I took my birthday off last week without actually meaning to. I just felt like I had nothing to say, and so appropriately said nothing.
Thanks to the past few days, I have something I’m sort of willing to jabber on about- teaching myself how to play with a presentation program. Fortunately, I love to learn and I have an oversized determination streak.
It all started when I thought it would be nice to not only create this blog and book, but to create something for visual/auditory learners. (Eventually, I’ll get to the haptic learners, but for right now I’ve almost bitten off more than I can chew.) I’d always planned to create a video using Impress, OpenOffice’s equivalent of PowerPoint. (I had to start somewhere, and it’s on my computer.)
Not too long ago, someone reviewed Beyond Bullet Points, and I thought it was as good a place to start as any. Before this, the closest I’d ever been to PowerPoint were a pair of presentations I had to create in grad school several years ago. I’d never opened Impress. I got the book from my local library, sat down and started reading, making notes and creating the tutorial as I went.
The most complicated part, it turned out, wasn’t creating the presentation in the format presented in the book. Translating PowerPoint into Impress was easy. It wasn’t creating the expressions (OOoMath uses a format very similar to LaTeX, which I use to write expressions for Dead Bunny’s blog.). Creating a storyboard and script have even been fairly easy. The hang-up came when I learned not all off OpenOffice’s packages had been installed. This led to all sorts of repeat work in Impress because certain edits weren’t being saved. (We’ll hopefully have this one fixed later today. Thank goodness for the friendly, helpful OOo forums!)
I’ve started working on animating the tutorial (meaning I’ve started fidgeting with the slide timing. There are only two actual animation sequences anywhere in the tutorial.) The next step from here will be to replace my dying microphone (not a pleasant discovery), take a deep breath, push past my stage fright, and record the narration for this thing. Then I’ll get to find out how complicated incorporating audio into Impress is, and how hard it is to sync the slides and the narrating.
If all goes well, I should hopefully be sharing a link to the tutorial by August, and you can tell me if I learned well.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:08 AM EDT
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(This topic will end up cross-posted because of how I started blogging.)
The newest blogging challenge from Lorelle on Wordpress asks for our blog’s story. Well, my blogs had a unified start, so it makes sense to start both stories the same, and then follow their development apart individually.
I was gifted with an online journal in January 2002, not long after moving to San Antonio after grad school. She had just met me, and was adamant that I should have this journal (She was doing this to her friends, and she decided the moment she met me that we were going to be friends. In an interesting twist of events, we no longer speak to each other.) At first, I had no idea what I was going to do with the space. I stumbled through a couple of random posts before discovering quizzes. Before long, I started writing random reflections and thoughts about what was going on around me. After a while, it became more a place to tell friends what I was up to. I actually started meeting new people through the community, some of whom I’m still good friends with.
A few months after being given this online journal, I was introduced to Curt Rosengren’s blog. It sparked something in me. I decided I wanted to write more than just silly little “Hello, world” posts. I set up a Blogger blog and started writing in it about personal observations about informal learning (one of my passions). Eventually, I started writing more about education, and then started writing posts about personal development, changing careers, and writing resumes (I was starting to realize I had to consider how I was going to reshape my career path. Still am, come to think of it. I was also spending a lot of time helping friends and family navigate their own career changes.)
After a while, I felt like I had no idea what I was trying to accomplish anymore. The Blogger blog was split up among three TypePad blogs: CareerNiche, DesignNiche, and EducationNiche. They covered the main topics I’d been blogging about at that point. People would occasionally stop by and leave comments, or email me. But TypePad had a series of meltdowns, and I became frustrated at not being able to write when I wanted. This blog dabbled briefly as a Drupal blog (which is where JewelryNiche became a blog, but someone mentioned WordPress, and I checked it out.
I can’t remember when exactly I moved this group of blogs to WordPress. but I remember it was a bit painful. My web guru finally used Multiply to get everything here the way I wanted. (Funny thing, we’re actually finally looking into MU, but I don’t really want to move anything until I have a design and a good idea how everything is going to change around here.) At some point not long after that, I started WritingNiche.
My motivation is purely internal. I need to be able to get things out of my head, and this medium works well for organizing discarded thoughts. Others read and link these blogs, and I’m very appreciative of that fact, and a bit surprised anyone finds this useful. My inspiration comes from life, my own learning efforts, and the blogs I read. The biggest challenge, especially now that I’m trying to reorganize everything, has been figuring out where certain topics fit.
Would I give up any of my Niches? Except for JewelryNiche (which is on an indeterminate hiatus), I don’t think I could reasonably give up any of them. To some degree, they all represent some facet of who I am and what makes me happy. I guess that’s all one could really ask for.
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 8:11 AM EDT
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Like a number of teachers I’ve known, I had already learned a lot about teaching long before I ever set foot in a teacher prep program. I had tutored classmates, taught small classes to younger students and kids my own age, and helped develop educational programs that I ended up presenting in a planetarium.
No one ever sat me down and explained how to control a room full of energetic preschoolers.
No one ever told me how to develop an educational program so that visitors took away information.
I got very little time to shadow someone else doing the job I was about to be asked to do.
But when I walked into the teacher prep program after three years of being involved with the education department of a planetarium and a museum, I already knew much of what the professors were talking about. I had to learn specific terminology. I to learn about the university’s preferred format for lesson and unit plans. I had to learn about special needs groups. I had to learn about assessment.
Because of a lifetime spent teaching in some capacity, I understood the theory behind what I was being told. I was praised by master teachers for my great solutions to issues, all developed while babysitting, tutoring, or teaching.
Do I think going through the teacher prep program was a waste of time? No. I learned some very useful information. I had a chance to practice teaching in different dimensions that i might not have had while teaching in museums and planetaria. I passed my certification exams.
In all honesty, I’ve spent two-thirds of my life as an amateur teacher and only the last third as a professional teacher. Does anyone hold the first two-thirds of my life against me professionally? Nope.
Right now, there is fear going on. Fear that the technological revolution that has quietly swept through the schools will spell certain doom for a number of professions. Children not old enough to drive are turning out simple multimedia projects, web sites, graphic designs, and writing that most of us (even those of us who are part of the video game generation) couldn’t have even imagined when we were their age.
These kids are looking at what’s out there and saying, “Cool! I bet I could do that.” They’re duplicating what they see, and some of them are using that as a launch pad to find their own voice in the medium. They aren’t as polished as someone with twice their experience in some cases, but they’re gaining skills that could help them find a career working with that medium. All without setting foot in a professional program.
Amateurs are a very dangerous lot, I guess. They find someone they admire or can’t stand. They learn the medium, often through self-study or by networking with other amateurs. They develop a passion for the medium. Then they practice. Like their professional counterparts, some continue learning, practicing, or growing. Others follow their professional counterparts by becoming arrogant, half-competent practitioners.
It’s just a different pay scale.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:55 AM EDT
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