Here is a link to a poem I composed on Prezi. I used a picture and tried to draw a narrative between its different aspects. I think this is a rather simple exercise that we could have our students give a try.
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Author: faran
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interactive art on the net
While stumbling through websites through StumbleUpon I have stumbled upon many websites that offer an interactive and simple way to create art. I think these resources are very helpful for those students that find the art aspects of the projects to be challenging.
here are some examples:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1D1Jyz/new.weavesilk.com/?ika/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/AOHjDF/bomomo.com/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/16yexA/koalastothemax.com/?aHR0cDovL3d3dy5hbWlyaWdodC5jb20vYWxidW0tY292ZXItdGhlbWVzL2ltYWdlcy9hbGJ1bS1CcmFuZC1OZXctRGVqYS1FbnRlbmR1LmpwZw==/
and here’s my composition with Incredibox.
And here is another really seemingly useful website, but I have yet to look through it. perhaps I’ll write a review once I do:
http://d3js.org/
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Teaching through Games
Our session on games got me thinking of a game I used to play as a teenager: Age of Empires. I will be teaching grade 8 humanities and we’ll be covering the medieval period/feudal Japan. The different games of Age of Empires covers civilization nearly from its inception to present time throughout its different releases. Fortunately for me, the era that I have to teach is cover by my most favourite of the series “Age of Empires: II.”
Age of Empires is a strategy game. The style of game play that I will be working with is as such: you choose a specific civilization and you begin in the dark ages with about 3 villagers and a town-centre. From there you must begin to gather recourses (food, wood, gold, and stone). In the process you can build different structures, such as houses, a mill, or a port. As more structures are build and wealth and resources accumulated, the civilization can progress through different stages. Accordingly, different aspects of the game change. New structures and materials become available as progress happens. Eventually armies can be formed by building structures that can produce soldiers, knights, archers and so on.
The different structures and the way they appear, the different people and militia and their abilities, are all peculiar to the specific civilization that one chooses.
The challenge before me now is to find a way that I could link this game to the subject and incorporate it into my unit. My options also depend on wether I will be able to have all of the students to play the video game or not. I doubt I will be able to purchase a class set of the video game for the whole class. In addition, I am quite certain I can’t have the students torrent the game. If I am limited in this way, then my remaining option is to play the game myself and project my screen for the students—which, although different, is not really the ultimate engagement for which I was aiming.
I may have an option of having each student download the trial version of the game, but I have yet to find out if they can play as the specific civilizations that we are covering. I need to find a PC in order to do that.
If they are able to have access to the game and play it, my next challenge is to find out how the contents of the game can compliment what is covered in their textbook. I am entertaining a thought or two about basing my evaluation on the contents of the game.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions regarding my challenges?
And please comment if you have any questions or would like to know more about the game.
I am also open to collaborating with someone on creating a lesson plan based on this game.
ps. I didn’t add any links or pictures in fear of copyright infringement—I have been effectively petrified—but you can google it.
I’m not sure if this qualifies for what were to share, but I always find myself coming to this website after watching an intriguing movie. If I have any questions about the movie, I can usually find answers in the ongoing dialogues. Or even if I simply want to engage in a discussion on a topic regarding the movie, this website provides a common space to start and contribute to different conversations.
I also visit the website for their neat ‘Did you know?’ section.
Overall, I think the website provides a good platform for a discourse around movies, but there is a general want when it comes to user-friendliness and the over all structure of forums.
Here’s a link to a movie I watched recently and for which I felt the urge to visit the website to find out more.
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sensitive man
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Visual Influences in Manga
Recently I have been thinking about the influence of the camera, or the lens, on manga. The representations in manga mostly seem inspired from the way we understand the visual world through photography. For instance, in the above manga excerpt, fast movement is represented through the contrast between a focused object against a background the details of which are reduced to mere lines. This of course, is a phenomena observed in photography. If the camera is to move with the object, and the object’s speed be so high as to not allow enough time for all the photons from the background to reach the photon-sensitive part of the camera, then such a notion of movement is created. This method of understanding movement, however, does not resonate exactly with the way that our eyes take in light, but more importantly, with the way our mind tends to withhold to such information.
In memory, for instance, perhaps a series of images remain in the mind characterizing single points within the entire process of movement. Our memory may only take in single frames where sufficient photons have reached the retina of our eyes, action potentials are sent to the brain in timed succession—as is the nature of neurone activity, compelled by time—and the data interpreted by the brain in intervals. Thus, the remaining impression may resemble something like these two frames from the manga I chose to read for our class, Berserk.
For this and many other reasons I found this manga to be quite unique.
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fragile childhood – monsters
fragile childhood – monsters
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Wordle Poetry
here is a worlde reading of one my poetry projects. because i consider “the common english words” to play a pivotal role in the work, i decided it should be included. the word “Her” actually appeared more frequently in the text, than “the.” In the attached picture i was able to cut out “the” so to put more emphasis on the other words. this alternative method of actually ‘reading’ my own poetry brought forth many aspects of the work that i either was not aware of, or would not admit to. for instance, my choice of words prove the work to by quite lyrical. In some sense even clique.
in the following picture, i removed the “common words” and was surprised to see a few things. to begin with, the months that are part of the poems chronological titles seem to play a larger role in this reading. now i see the work to be a lot more confined to a temporal framework that i had assumed.
my preoccupation with the human frame, also, easily comes through, with words such as: body, eyes, face, hand, arm, arms, legs, cheek, hair and so on.
another aspect that surprised me was a domestic undertone, with words like brother, father, sister, and mother, which i had otherwise not intended nor noticed.
the first rendition of the words, including the common words, it self looked like a poem. i unfortunately lost the image, but it even made syntactic sense.
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Reading After Dinner
This picture reminds me of what my philosophy teacher would tell us of her habits: that she would sit down after dinner every evening for good 2 hours of fine, rigourous reading. When I heard her say that, as though it was a commonly accepted practice, I aspired to do the same. But the internet or the TV never let me.
It is all too often that I feel I have wasted precious moments of my life, which otherwise could have be occupied by “fine, rigourous reading,” to be navigating through Facebook or simply receiving a movie as passively as possible. Despite all these forces that held me back, I still did manage to sit down at times and read a book. My academic career, mostly, made sure of that.
But now I wonder at the fate of the young people that I will teach. How and when are they to find time, or the energy necessary to combat the contrary forces, to sit down and actually read. Perhaps, the answer to my fearful wondering lies in what I have referred to as contrary forces. Perhaps it is within the platforms of social media or among the nonsense found in the confines of a television that these young people will experience what the man in this picture is experiencing from his wooden technology.