Final Project.

I haven't informed you to the fullest of my final project. What I plan to do is make tutorial on how to play the harmonica. I am going to take a video with a digital camera of myself explaining how to play, such as the different notes, cords, how to clean it, how not to clean it etc. I will use Windows Movie Maker to put it all together, with pictures I have found on the internet and also some songs that have the harmonica that I really enjoy. Since I have come down with a bad cold (got blood taken for mono today), I do not really have a voice to do this. I am going to have to wait until next weekend to film this. However, I have found all of the other information I need to use. So I think I will be alright. Thats all for now, I think I need some honey lemon tea and buckleys.

Podcastin' Problems Prevented.

Thankyou to Robin yet again. In one of her blog posts she gave a link to a site that turns my audio into an html and lets me embed it into my blog!It was under the blog title Skyping with Maria Knee. So here you go, my very first podcast. Music at the beginning is by a great old school ska band called The Specials. I hope you enjoy this and maybe find some of it helpful!

Set your goals high enough to inspire and low enough to encourage you.
-Author Unknown

podcast problems

I have finsihed my podcast, I am just currently trying to figure out how to put the mp3 onto my Blog. If anyone knows how, fill me in! Otherwise I think I am going to have to post it on YouTube, and then embed it from there. I really don't want to do that though, so if anyone knows of an alternative, I would love to know and would be very thankful!
In the meantime I will share with you an email I recieved the other day. I love nature so I thought this was pretty neat. As you can see to your right, is an iceberg.I cebergs in the Antarctic area sometimes have stripes, formed
by layers of snow that react to different conditions. Blue stripes are often created when a crevice in the ice sheet fills up with meltwater and freezes so quickly that no bubbles form. When an iceberg falls into the sea, a layer of salty seawater can
freeze to the underside. If this is rich in algae, it can form a
green stripe.
I thought these were very beautiful. And even thought the weather has been nice lately, do not let it fool you, it is possible for it to get cold again. I do hate being a pessimist, really, but the bright side is, our earth wouldnt have these beautiful things without the feezing weather right? So thank Mr. Winter sometimes, because he needs some love too.

Google Maps

I had already made a map on Google Maps, for one of my videos. However, I did not go into full detail as I did for this one. As Amber said, I could not figure out how to do the video portion of the assignment. Anyhow, here is my trip to Jamacia!

View Larger Map

Educational How-To Podcasts

For my second and educational podcast, I chose "One- Minute How-Tos". I thought this was perfect for my final project and others as well and there were many helpful how-to videos. for example, How-to make a website, How-to get noticed on Flickr, if these apply to you, I really suggest that you download them because they are quick audios packed with information. The one I chose was "How-to Perform before an audience". For my Aesthetics Education class I have to perform a song I wrote and play the harmonica. Now, I have expressed in the passed that I have a little bit of stage fright, and I thought this would be very valuable to me. Some of the tips were given by a man named Ken. He is from Dallas Texas and performs something he called "bad attitude comedy" he said he has had encoutners of messing up on stage therefore he thought he was qualified gave these tips:
-assess audience, how old are they, adopt an attidue to fit with their attitudes
-embrace your fear, when you do this at least you know your alive
-practice your material till your sick of it
-persevereve till your done, even if you mess up like forgetting a lyric, it is okay. The point is if you dont try at all then it truly will be a failed attempt
accept the fact that you are terrified and do it anyway
-give self freedom to be horrible because if you do forget that lyric you will have experienced that moment of blankness and know how to cope with it for next time. You will always learn something new
-set up and survey the performance space before hand, then when you go back you feel more comfortable.
This short educational video helped me for a number of reasons. It showed me that everyone gets frightened on stage, at least once in their life. But if you hang in their, people will respect the fact that you had the courage to perform in front of them. It was also helpful because it gave me confidence to know that I already know my audience as they are my peers. I am guessing they will be supportive of me, whether they like my music or not.
These one minute How-To's are great, in addition to this specific video, as a how-to video in general, it will help me create my final project. These videos didnt supply or rather, fill their video with useless information. They were straight forward and too the point and this kept my interest. I think keeping it short and directly share my information.

Podcast of my choice

I love my ipod. I know I criticize technology but, truly my life would be less without music, and what better way to transport it in such a mini device as the ipod. I used to ahve podcasts on it as well, but my space got a little low so I had to remove the wonderous "Flight of the Conchords" so I could continue to put on my sweet jams. Nonetheless, I really liked looking through the podcasts and I also enjoyed that they were free :). So browsing through them the other day I found one that sparked my interest. It was Rolling Stone magazine doing reports on many artists which I love, like Paul McCartney, Al Green, so I subscribed to the whole thing. The one in which I will explain to you about it about the replacement of Conan O'Brian on the Late Show by Jimmy Fallon. Now, I think Conan is hilarious and am sad to see him go but, Jimmy Fallon ain't bad. He's never let me down on Saturday Night Live so I am hoping he can live up to my expectation and the Conan Fans expectations around the world. A plus about Jimmy is his house band will be the great hip-hop group, The Roots. They are a very talented band from Phildelphia, they play anything from blues to soul to punk to surf. I will leave you a little taste of their music from way back when called "The Seed". I chose this podcast because I love music, and Rolling Stone magazine, so what better way to get it for free on itunes, then to pay for the paper copy. HOWEVER, I will continue to buy the ones I am interested in because I think they are a collectors item and they have a lot of politcial and current event criticsm that I value, that you do not get on the podcasts. I will get the best of both worlds, I will be able to sample the music from itunes, and feed my brain with actually reading the hand held copy. I was not able to get the actual version of "The Seed" as it was disabled by request. I was able to get a live version, but please check out the real video if you like the live version, because the actual song and video are superb. I'll give you a link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFb9UqELX8w
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Mentorship

My mentorship has come to an end. I recieved the students' final essays on Thursday with their grade on them. Maura Moritz had marked all of the essays and also done some corrections on google docs, so I could see what she approved on and what she didn't. Besides some grammar errors, and some structural issues, the essays were very well done. Two out of the three essays recieved a 90% and the other a 95%. All in all I think that those are some pretty darn good marks. I would be pretty excited if I recieved those marks. I hope that I contributed to those marks and helped the students learn a few things about essay structure and over all essay writing. I valued this experience and feel like learned a lot myself. It gave me an opportunity to better my skils of giving contructive criticism. Reading these essays also helped me in my essay writing becuase it reiderated things I have forgotten about. Thankyou to Maura Moritz for allowing me to help her students and to Dean for giving me this opportunity!

Oh! The Grandeur!

I had an extremely blessed and eventful weekend. On Friday, I anxiously awaited class to be over, as I had tickets for the "Whose Line is it Anyway?" show at the Dakota Dunes Casino in Saskatoon. It was simply hilarious. After the show my boyfriend and I tried our hand at one of the slot machines. Now we are not gamblers at all, but we thought we should try it once as we would probably never be back their again. So we limited ourselves to five dollars, we put the bill in one slot machine and came out with nine dollars, we thought maybe we would get even luckier so we tried another machine. We put in our nine dollar ticket and our luck slowly faded. We were down to two dollars and the rebel that Graem is bet it all, I pulled the leever the numbers started shooting up, to be honest we had no idea what was going on but, we ended up with 90 clams! Needless to say we were pretty excited. So we walked away with the money. On Sunday, the luck was still flowin through our vains. We get a call from my auntie and she had some excellent news. She had two extra tickets for the Eagles concert! Graem and I obviously accepted. I am a huge Eagles fan, but my wallet could not afford the show, so I was extatic. The show was amazing. They played all of my favorites, and they sound exactly the same in person as they do on their records. It was by far the best concert I have ever been to, and if I had 200 dollars, I surely would have gone. But since I do not, Graem and I will have to do something nice for my auntie. Anyhow, that was my awesome weekend, I hope everyone else had a great one too! :)

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
-G.K Chesterton

Tech task 12

This tech task was a little challenging for a few reasons. There are an abundance of pointless videos on youtube thus it was hard to find one that met the criteria of this assignment. I thought I would narrow my search and look through commercials. There must be a point to them as they are advertising their item and it must be visaully stimulating for the viewer to consider their product. So I thought it was a good starting point. I found this car commercial and I quite enjoyed it. It was entertaining, and there are many neat angles they use to convey the comedy of the commercial such as long shots, medium long shots, medium and close ups. I liked how it began with their day and the vehicle was the first thing on their mind. When the woman went into the shower and got electrecuted, I liked how they put the camera in a different room, this was obviously to get away from showing the unrealistic event that occured to her, but it was a good idea to show it possibly from her husbands view. I liked that they played tricks on eachother to prevent one another to driving the vehicle, the angles they took, when the man had his hair lit on fire was cool, how they showeed his reflection in the mirror. It was also neat at the end, when the man is driving away and he looks in the rear view mirror at the explosion rather, than us seeing the actual house. They used actions instead of words and I liked that as well. Its also a great song that they chose, "So happy together" by The Turtles. At first we are lead to believe that the song is representing the man and wife's love for one another, but we then realize that it is actually their love for their car. All in all, it kept the viewer intrigued and it must be a good car, if the couple is more intersted in it, then eachother. Kind of sad, but it follows the theme of the commercials unrealistic and comedic nature.

Mentorship

Hello Everyone, right now I am going to do a Mentorship update. I believe that the students are coming to an end with their essays. They are all very well done. There was a lot of revision stages, which I have learned is very important, in University, and simply in everything. Here's a look at how we have been communicating for the past 4-5 weeks. I really enjoyed going through Google Docs, it was a little hard, seeing as I didn't know much about the students, but I thought the process we used to communicate the essays, was easy and effective. I would like to use this method with my students, if I ever have the opportunity. I am still waiting for one more essay today, I think. They all may completed now, and the one that I am waiting for may have thought that they do not need to do any more revision. As you can see, this is a flaw with using Google Docs, and not knowing the students very well. Nonetheless, I have enjoyed reading their essays and offering my help.


A hug is a perfect gift- one size fits all, and
nobody minds if you exchange it.
-Ivern Ball

I'm Goin' Again.

I had been looking at a variety of different sites to do my second story with. One of them was Bubbleshare, and I thought that I would give it a shot. So I joined up. Bubble Share was a little bit easier than Voicethread, but that being said it isnt as interesting. I simply typed in the story rather than speaking it, which can be a plus or a minus, depending on how you look at it. I liked the voice bubbles in Bubbleshare, and also you can add little icons into your slides which I thought was neat. I do not know if this is as entertaining as my other one, but, Bubbleshare didn't stress me out as much as Voicethread. I again, couldn't find where to add music. But one of my videos applys to a visual learner, and the other applys to an audio learner, therefore I am happy with both of them. Embeding both stories was made very simply by both sites even though they were a little different. With Voicethread, it was put right into my blog, where as with BubbleShare, I had to copy and paste the HTML. A plus with Bubbleshare was that I had the option of choosing what size I wanted my story to be displayed in. They both have their pros and cons, much like everything else!
BubbleShare: Share photos - Easy Photo Sharing

Goin' Up The Country

So, I have done tech task eleven and it was kind of a challenge for me. As I had said before, I wanted to use voice thread. I think it is a really great tool to use in the classroom as people can comment and doodle, two things art students probably like to do. Nonetheless I had trouble setting up my video. It is most likely because I am not the most computer literate person out there, but it did take me awhile. I found how to record my voice, but I could not see how to add music in the background. So I just played the song while I spoke. It may be a little bit choppy, but I still like the outcome of the story. This story may not have been the best for voicethread, but I can see it would be useful for many other kinds of stories, such as Dionnes. You just have to click the exit box, and play if it doesnt show up right away. I got all of my photos, from flickr, but the one map from google maps and the last one is my own.Anyhow, I hope you like it, this song always makes me happy, it is by an old band called Canned Heat.

patience is a virtue, right?

Aloha everyone, I say that because, today in Saskatoon it is not blistering cold. It is a mere, -10. I know it is strange for us to be adapted to such cold, even to the point where we think below temperatures is warm. Anyhow, I love the winter nonetheless, the blue sky against the white ground and the frost make a lovely scene.
The weather is not really what I wanted to talk about today. I was going to begin doing 50+ ways to tell a story assignment. I read a few blogs before starting, such as Dionne's. She said that she really enjoyed Voicethread, so I decided to check it out. She was right, it is a really neat site, so I decided to join up. I wanted to check the criteria for the assignment before I began to be fully sure about what I was doing. But, when I went to do so, the site was not working! I tried on my boyfriends computer, and mine, numerous times, but I think the server must be down. I guess my assignment will have to wait a little bit longer, but I will keep checking the site throughout the day. In the meantime I will play around on Voicethread and check out some other sites that Alan listed.
Hope everyone is having a great weekend!