pkittle this one's for you

Don't ask me why I'm doing this at 12:30AM, I just am. ok. So here's how my DigiDoc is coming along: I spent the majority of my day today installing programs and upgrades for this program my dad gave me called Pinnacle Studio. He said it was really cool and pretty easy to use and that it is basically another version of Windows Movie Maker, but from what little work I did on WMM I didn't think this project was going to be easy at all. For thursday's class I had drawn a storyboard in my notebook and I knew which images I wanted to use AND which songs. When I got to class, I felt really behind and I started to freak out a little bit. After working with Pinnacle today, with what little patience I had left, I managed to bust out a whole minute and ten seconds. I found it surprisingly easy to put the images I wanted along with music and fun transitions. I really felt like I was making a little movie. Now that I have had some experience with Pinnacle I feel like it will be easier in the next few days (haha.. procrastination) to figure a few more things out and make a really cool little movie. I did ran into a few problems on my journey through movie making land today(and I remember you don't know anything about Pinnacle pkittle so I am not asking for your help, I am just blogging) : 1. I saved all of my images and videos I had in the same folder called YOGASTUFF. For some reason when I pull that folder up in Pinnacle the videos aren't there. I'm assuming since they are saved in my computer through quicktime, which is from Apple, they end in .mov and .mov videos aren't compatible with programs like Pinnacle, which is from Intel. I'm going to try saving them in a different folder that IS accessible through Pinnacle and see if I can get them to work. IF NOT, I DO have a question for you pkittle, do we HAVE to use videos? ok. 2. I can't figure out how to use my roommate's jumpdrive thing. I stick it in my USB port and it opens but I can't figure out how to save it on there. any suggestions?? Alright. In conclusion.. I guess I can say that I feel better about this project than I thought I would at this point. I don't feel great but, I think everything will be fine.

Learning and Action - Ch. 5

As a future teacher this chapter caught my attention; one quote in particular:
"Learners cannot do much with ots of overt information that a teacher has explicitly told them outside of the context of immersion in actual practice. At the same time, learners cannot learn without some overt information; they cannot discover everything for themselves." After reading this I sat for a second and thought about what it meant. How many times have I been sitting in class while my teacher is lecturing about something. I'm listening and taking my notes and trying to retain as much as possible. Once the lecture is finished my teacher tells us to apply what we just learned in a real-life situation. I start looking through my notes trying to connect the lecture with my life and it is almost impossible. Almost as impossible as if my teacher would have just asked us a question about the lecture without giving it first. There seems to be a happy medium in teaching where kids are actively learning and teachers are scaffolding their students, that is often hard to attain. "The solution is to give information in context and to couch it in ways that make sense in the context of embodied action" says Gee. Easier said than done my friend. I took a geography class last semester and on the first day my teacher told us that it would be impossible to teach geography "in context" in the boring, white-walled, classroom we were in. In order to "actively learn" we would need maps and globes and a many more resources. He told us he would do his best considering the circumstances. I found it very interesting that he made a point of how much the learning environment can affect the learner. Gee discusses Lara Croft and how there is a "training game" where you are taught all the commands to play the other games in the series. He made an interesting point about how the training instructions for that game wouldn't make any sense if you weren't playing it. I think this is a strong argument in the world of education seeing as most of intrustion in today's schools is direct and not interactive.

For what it's worth: Situated Learning

ok. So let's just say I caught up on some reading this weekend... After the discussion in class on thursday my little brain really started to think. How do these different situations we are put in shape the person we become? The term "learning" in the classroom is straight forward and usually corresponds with direct results. What most people don't realize is that we are learning all the time. Whatever we do and however it turns out, we learn from it. We learn behaviors that are appropriate in some situations and not appropriate in others. We learn from each and every experience we have. Gee makes an interesting claim in ch. 4, "It is the connections or associations that people make among their experiences that are crucial to learning, thinking, and problem solving". I find this interesting because I've never recognized the "learning" that happens when kids play video games. Gee points out that in one of the games he plays the characters are well though out and designed. Thinking back on my childhood the game oregon trail comes to mind. I remember choosing my family's names, and traveling the journey on the oregon trail. It was really fun back then and now I think about how much strategy my mind put into that game. You had to hunt your own food, buy your own ammunition (spelling?), forge the river and make sure no one in your family got small pox and died along the way. I dont' know how I learned from playing that game but I do know that it forced my little 8 year old mind to work hard. I look at video games today and how much they've changed but I still think that kids learn things in their lives and in their video games and are constantly learning from everything around them.