Cyandra Cornish

I AM ALWAYS LEARNING!

Month: February 2021

Week of learning

February 23, 2021 / / 1 Comment

This week I worked on creating a plant piece. This is one of my favourite plants! A Monstera! I believed once again that this piece was going to be fairly easy. Like always it was not. The biggest struggle with this piece was drawing the leaves perfectly imperfect. Because plants are so organic it is hard to recreate that in cartoon form. After spending over an hour on the first leaf I decided that I needed to not be such a perfectionist as getting the organic shape and colour of a real Monstera was almost impossible. After giving myself this freedom the leaves took a lot less time. This week I learned how to shade, how to use a reference picture, how to use different dimensions by placing leaves behind and in front of one another. I loved that I was able to use last week tool of lettering by adding a little touch on the final product.

My Wevideo

To show my progress this week I decided to make a WeVideo . Being a visual learning I find videos one of the best way to learn skills online. I love in this video editing software you are able to layer videos, music, and audio. It was surprisingly easy to create this video and for me it would be very beneficial to be able to see time-lapse with audio behind explaining what is happening at the same time. I will absolutely being using this tool in the future to help students, to make fun brain breaks with the students, and to help them have another option other than PowerPoint to share their ideas! WeVideo is now my favourite way to presents anything from a lesson, to a book review, to an about me on the first day of class in my future classroom. The simplicity and the capability of using it completely blew me away! My rating on WeVideo is a 10/10!

Writing?

February 11, 2021 / / 1 Comment

Week 3! When looking at what I wanted to do each week I thought lettering was going to be easy so I put it near the beginning of my journey so that I could use it along the way in future pieces. In my head, I thought that this calligraphy style of artistic writing seemed so easy. I have seen so many Tiktoks of people writing all pretty and it was so fast so I just assumed that it would be easy! (like this one)

@procreate.and.lettering

Antwoorden aan @gachalogic1234567890 ik doe alleen maar VOORNAMEN.

♬ Banana (feat. Shaggy) [DJ FLe – Minisiren Remix] – Conkarah

Was I ever wrong. When I realized how hard this week was going to be I realized that I was going to need to practice a lot. So I found some free templates online and I got to work practicing. I remember doing sheets like this in elementary school when we started learning cursive but these were so much harder.

I decided that I wanted to put all of my hard work to the test and try to create a couple of little pieces. I followed one of the YouTube videos from the same person whose website I found the brush on (video linked here). Here video was really easy to follow along with and she actually also taught me how to download colours and create colour palettes. I FELT SO TECHY DOING THIS! 

What I learned this week!

-I realized that I am not going to be like this amazing Tiktoker who can whip up a beautiful piece in one go. 

-I learned how to download new brushes

-I have the tools to make my own palette now

Any worlds of encouragement for this coming week?

To tweet or not to tweet?

February 10, 2021 / / 1 Comment
thumbs up

Before coming into this class I thought that Twitter was for old people who did not have Instagram, or for people who had a lot to say but no one to say it to so they would put it on Twitter. So when Katia (My Prof) said that we all needed to download Twitter I was a bit skeptical. I have never heard of anything good that came from Twitter. However, in exploring Twitter over the past couple of weeks I have come to realize that Twitter is what you make it. If you want to follow people who only talk drama then you can do that, BUT if you want to use it as an educational platform that supports others in learning and developing then that is also an option.

My first big accomplishment with Twitter would be the #saskedchat that our class participated in. Going in I had no idea what to expect. It really blew my mind to think that a group of people was discussing education from anywhere in Saskatchewan. As well to think that this conversation was not limited to Saskatchewan and if someone from Germany wanted to see what we were doing they could. I thought that this was so cool!

The big question! What place does Twitter along with other social media have in the classroom? To put it plainly I am not sure. Twitter is still so new to me that at the moment I cannot see a huge benefit for students to use it in education until maybe High School. I am not a fan of social media in general. My concerns with social media are the following: teenagers are already spending so much time on social media so why should we introduce it in the schools encouraging students who do not have it to get it and for students that do have it to spend more time on it. What you post lasts forever and I do not think that students understand that at this age. Finally, many students have back experiences with social media, and to bring that into the classroom when a student may get bullied on social media that may make the student feel uncomfortable in this class.

That all being said, I am totally up for having my mind being changed. So am I just over thinking? Do you think Twitter and social media in the classroom is a wave of the future? Do I need to jump on this ship? Let me know!

Fumbling through FEEDLY

February 3, 2021 / / 1 Comment

This week we were asked to get an RSS reader. I chose to use Feedly because this is the one that seemed easiest for me to figure out. I began by searching education, EDtech, inclusive education, math teachers, mathematics, high school ED, etc. However, I actually struggle to find sites I wanted to follow. Lots of sites did not come up with searches or they did not spark my attention. After some digging and looking into articles, and followers that they had I think I started to get the hang of how it works and what I was looking for. 

These are the top two education sites that I followed. 

Screenshot from Feedly

I followed them because they actually looked very interesting. Love that the first site, Free Technology for Teachers, says “Just trying to be helpful”. This makes me so excited about being in the teaching community because we all want to help each other learn! The second site I followed was Dangerously Irrelevant. What stood out to me was “why most schools won’t reinvent themselves after the pandemic”. When thinking about it, it sparked me to think about how I plan on changing things because of the Pandemic. 

I then searched for leadership.

I think that many people do not recognize teachers as leaders. When they think of leaders they think of principals, managers, CEOs, business people, etc. I think that as a teacher I need to work to grow in my leadership skills, so I followed some leadership sites. Mindtools looks really interesting from looking into it a little bit because I love steps, or 5 point lessons it helps me to learn better and they have so many 5 steps to…. articles that I am excited to look at!

Struggles

Things that I struggled with in this activity are that I am still not completely sure how Feedly works. I am working to understand how the sites work and the relationship to twitter. If anyone has any tips or help for me on this please let me know! As well, does anyone know any high school, or math sites to follow on Feedly?

Harder than it looks

February 3, 2021 / / 5 Comments

Week #1. Wow all I have to say is that this was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.  Who would have thought that colouring on an Ipad would be so hard? 
So this week I dived headfirst into learning how to use Procreate on my Ipad. I thought that I was going to be able to watch at least 5 videos with 5 different art pieces at the end of this week but that was not the case at all. I started following along with one youtube video that was only about 30 minutes and it turned out to take me over 2 hours to get all the way through this video.

  • Halfway through
  • Final art piece

This was about half way through the video. And at this point I was starting to really doubt myself and what I could do because my drawing did not look as good as the lady in the video.

However, this is how my drawing turned out. Not horrible for my first ever art piece on Procreate.  How do you think I did?

What I learned from this first week:

I learnt soooooo many terms that I had never heard of until opening up my Procreate app such as; Alpha lock, clipping mask, transformations, colour dropper, etc. As well as I learned different ways to use brushes, smudging, colours and colour palettes, layers, etc. I also learned that not all videos are easy to follow. This lady took it through nice and slow and showed where everything was. I watched another video that was very fast and she jumped by steps assuming that I knew what she was talking about. 

Goals for this week

I am starting lettering! So my goal is to find another good channel to watch a video, find some templates online to help practice my consistency in letters, and maybe find an app or a class to take! Any advise from any artists out there?

© 2023 Cyandra Cornish

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑