Discovering Learning Objects: StoryBird

A learning object is a web-based resource that can help facilitate your students learning in the classroom. Today we had the opportunity to discover different learning object that we can use in the future. The one that I choose to focus on is StoryBird. This is a very interesting, fun, and engaging way for students to work on their writing skills. The site allows users to create their own short stories, novels and poetry books. It provides amazing illustrations for users to choose from, after choosing illustrations and story type all the user needs to do is start typing! I had a lot of fun discovering this tool and created a short story of my own, take a look at my story called Charlotte.

StoryBird give both teachers and students to create their own stories with their own imagination. For teachers this is a great way to introduce new topic in the classroom, by creating a story that can appeal to their students interests students can be more engaged. It is also a way for teachers to allow students to have artistic freedom and have them create their own piece of work. I am really excited about using this tool in the future.

Keep learning,

Rob

Production Of My Genius Hour

Over the past year I have really gotten into podcasts, I've listen to too much of This American Life and love listening to the calmness of Ira Glass' voice. So for this week of my Genius Hour project I want to learn how to create a podcast where I can highlight different aspects of Sri Lanka in each weeks episode. I have no idea how to create one, so this week I will be researching what steps in need to take in creating a podcast. Here is a slideshow I created of how to create your own podcast:

Keeping Up With Genius Hour

Just an update on my Genius Hour project, I have been continuing to think about how and why I am going to create this project. 'Why' is the easy one to answer, I have been looking for something to connect me to my roots for a while now, and this project allows me to take the time to learn more about my family and therefore myself. 'How' is something I am still thinking about, there are many different ways I can present the information I have discovered but I want to do it in a way that I enjoy. The original plan was to make a blog, though I have been thinking recently that I could attempt to make a podcast (if I can figure it out and if I work on my radio voice). For whatever form I choose each week I can discuss a feature in Sri Lanka Another 'how' is how I will make sure I actually answer my research question and measure my progress on it:

What are the important events, people and/or innovations to come out of Sri Lanka?

I hope to do this by creating a timeline of highlighting one event, person or innovation a week. By using this timeline this gives me optimal time to properly research and make a creative and informed mini-project about each important thing to come out of Sri Lanka. Being an avid procrastinator hopefully this will be a plan I stick to, because it will be extremely helpful. I'm very excited to start my research for this project!

Keep learning,

Rob

My Genius Hour: Discovering My Roots

I thought I would have difficulties trying to think of a Genius Hour topic, but little did I know is that my idea came to me with no struggle at all. The topic I have chosen for my assignment is to discover the innovations, historical events, and influential people who have have come out of my parents place of birth Sri Lanka. Both side of my family are full Sri Lankan, but now that I am getting older I'm coming to realize that I barely know anything about the culture or history of the country. I know a little bit about the civil war that has been going on (which is something I would still like to learn more about) and I know that one of my favourite artists MIA was also born there. Though I want to learn about the good things that have come out of this country and how Sri Lankan's have made a difference in the world. I want to be proud and feel a connection to my mother land. I think I am going to choose this assignment in a blog form, I believe that this is the best way that I would be able to express myself and reflect on my inquiry. For this project I would like to take the time to do some self-disovering and find a personal connection to where I am from.

J. A. Bueno (2016). Printable Map Of Sri Lanka. Retrieved from http:/bit.ly/2deQcBh

Please Copy It Right: Learning Why Copyright Matters

      In a world where social media is huge and young people are trying to create and ‘ascetic’ look for their profiles, we often take someone else’s photo from Tumbler and use it as our cover photos (I am 100% guilty of doing this). The question is, is this infringing the terms of copyright?

Artsvector. (October 2015) Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2cqKzPc

Copyright means that all rights are reserved to the individual who produced the piece and uploaded it to the Internet. Therefore, it is prohibited to copy, distribute, display or adapt the work. Since copyright makes it extremely difficult to share work or for teachers to use work as educational resources Canada has crafted up Fair Dealing. Fair dealing allows teachers or any educational staff that is a part of a non-profit educational institution to copy or reproduce short excerpts of copyrighted protected work. Unfortunately, a “short excerpt” is only 10% of a piece of work, this equals to a couple of an article of newspaper, one chapter of a book, or a single piece of artwork. This can be very limiting to a teacher who wants to share a full piece of work with their students. This is where Creative Commons comes in to save the day for us teachers. This innovation allows authors to share their work openly to others. This is done in 4 different ways:

• 1Attribution: allowing others to copy, distribute, display and perform copyrighted work.
• Share Alike: allowing other to distribute copyrighted work, only under a license identical to the one that governs the creator’s work.
•  Non-Commercial: allowing others to distribute, display and perform work for non-commercial purposes only.
• Non-Derivative Work: allowing others to copy, distribute, display and perform only exact copies of the created work. 

It is extremely important for teachers to know the importance of copyright in this digital age. I know that a lot of this information is new to myself and is something that I will need to continue to look into this topic. It is also something important to teach students about what copyright is and how/ when are we infringing copyright, to make them positive digital citizens.

(Tuncay). July 24, 2014 Childish Joy. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2cqhaBA

Rob The Teacher Candidate

Welcome friends,

Today is my first day of being a Teacher Candidate and I want to share some of my experiences with you. I'm currently learning more about technology and how to implement it into my soon to be own classroom (scary to think about). We have been talking about this neat idea called Genius Hour where you students (or teacher candidates like myself) have an hour out of the day to do whatever they want! Imaging that allowing kids to research/ create/ make/ build what ever they want, doesn't seem like a crazy idea to me. Through working with technology and personal interests as teachers we can work in the digital world that kids are already immersed in to help them discover their passions and create a drive to do something with it.

 https://www.kabbage.com/blog/passion-mean-entrepreneurs/

Keep learning, 

Rob