I had initially planned to make a video for Reflection 3 but I had this amazing idea, what if I combined making a video with screen recording?
Programs used: Audacity, DaVinci Resolve, and Screencast-O-Matic
Category: EDCI 336
For everything made for the technological education course EDCI 336!
Did you know your pinky is weak? I didn’t until I had to try and use it to play guitar a bunch. To make things worse, the next step on my guitar journey is learning the Peter Gunn theme. For the sake of practice, while picking this theme, we are expected to use all of our fingers for practice and this includes the pinky finger. While this may sound like nothing, using my pinky finger has been quite the challenge. But if my journey so far is any proof, a couple sour notes while I am learning something won’t stop me!
Luckily, I am working on more than that. Song practice is coming together, I can sort of play Born in the USA now, but just not for a consistent amount of time. I usually make a mistake or two a few bars in that throws me off. However, I can play each simple part of the song away from each other. Now, I just need to be able to consistently put all those skills together to make a coherent sounding song!
Lastly, I have also been working on a few mechanical skills: strumming on the beat, strumming mechanics, and tapping my foot to the beat. As someone who is not very rhythmically inclined, this has been a trial but a rewarding one. The strumming mechanics in particular have been helping my playing sound more like someone playing the guitar!
As always, thanks for reading!!
So now that I have moved onto a new lesson and therefore practice plan, learning the guitar has gotten more engaging. I guess the moral of this is that it is important to keep things fresh. Since there’s not a lot to report other than this, I thought I’d share some of the resources I am using to practice!
Since I am still working on learning to tune the guitar on my lonesome, I have been using this app to check my work
In previous posts I have mentioned JustinGuitar as the main resource I am using to practice but I have not linked his website or youtube channel before (for when you decide to start your guitar journey).
For my song practice I have been using two videos:
Thanks for reading! Have a good day!
This is going to be a short one…
How Not to Form Habits
According to Lally et al. in How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world, it takes between 18 to 254 days to completely form a habit.
So what I am saying is, that not playing guitar over Thanksgiving weekend is not an effective way to form the habit. Especially when you continue not playing guitar into the next week. In fairness to me, I was at my partner’s parent’s house over Thanksgiving and they all know how to play at least one instrument. Joking aside, the point of this is to make sure that I continue to push through and play most days a week. I have been using my schooling and work as an excuse to not play but realistically, my plan is only to play 15 minutes a day. So it should be within my abilities to do it. Now, the issue is just taking the time to remember I need to do it as opposed to thinking because of school and work I can’t do it.
The Positives
Following the lesson plan made by Justin Guitar, I am eligible to move on to the next level. I plan to take the time to brush up on my guitar playing before I do move on to the next level. Thanks for reading, and by the time I get back to you hopefully I will also be all over the G & E chords!
Reflection 2: Social Media and Technology in Today’s Classrooms
Social Media and Me
Being only 22, I experienced most of my life with the presence of the internet and social media. I remember hearing MSN messenger dings whenever my cousins would come over and use our family computer. I remember when Facebook was becoming the big thing and making an account with a fake age because I wasn’t quite 13 yet. I also recall getting my first phone late in high school and immediately downloading Snapchat and Instagram so I could finally talk to my friends on all the cool social media apps.
Even with all that I grew up in an in-between stage of the intersections of social media and technology with children. I definitely remember a time when having a smartphone was not normal. I got my first cellphone in my senior year of high school and I remember a time before Facebook and MySpace. In school, there was minimal interaction with technology outside of the computer lab. Having your phone out when the teacher was talking was not allowed and if you were lucky a “cool teacher” would let you listen to music while you were working. I am not mentioning this to sound like an older person (my dad) who decries how youth today do not understand how hard we all had it way back in 2010, but to recognize how the landscape is completely different for me than it is for youth today in the short time it has been since I was in high school. Youth today were born into the social media age, their schools have Chromebooks and they hand in assignments online with Google Classroom. Now, more than ever before does social media affect the landscape of schools and as future educators, we need to be aware of this.
What Social Media and Technology Looks Like in Today’s Classrooms
This past week we had the chance to listen to Jesse Miller of Mediated Reality who offered great insights on the intersections between social media, students, and educators. In his short talk with us, Jesse hammered home the importance of being cognizant of how social media affects youth and educators today. Instead of simply summarizing his speech, I will talk about some of the things he said that resonated with me.
The importance of teachers protecting themselves on social media is something I am glad we talked about. Before this class, I was never that protective of my social media platforms and how that all can be traced to me. Jesse brought up some examples of how students understanding of social media interacts with teachers’ social media as trying to add them and follow them. In the same vein, he also added how teachers can be flippant with the interactions between social media and students. He added one example of a teacher who made an Instagram account for test scores. Initially, I thought this was genius, but Jesse brought up how now this teacher had access to the personal information of many of his students and the ability to DM them. While it is unlikely this would be used for anything inappropriate, simply having access to these things is is inappropriate in of itself. While I feel like I have a good handle on social media in 2020, things will rapidly change and it is important for me to make sure I stay up to date and understand the level of power a teacher can have when interacting with students on these platforms.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it! See the links below if you are interested in any of Jesse’s other platforms or work.
After a good week or so of playing, there have been ups and downs as expected. However, with a flood of assignments coming next week in my other classes I may have to cut my guitar playing a lot closer to that fifteen-minute minimum I outlined earlier. With that said, I thought it would beneficial to ruminate on what I felt like were the things to build on and the things to work on in the upcoming weeks.
Triumphs:
- One part of my learning that has surprised me is how much I think about it outside of playing. On my visit to Claremont this Wednesday, I found myself sometimes daydreaming along with the other students as the two and a half hour classes dragged on. I thought about how guitar practice went on Tuesday and how I was proud of how it was feeling to get started again. I have tried to get started on the guitar on a few other occasions but never have I found myself thinking about too much. I think that blogging about it has forced me to be more thoughtful about how the learning process is going and has led me to be more focused on learning and how I am learning
- Another aspect of this that I have found helpful is the environment I am in when playing. During previous attempts at learning the guitar, I was still living with my parents and I think that that made me more self-conscious of how it was sounding. Additionally, I was also always alone in my room when I was playing and I think that added to the insecurity I felt. Currently, I am living with my partner who has been a tremendous help while I am practicing, Unlike me (for now), she is a pretty musical person and knows how to play the guitar along with a couple other instruments. Having her around while I practice has allowed me to have a knowledgeable person to ask questions to and a support base when I am feeling down about how my playing sounds.
On the topic of how my playing sounds…
The Stumbles:
- So I am not very good at this. That is to be expected, I mean I am a beginner. But the biggest hurdle for me in the past has always been the steep learning curve and how that makes me feel. I sometimes can be a bit of a perfectionist and that is quite harmful when needing to fail before getting better. Often times, the failures just lead to disillusionment and quitting when trying to learn new things. Although so far this insecurity has been kept in check I have had moments of frustration during this learning process. While those are expected, I need to focus on not letting that insecurity get to me and turn into giving up on the project as a whole as I have in the past and remember the comfort zone donut.
- This upcoming week will also bring challenges as I have a lot of assignments due next week. This brings the challenge of sticking to my lesson plan. This past week I already skipped a day because I was tired after our long Wednesday visits. Although I think it is okay to take a mental health day here and there, with the upcoming flood of school work it is important to remember my goal is only fifteen minutes a day. My goal is absolutely doable regardless of how many classes or assignments I have due any time soon.
Hopefully, this has illustrated where I am currently at in my guitar learning and how things are looking for this upcoming week. Thanks for reading and see you next week where maybe I work up the courage to post some of the footage I have!
First Weekly Reflection
As things start to pick up in this class, there are numerous different resources we have been expected to sign up for and begin to get a feel for. So, for my first weekly reflection, I think it would be smart to reflect on my different experiences trying to get the hang of all these resources.
Trello and Hypothesis have the potential to be very useful if I use them to their full potential. The ability for fellow students to edit my work on Hypothesis has already been invaluable to these blogs so far. My pod and I have been keeping tabs on each other’s blogs, editing, and commenting through hypothesis and I have really enjoyed it thus far. Similarly, my Trello board for the Free Inquiry project has helped keep me on task. I can even imagine myself making Trello boards for all my other classes, but we will see if I get there.
Mattermost and WordPress are two resources that feel very familiar to me. I have had to use WordPress for classes on many different occasions so it is nice to not be too behind on one of these resources. However, I do feel like my skill with WordPress is pretty basic and I would like to get more acquainted with some of WordPress’s features. Although I have never used Mattermost before it is very similar to Discord and was very intuitive.
FlipGrid and Twitter have yet to really be used for me so far. There has not been much need in class for FlipGrid just yet. Regarding Twitter, I am still undecided about how open I am to use it for this class. However, during our first pod meeting, one of my pod-mates gave some good reasons to do so. So perhaps there will be an @AustonNeveuEd coming to you soon??
So far, the technological hurdles in this class have got less overwhelming quickly, which is great considering how worried I was the first week. Outside of this class, I keep learning new resources too! In EDCI 352 Rich McCue (who is teaching another section of EDCI 336) taught us about Twine and Unsplash. If there’s anything I have learned about this program and presumably teaching as a whole, we need to be able to adapt to new resources and changing technologies. Thus far, I have enjoyed the technological resources I have been given, and hopefully, next week that feeling will continue to persevere over the potentially overwhelming scope of this program.
Week 1: Getting Started on My Guitar Journey
Well… here we go! As of now, my main goal is to learn how to play the guitar. With resources as numerous as they are for a topic such as learning the guitar, I am starting out with a vague main goal to allow myself to branch out wherever I would like to go on this journey. I also have a “sub-goal” that I decided on before I begin this in earnest. In my previous attempts to learn the guitar, I have always felt like practicing the basics has made me feel like I have nothing to show for it. So my first sub-goal will be to learn how to play a song.
Now that I have outlined my goals, let’s get into how I am going to do this. Luckily, there is no shortage of guitar tutorials on the internet. So after a little internet research, I have opted to tentatively use the online tutorials of a YouTuber named JustinGuitar. He also has a comprehensive website where I can mark each lesson he has as complete too! My partner is also an experienced guitar player so I do have access to her knowledge should I need any hands-on guidance. For now, I do not plan on branching off the lesson plan set out by this YouTuber until I can feel comfortable about being more independent in my guitar learning. I feel like keeping a strict regimen will be the key to success here as previous attempts have been less structured.
So as far as what my lessons will look like for now, I will be trying to get in 15 minutes of playing guitar a day. The scheduling for those will look like this: 5 minutes of practicing my chord changes from A>D and D>A and 10 minutes of song practice. For the song practice, JustinGuitar has a list of A and D chord songs for students to learn and video tutorials to boot. Due to my now not-so-secret love for the Boss, I decided to learn “Born in the USA”.
As for how my project is going to look, I think I am planning to film my first 15 minute practices every week and cut them up into little chunks to share my fun bits and pieces of my progress here.
Hopefully, this sounds as exciting as I think it is going to be for me! Thanks for reading this and I hope you stick around with me on this journey!
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