with both feet for this "Twilight Zone" themed go-around of DS106. I’d say he’s in way over his head, but the man has been treading water like a champ, completing scores of assignments last week alone! He even completed a special assignment for yours truly, entitled Ben Rimes is a Monster. I know, some of you may be confused…how is that a good thing? It’s DS106, it’s always good! By creating the "Savvy Mage", a Dungeons and Dragons character, Brian adroitly captured my more pugnacious failings, yet stroked my ego by extolling my perceptive abilities….unless of course that’s just the fake Dungeons and Dragons wizard part of it I decided I wanted to return the favor. The actual DS106 design assignment was to create a Dungeons and Dragons creature card for someone else, weaving a backstory for the individual chosen into the creature’s description. This is a digital storytelling class remember, so there’s a lot of fun to be had in describing fellow classmates as monsters. I was really excited to do this assignment, as I hadn’t attempted it before now, and even though I’ve only played Dungeons and Dragons once, I did spend a lot of time playing Magic: The Gathering in the mid 90s (yes, I’m a nerd). I decided to put a twist on the assignment, and rather than turn Brian into a Dungeons and Dragons monster, I turned him into a Magic card. Meet Brian Bennett, the Human Educator, otherwise known as "Azamuki, the Video Lord". For those that have never played Magic: The Gathering, it’s a skill and luck based strategic card game in which players cast spells, summon monsters, and conjure up power artifacts, representing all the magic with cards placed in front of them on a table. Each turn a player gets to draw a new unseen card from a draw pile, and hopefully have enough "mana" (magic points basically) to cast a spell. I had an absolute blast creating this card, as not only was it a special "flip" card (which I thought might be fitting for Brian), but I also tossed a couple of easter eggs into the design. For those that may still be confused about the whole concept, I took an image of the "Cunning Bandit/Azamuki, Treachery Incarnate" card and took it into Photoshop to doctor it up for the assignment. Replacing the names of the card was relatively easy, using the clone stamp tool to erase the words with the color and texture from elsewhere on the card. I left the hit and defense points the same as the original since I figured Brian Bennet the human, and Brian Bennett as Azamuki would have simliar attributes. I played with his creature type, turning him into a "Human Educator" when first brought out onto the field, but felt it was fitting to leave him as a Legendary Spirit once the card is flipped. Brian’s sort of a legend in the "Flipped Learning" world, so that worked well. The text describing the creature’s actual abilities were a hoot, and I was able to play Brian’s strength in the flipped world of video learning against Khan Academy, the defacto "Flipped Video Learning" heavyweight. The idea was devilish, geeky, and humorous all at once. Brian’s creature card is actually a heavy-handed deterrent for anyone looking to play a "Khan-based" game of education. Once Brian is on the field of play, he welcomes all Khan creatures, but comes loaded for bear to deal with any of the shenanigans that Khan supporters might toss his way. Upon arrival of any Khan-based creatures, Brian’s card is flipped, and Azamuki is born, armed with several "Ki" bombs to lob should any Khan supporters claim individual teachers (with actual connections to the students they’re teaching) shouldn’t waste their time making instructional "flipped" videos, instead using the cookie cutter videos provided by Khan. I’m really happy about the way this project turned out, and I’m looking forward to digging a bit deeper with DS106 in the coming weeks. This assignment was a blast, and it reminded me of the Explorer Baseball Cards that I used to have my 5th graders make back when Webquests were still cool. I’m a sucker for assignments that get kids manipulating digital images, giving them free reign to explore how digital art tools can often be analogous to real world art tools, but provide a depth of fidelity that traditional paper and paint can’t achieve. Working with layers, clone tools, copy/paste, and graphic design basics are all important elements of creation with computers. You can even go younger, as I had 3rd graders that turned pictures of themselves into super heroes. They had a blast doing that particular assignment, and were able to turn them into wonderful spoken stories via VoiceThread. You don’t need Photoshop to do this sort of work either; a simple JPEG from the internet or a camera opened in MS Paint or GIMP are both great FREE alternatives that can get your students exploring the basics of digital storytelling through graphic design and remixing.