I was sitting in the lobby of my dentist’s office waiting for my annual dental appointment to begin. A few people were flipping through magazines and chatting. One lady looks over and notices my employee badge and asks me where I work. I tell her I am librarian in a…

“Badges ruin intrinsic motivation!” How many times have we heard this? But what about Grades? Grades can also do much to damage the intrinsic motivation of a student and is often very limiting in helping students understand where they failed an assignment or subject. This is where badges could help.…

Gamification has always been a fuzzy concept to me at best, and a potential teacher nightmare at worse. Too many things could go wrong if done incorrectly and it just scared me off. To clarify what gamification is and get over my angst, I turned to Chris Haskell and Rezzly…

Chris Haskell, professor of EdTech at Boise State University, has a unique idea: let’s do away with grades in school altogether and replace them with achievements, points and badges. His idea is to swap out our traditional method of grading and replace it with something closer to leveling up…

Our team was tasked with creating a multimedia project to demonstrate theories and practice regarding the Emergence of the Profession. Essentially this involves reporting on the origins and uses of a key learning theory through an engaging format of our choice. This is awesome because as teachers and professionals, we…

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Privacy Is A Myth
The truth is, we never had online privacy and we never will.  We can manage it as best we can, and we should. But let’s face it, with more than one billion people on Facebook, and over 500 million tweets going out daily across the globe,…

Does “transmedia” and “multimodal” mean the same thing? No, according to Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. There is often confusion about what the term transmedia means, and even controversy surrounding its definition within academic and entertainment circles. In his…

For today’s Daily Create I transcribed a snippet of dialog overheard today and used that cue as the opening thought of a poem, like an epigraph. You can do this activity with students when teaching on poetry and how epigraphs are used in literature. Kids have a great time coming…

Chinese mines are the most dangerous in the world. Every day 20 people die in accidents. In this web Documentary, Journey to the End of Coal, directors Samuel Bollendorff and Abel Ségrétin chronicle the risk millions of Chinese coal miners take every day to satisfy their own country’s appetite…

Joe Lambert (2013) and the StoryCenter wants to creatively inspire storytellers through a group process they call story circles. In his chapter on Seven Steps of Digital Storytelling Practice, Lambert explains that during their 3-5 day workshops and through story circle engagement, clarifying questions are asked to aid the storyteller…

For this DS106 Daily Create we were to write a three-line poem about lemons without using the following words: lemon, yellow, round, fruit, citrus, tart, juicy, peel, and sour. It was challenging avoiding these words. I had several false starts and edits before finally getting my idea across, which is…

The solar system is all wrong. At least our perception of it is. “Every picture we ever encounter of the solar system is not to scale,” explains Wylie Overstreet. “The only way to see a scale model of the solar system is to build one.” So he and a group…

My reading response is on Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre by Brian Alexander and Alan Levine (2008). This was a little back researching for me to understand the genesis of the Web 2.0 literacies, and more specifically, storytelling in the Web 2.0 universe. You see, I thought…

This week’s digital story spotlight is part critique and part tech tool sneak-peek. The digital story itself is called The Click Effect and runs on a special platform called Within: Extraordinary Stories in Virtual Reality, which is designed for mobile and the latest VR gear (you can watch it…

For this DS106 Daily Create I was to illustrate a word from another language that does not have an English equivalent. Then I’m to make up an English word as a possible translation. This is actually a picture from a place not far from where I grew up. It’s the…

It’s the story behind the story that always intrigues me. In this way Joe Lambert (2013) tells how the Center for Digital Storytelling came to be. I liked how he started with his parents’ ideology inspiring him and ended with their continued guiding inspiration: “The hands of each of my…

For this DS106 Assignment Bank Design project we were to think about places nearby that we have been missing out on visiting and make a collage of pictures of those destinations. These are places that would be interesting and inspiring to us as a future goal. I thought it would…

I enjoyed a remarkable digital story experience that was recommended to me this week called Awra Amba: Rethink a Beautiful World. It’s a 360º interactive documentary about a village in Ethiopia that has gained worldwide recognition for creating a community based on true equality with the goal of solving…

A presentation I made with Adobe Spark on what I’ve been learning in Digital Storytelling.

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Storybird is a creative, fun and engaging platform to make art-inspired stories that can be worked on individually or with others for collaborative projects. Users choose from a wide variety of art themes and build a story around those images. Finished stories can be shared with family and friends through…

CNN’s powerful film, We Will Rise, is a documentary about Michelle Obama’s global education initiative called Let Girls Learn. In it she travels to Morocco and Liberia with Meryl Streep, Freida Pinto and CNN’s Isha Sesay on a mission to break down barriers between young girls and their…

We are built for community, all of us. When I don’t have the answer to a problem, I know my family or network of friends and colleagues often do. And that’s great because it means I’m not alone trying to figure the world out on my own. Mentoring and learning…

I began reading a book called “Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture” by Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, and Robison (2009) that addresses the emerging widespread phenomena of our participatory culture in producing and distributing media. I will be looking at Chapters 1-2 in this reading response: The needed skills…

Today’s Daily Create is to share our collection obsessions. And I’m kind of embarrassed to admit it, and it’s definitely a guilty pleasure, but I love Buxom lip gloss from Sephora. It’s also expensive, so I will usually get it at Christmastime if someone gives it to me as a…

After the Storm is one man’s harrowing account of a 1.5 mi (2.4 km) wide EF4 tornado that leveled his home town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama on April 27, 2011. The storm resulted in 64 deaths, over 1500 injuries, and massive devastation which permanently altered the geography of the town. Told…

Chapter seven on Social learning, ‘push’ and ‘pull’, and building platforms for collaborative learning by Lankshear and Knobel (2011) reminds us that nothing lives in a vacuum, and that certainly holds true for knowledge acquisition. Indeed, the authors begin their analysis early in the chapter by stating that collective social…

The simple title is deceptive—like a Chekhov play—because it is very deep and full of symbolism and meaning. What makes this story unique is the way it’s told as an online multilayered graphic novel. Originally penned by Nam Le, an immigrant from Vietnam himself, The Boat is about a…

For today’s DS106 Visual Assignment I chose to make a short newscast using a green screen backdrop with the goal to make it appear that I was somewhere else. Wanting to play with a new app, I used TouchCast studios on my iPad. I’m really excited about using platform but…

I’ve been fascinated with the idea of using the iPad and smartphone as a video creation tool. Not just for shooting, but also editing – a one-stop-shop production tool for making and exporting video content to the web. So I spent some time exploring TouchCast Studio this week. TCS has…