Education, Learning, and Neuroscience
When it is -20 Celsius or colder, then mittens are much better than gloves.
I made these with beaver fronts, calf upper, inside mitt is elk. They are lined with sheared sheep and fleece. The frills are deer.
The cord is so you can take the mitts off and work with bare hands when necessary.
There is a whole world in books. Calming down and getting focused on “being here now” sets the stage to read, at least for me. When Bryna starting to get excited about books she was only about 2 years old and what sparked the journey was Elmo. Having exciting material makes a big difference.
I thought it would be interesting to hand-sew fur so I took on a beaver hat project. Thanks to Celeste for modelling it for me.
Many years ago I thought of this design and since I had a couple of extra deer hides I thought it was time to see how it would look in reality. Thanks to my son Griffin for taking time to model it for me.
Some projects take longer than others. Getting all the pieces for the moccasins took a long time. If there was one good thing about the COVID pandemic it was that I finally found the time to finish sewing these moccasins.
My son Dawson and I had some luck looking for pheasants. Such beautiful birds and we can use the feathers for tying flies for fishing.
Some hobbies are still good even after 50 years.
This is the second biggest trout I have ever caught. Just being in the mountains fly fishing is fun but this one turned out to be supper.
Creating video footage of materials for blended or flipped classroom environments can be time consuming for teachers. Often the teacher is already presenting the materials at some point and if the lecture was captured then this resource could be available for future classes or as supplemental materials for the class they are teaching.
One program that is growing in popularity is Screencast-O-Matic (https://screencast-o-matic.com/). This software allows capturing the screen from the teachers computer along with the audio. The program supports editing the video, and posting the content. There is a reduced pricing for available for education but it is not free.
Web conferencing programs like Webex and Zoom (https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362473-Local-Recording/) allow recording of a web presentation. The shared screen is captured along with an image of the active speaker and the room audio. The video files can be saved in mp4 format and then edited using industry standard programs like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere. With these programs the audio can be adjusted and the video can be cut into topic based movies. Still images can be added to the movies where details of the lesson are desired.
Digital media capturing and editing are great resources for teachers and reduce the amount of time required to produce educational videos which can then be used in the teaching environment.
Most people today have grown up with television and are expecting media in a movie format. Guidelines are being thought through as to how to use video effectively in education (https://www.nyu.edu/faculty/teaching-and-learning-resources/strategies-for-teaching-with-tech/video-teaching-and-learning/guidelines-for-video.html). Research is being conducted to determine how valuable video information is in education (http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/).
In my experience when using web conferencing programs to capture my own teaching, I have found it takes a bit of time to get comfortable with being recorded and to just get back to paying attention to the students. A great feature of the digital world is it quick and easy to edit the video after.
Some years ago I was teaching summer school to seniors for a program where Seniors traveled across Canada learning about other cities. One lady in the course, who had written several books, was concerned that the internet would add so much to her already busy life she would become overwhelmed. I must admit that my adoption of social media gave me a similar feeling. Some days just reading Facebook posts could take an extraordinary amount of time. As a result, I have found that Twitter much more fits my lifestyle. The brevity of posts and that I can pick through the content that is more related to my interests; Neuroscience, technology, Education and learning, is more appealing to me. I am also able to pick people who I follow and find interesting people and forums.
For general use there are many programs to support Twitter users. An easy to use program for organizing Twitter information is Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/).
Of interest for On-line teaching in adult education is the idea of using Twitter to communicate in a chat with participants in a course or people who have interests in similar topics. A unique hashtag reference is created for a group. Participants can then join the chat through http://tweetchat.com/. A set time can be created for synchronize communication with participants and the chat can be moderated.
Dr. Beaudin, et al. has conducted research that shows that Twitter is useful for educators to share content and resources for professional development (Beaudin, L. & Cowie, B. (2014). Educators’ Perceptions of and Practices for Using Social Media for Professional Development. In M. Searson & M. Ochoa (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2014 (pp. 2434-2439). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)). Twitter was second, only YouTube, as a professional development resource. Twitter can be very useful to break the isolation teachers face in their profession. It is a useful resource for finding information and people. Twitter can be used to simply gather information or it can be used as a sharing platform.