I have attached my Prezi Screen Cast here for everyone to enjoy!
I have also attached my Prezi without audio. (I didn’t realize until after I completed my presentation that I could not record audio without a subscription)
Thanks for the great class everyone, enjoy your summer!
Photo by Mohamed_hassan on Pixabay
This class went by so quickly! I don’t know about anyone else but I felt like we just started yesterday. But I am very thankful that summer is starting! As I reflect back on everything we have covered, I feel that I am leaving this class with a good collection of educational technology knowledge, but also with the feeling of accomplishment for myself as well as everyone else in the class.
To reflect back on my contributions to the learning of others.. I really really wish that I would have kept up more with our discord group and blog comments. To those of you that listened to Katia’s advice about keeping screenshots/doc of all your comments, I commend you. Really really really wish I would have done that too!
In my defense.. I normally take 1-2 business days to get back to anyone. I’m really bad for reading something, putting my phone down for whatever reason, and then just forgetting to reply. It’s a really bad habit I need to break!
I feel where I was really able to contribute was in our class break out discussions. I do have a tendency to step back and let others share, but I found that I stepped up to the plate more this semester. I found that in a lot of discussions, I was able to get the conversation started and shared my opinions, concerns, and ideas with others. In this class I found that we had a lot of great discussions I enjoyed! During the rest of class I tried to stay active in the chat discussions.
Discord Contributions:
Before this class I had never used discord, nor did I really understand what is was. I always thought it was sort of like Twitch for some reason. Now that I am aware of what it is, it’s really handy to have! Especially for online classes. It will be something I definitely suggest for group work in my future classes!
Blog Contributions:
Thanks for the great semester everyone!
Before I started writing this final post, I sent a picture of my finished incense burner to my friend that I have been keeping updated through my learning project. We talked about how we both have tried so many different hobbies but never really stuck with them. Both of us have hobby graveyards in our closets. Mine is filled with knitting/crocheting stuff, painting supplies, those gem painting kits, and so many other things that I was once excited to use that have now lost their original flare. I don’t know if it is because I had to stick with it for this project, or just because I really enjoyed myself throughout the process,(probably a bit of both) but I think I’m going to stick with air dry clay!
Through this learning project I have learned many skills related to clay art, but many new skills related to technology as well. I can now say I am confident in finding online learning resources that are actually useful, and I now feel very comfortable editing videos, pictures, etc. (which will definitely come in handy in the future!) I loved keeping up with everyone else’s learning projects, it was great motivation to keep going on mine and everyone had so many great resources to share!
I have looked through my learning project posts and I feel that I can see the growth that I have made learning this skill. Before starting this project I had never worked with sort of clay (other than playdough) before, and I feel confident that the next project I make I won’t need a tutorial to complete it!
Here are some of my personal favourite highlights from my learning project:
Starting My “Pottery” Experience
Checklist of Skills/Techniques:
These are the skills that I set out to learn in my first post. I have covered all of them and feel quite confident in my abilities. I even added colouring the clay to my list! (I still need to perfect this)
I Made an Earring Tray! Second Learning Project Post
This was my first actual project, I chose this slide to highlight just to share a visual starting point to see how my skills have progressed. Looking back, I don’t think I started too shabby but I can definitely see my improvement!
Having an Egg-cellent Time With my Learning Project (3rd Post)
When I finished, I left the magnets to dry on my kitchen table for the night. The next morning when I checked on them, my cherries fell apart when I picked them up, so I think I need to continuing working on my combining pieces skills.
Since I had this issue with my cherries falling apart, I have practiced connecting smaller pieces together with my fish tank decoration, as well as my mini vase project. These pieces are still holding together, so I call that improvement!
Getting the Hang of This! (4th Post)
Because of how the food colouring was reacting with the clay I decided to just paint Patrick’s rock. I couldn’t leave Squidward’s house looking that crazy, so I decided to remake it without the food colouring.. and it looks a lot better!
This is my final dried product, I’m a lot happier with this version than the previous. Once it is fully dried I am going to paint and seal it, I’m quite excited to see it finished!
This was by far my favourite thing to create. I was proud of myself because I was able to correct my mistakes instead of just leaving it as is like I normally would with tasks like this. Also, I was able to recreate Squidward’s house rather quickly which surprised me. It ended up being more of a recreation rather than a replica, but I am still very happy with it!
Possibly the Smallest Vase Ever? (5th Project)
I don’t have anything I want to specifically highlight from this post, but after completing my final clay project I do want to go back to this air dry clay tutorial to try and make a full size vase. I found a bottle in my garage that will work perfect for the project and I’m very excited to try it out again!
Here is my incense burner completed! I don’t really know what lead me to make a volcano, but it was the first idea that popped into my head after I read Chat GPT’s response to my prompt. If I was to use AI for a tutorial again, I think I would find a reference picture to either use as a prompt or describe in the prompt chat.
Overall, I feel accomplished in my achievements with this learning project. I probably wouldn’t have ever actually gotten around to trying air dry clay if it wouldn’t have been for this assignment, so I am quite thankful for the opportunity. Now that I have made some small accomplishments with clay I can’t wait to improve my skills. In the future I would love to try an actual pottery class now that I know how much I enjoy working with clay.
Thanks for reading and wishing you all a great summer!
To conclude my last project post, here is a picture of my completed SpongeBob decoration for my fish tank. I did paint the sand, but the colour dried to be basically the same as the original clay colour. I am going to buy the dishwasher safe Mod Podge and add a few more details before I call it completely done.
For my 6th clay creation, I wanted to try something more difficult than I have previously, while practicing working with clay free handed. I have been wanting a new incense burner, so why not make my own!
As my learning resource this week, I used ChatGPT. I found ChatGPT to be an alright learning resource. I like that it breaks down your steps into a numbered list, as well as goes into good details with how to. I don’t know if someone that has never used air dry clay before could follow the steps without looking up a supplementary video, but I am a visual learner so maybe that is just me! With this project I didn’t need to look up a video, but I’m sure there are lots on YouTube.
To switch it up for this learning blog post, I made a short time-lapse video of me creating this incense burner, please enjoy! YouTube Video
I used CapCut to stitch the videos together and add the music. It is free to use with lots of different options for adding text, filters, and music to your videos. And as an added bonus, there are no annoying ads to watch in between each step of editing. There is also a premium version, but the free one has to much to choose from I don’t see why you would need to upgrade!
Thanks for reading!
Before our class on cyber-sleuthing, I hadn’t really given any of the topics we discussed much thought. After our class, I have a lot of thoughts. Specifically on cyber-vigilantism and everything that comes with it.
Being connected worldwide is a great thing. Without social media specifically, we would not see the world or what is happening in the world as quickly and easily as we are able to. Though as we are sort of guinea pigs to this whole extreme interconnected way of living, it does have its benefits. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of negatives to having so much of our personal identities available for the world to see, as we all have learned.
I still think that cyber-vigilantism being right or wrong still really depends on the specific situation. When the internet is able to remain focused on stopping/spreading awareness of the specific bad situation, yes I think that is a good thing. It is nice to see that there are so many people in the world that care about what others are going through, and even better when the world can help bring justice to a terrible situation.
On the other hand, the amount of shame, bullying, and harassment that comes with being the target of a cyber vigilante can also be a terrible situation. As we all know, everyone makes mistakes in their lives, and making mistakes is how we learn! Now that we are able to make these mistakes online for the entire world to see seems more than a little unfair. Overall, I think we need to remember to give people grace when it comes to certain mistakes they’ve made in their lives.
Thanks for reading!
For my fifth project, I used How to Make an Air-Dry Clay Vase as my learning resource. I didn’t think my skills that I have learned so far would allow me to create a large vase like the one shown in link, so I decided to start small. I recently broke a glass ball that used to hold some dried flowers that I’ve saved over the years, and they are quite small, so win win!
First, I did the usual and rolled out a piece of clay. After the clay was rolled out, I cut out a rectangle-ish shape to cover my vase mold with. For a mold, I used a really small lunch box container for packing dipping sauce.
I then placed the container on my wax paper and used the rectangle piece to wrap the container to make the walls for my vase. I made my rectangle a little small, so I had to improvise and roll out a bit more clay to fully cover the sides of the container without the clay being too thin.
Removing the container from the center of the clay was not as daunting of a task that I was making it out to be, I just pushed down from the inside of the container and it slipped right out! I didn’t really want a circular shape like the one above, so I got out some slurry and tried to shape my clay into more of a vase shape. I then rolled out a bit more clay to make a bottom for it.
I roughly guessed with my etch marks the shape of the vase, added slurry to the etch marks and to the bottom of the vase and stuck the pieces together. I then used my sharpest tool to cut out the bottom of the vase from the rest of the clay.
Once my vase was free, I started shaping it with slurry and my fingers until I was happy with the results. To work on detail and add decoration, I used a toothpick to carve out some flower petals on the front. Once the clay started drying though the carve marks looked quite strange, so I quickly filled them with (you guessed it) slurry.
For my fourth clay project I decided to use a tutorial app that I found called DIY Clay Craft. As of right now, I would say this was my least beneficial learning tool. There are short videos for a few mini projects you can make, but there are no detailed steps or instructions to follow. I would say this app would be most useful if you are looking for some inspiration, but, you’re probably going to find more literally anywhere else.
On the app, I did find a video that showed how to create a pineapple that looked like it would be a good way to work on my detail skills. The whole project was for a fruit basket but since I just did fruits for my magnets I wanted to try something else.
Inspired by the pineapple and that I just got a fish tank, I decided to try and make Spongebob, Patrick, and Squidward’s houses as a decoration for the tank. I’m going to assume that everyone knows what I’m talking about, but just incase you don’t, SpongeBob SquarePants is an animated cartoon from the early 2000s and the main character lives in a pineapple!
To start, I attempted to make the sand that the houses sit on. I used one of my tools make sort of a sand underwater look and got the circle shape by using a mason jar lid as a cookie cutter.
I then wanted to try and pre colour my clay to save myself the painting step. My first thought was to use acrylic paint, but that made the clay quite sticky. I tried again using food colouring and that worked a lot better. To get a bright colour though, you have to use a lot more than you think you are going to need.
After getting the yellow to the right shade I used a bit of slurry to smooth the clay and started making a marshmallow shape. I used one of my angled cutting tools to make the lines in the pineapple, then started on the leafy part. I repeated the same steps with food colouring and created more of a teardrop with the green. I used scissors to create the leaves like the video suggested and then stuck the pieces together with slurry. I made sure to make deep etch marks this time to ensure my clay stuck together better than last time!
I then started working on Squidward’s house.. I was proud of the colour I was able to get by mixing blue, red, and a tiny bit of green food colouring, but that was about it.
Because of how the food colouring was reacting with the clay I decided to just paint Patrick’s rock. I couldn’t leave Squidward’s house looking that crazy, so I decided to remake it without the food colouring.. and it looks a lot better!
This is my final dried product, I’m a lot happier with this version than the previous. Once it is fully dried I am going to paint and seal it, I’m quite excited to see it finished!
Thanks for reading!
Screenshot from Google Images
When I was in school, I don’t recall talking about cyber safety much. Most of the adults in my life have viewed younger generations as more skillful than themselves when it comes to technology, so that leads me to think that they assumed we knew what we were doing when it came to staying safe online. I personally have not had any sort of cyber safety incidents, so I think I’m doing an alright job for myself.
I think a lot of what I learned about cyber safety when I was young came from my parents. I remember my mom always being worried about me playing those old Facebook games like FarmVille and MiniPlanet. (I just read MiniPlanet might be coming back?!) but I never really listened to her worries. I probably should have, but I never experienced anything scary or worrisome.
I do remember seeing a lot of commercials on TV about this topic when I was a kid. The commercials almost always had a creepy vibe that made its main point to basically just stay off the internet. There was one commercial that I remember that I think had the best message out the of the bunch, Protect Children Internet Safety PSA. This commercial’s message is to use the internet safely by blocking creeps that you come across. This was an okay message for the times, but as we know know blocking people doesn’t do much when you can just create a new account.
I think the best approach to staying safe on the internet is to always use common sense, trust your gut, and just avoid the sites that seem sketchy. I know all this is easier said than done obviously, but that is why is it important to inform our future students on the dangers that can come with being online. Even if we think they know it, reminders are always a good thing!
Thanks for reading!
Before I dive into my magnet creating adventure, I wanted to show my first 100% completed project. To finish my tray I first used acrylic paint, but I couldn’t get the paint to spread nicely on my dried clay. After doing some googling to troubleshoot, I realized that it is important to smooth out clay creations with a wet sponge afterwards to ensure a really smooth surface. As I could not go back and fix this, I used spray paint that I found in my garage. I then used glossy Mod-Podge to seal the paint and add a really nice shine!
Magnet time! My goal with creating magnets was to work on building my detail skills, as well as work on combining different pieces together. I used TikTok (this link was my most used tutorial video) as my learning resource for this project, and I found all the videos to be extremely helpful. My favourite thing about TikTok tutorials is that they are usually short, simple, and to the point. My least favourite thing is that in some cases, video creators skip showing some of the important steps. But for the videos that I have found that was thankfully not the case!
A lot of the tutorials focused on food magnets so that is what I went with! I made some cherries, a banana, and an egg. I first made the cherries which was actually quite simple. First, I created small balls of clay and then pressed them down with my thumb, sort of like you would with cookies. I then used the trusty snake technique again to make the cherry stems. To create the leaves, I just took little pieces of clay and shaped them to somewhat resemble leaves.
My next task was to create an fried egg. To make the yolk I used the same technique as the cherries and made another little ball of clay to press down. To create the egg white part, I rolled out a small piece of clay to be about 1/4” thick which is what most tutorials recommend. I then used one of my clay tools to cut out the egg white from the clay I rolled.
Lastly and definitely the most challenging, the banana. Instead of a bunch of bananas I wanted to create a single on that was half peeled as I thought that would be the easiest way to go about this task. Creating the actual banana shape was the most challenging part, followed by sticking the peels to the banana. I hand shaped all parts, and used slurry to help the pieces stick together.
When I finished, I left the magnets to dry on my kitchen table for the night. The next morning when I checked on them, my cherries fell apart when I picked them up, so I think I need to continuing working on my combining pieces skills.
Here are my completed magnets painted, sealed, and stuck to my fridge!
I’m unsure of what I want to create next, but I would like to continue to work on the skills I listed above, as well as maybe more shaping and clay colouring.
Thanks for reading!
For my mini coding project, I chose to do the create your own self portrait option on Hour of Code. I tried a few of the other tutorials like the Code a Healthy Meal App, but I found that one to be sort of confusing as there was not an as in-depth tutorial included. The self portrait tutorial is very in-depth with instructions as well as explains the why of each line of code. It even has some tips and tricks to make sure everything moves efficiently!
To start the project, you must first go to P5JS. This is a site that is essentially an IPad you can draw on with your keyboard. It has a bunch of examples, shortcuts, and presettings for you to use for free with an account. I will also link the tutorial video here: Code Your Self Portrait.
-the first step is to create a background colour. In this stage, you can google RGB colour picker, which will give you the codes you need to choose the colours for your project. 
-To start, you must first draw the shape of your head. In this program ellipse is the code for circle. You can then adjust the dimensions of your circle in your coding.
-I then added eyes to my project by adding more ellipses. Adding the different colours to your picture is easy, as you just use the fill code above the shape you want coloured.
-I then added a neck to my portrait. To add the neck, you must use a “rect(CENTER)” code to center your shape, and then you must copy and paste your code above your head shape. In the tutorial, this is explained as the shapes being stickers on a paper, so to layer them properly you must go in the right order for your picture.
-After changing my skin colour to a more Cookie Monster feel, I also added a mouth by cutting an ellipse in half. The coordinates that were provided in the video were giving me a strange shape, so I had to play around with my numbers to get a half circle.
-In this stage I was adding a nose, I don’t know exactly why my mouth became a line and my nose was only a half nose, but I liked the look so I didn’t bother to try and figure it out. (I guess I’m just a pro coder now?)
-The next step in the tutorial was to add eyebrows by creating straight lines. This did not go well for me at all. Again, I don’t really know what I was doing incorrectly, but when trying to create the eyebrows my lines would in all sorts of crazy directions so I decided to leave them out of my portrait.
-Removing the eyebrows created an error, and I thought I lost all my progress! I watched the tutorial and tried googling the issue but nothing was coming up. After staring at my screen trying to solve my problem, I realized that I accidentally removed a very crucial part of my picture, a curly end bracket! ( } ) After adding that back to the end of my code list, my project thankfully came back!
-This is my end result at the moment, but I plan to go back in and add some hair to my portrait!
Overall, I think that Hour of Code is a great resource for students that are interested in learning code. There are lots of options to peak everyone’s interests! Through this short tutorial I feel that I learned a lot of little tidbits about the ins and outs of code, as well as how cool it can actually be. Personally I don’t think this is a hobby that I would pick up as I found it a tiny bit tedious. I do think though that coding is an important skill for students to learn with the way our world is becoming more and more technology centred. It also opens a lot of doors for students to show what they know in a creative way!
Thanks for reading!
