I made a video game! My childhood dream!

Well today I definitely learned something new! I coded my own video game! Doing an Hour of Code on code.org, I have successfully coded my own video game. The instructions were fairly simple to follow… Even though a couple times I wasn’t quite sure what to do, the program lets you know of your mistake and allows you to correct it before you move forward. This activity definitely felt a little more than a beginner activity but it was a lot of fun to see the work some together in the end. I took a screen recording of the process which is quite long, but it was a lot of fun for myself. Tune in here to check out my progress!

As far as coding in the classroom, I think there is 100% a spot for it. One of my few regrets in life is not learning more how computers work on the inside and with code. Technology is such a huge part of our lives and culture nowadays that I think it is so important that students learn at least the basics of coding. Now that I’ve been able to gain a little bit of experience in coding, I would definitely feel a lot more comfortable letting my kids play around with these programs and I’d feel confident that I would be able to help out students who are beginners in the area of code.

Pre-adolescent boys programming robotics at digital tablets in classroom

Photo by Hero Images/Hero Images

Walkin’ Towards Progress

This is most likely not going to be a very long post, however, I did learn a new skill when it comes to Stop Motion! This week I learned how to replicate a walk cycle of a LEGO mini figure. It was a pretty basic skill to learn but it is also essential to making a short film using the LEGO figures. Below is the walk cycle illustrated in one frame.

LEGO walking sequence

I did make a little video as well with some waving action from the mini figure. This Storm Trooper walking video will probably be the last video that I post before I start working on the final project for this assignment. I feel like I have made a lot of progress along the way and I’m excited for my final product and what I’ll be able to produce!

Thanks for tuning into my quite short progress post!

Can Saskatchewan produce digital citizens via the classroom?

This was a very interesting assignment. I have spent some time doing a little bit of research to try and find something in the Saskatchewan Curriculum about digital citizenship and it has been quite difficult to be honest. In all honestly, I focused mainly on the middle year curriculum, grades 6-8, as it is my area of teaching. As a result, I have STRUGGLED to find anything relevant when it comes to digital literacy or citizenship.

I did, however, find a few interesting things while doing some research. The only outcome in the 6-8 curriculum that I could find that even eludes to digital citizenship a little bit was in the grade 6 Health curriculum which was the following outcome:

This outcome does not say directly that it includes digital citizenship, however, one could make a fairly easy argument that it falls into the category of developing identity as well as dealing with mass media outlets.

During my research, I was able to dive into the Regina Catholic School Division staff portal and find some of the ressources that they offer to their teachers. Unfortunately, I cannot share any of what is on the site through this blog as one would need access to the RCSD staff portal which is only available to staff members… Another important note is that as I was looking, I noticed that the RCSD site eluded to the fact that the PAA curriculum has some Digital Literacy things in it, but when I clicked on the curriculum for PAA on the government site, there was nothing there on Digital Literacy.

As I sit here and say the government has no ressources multiple times, I’d be remised to neglect the Digital Citizenship Ministry Continuum. This IS a document that is provided by the government which outlines Ribble’s Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship. All of the nine elements are important to digital citizenship in the classroom. These elements are especially important when students can access the internet so easily, communicate with others and need to focus on navigating through our digital world securely and while keeping in mind a healthy balance of screen time, relationships and education.

As a current practicing teacher, I ensure that I always focus a little but on Digital Citizenship in my classroom. These lesson often fall into my Health class or Religious studies class as that curriculum includes healthy relationships. I absolutely believe that Digital Citizenship has a place in school and curriculum, I’m just not quite sure that the Saskatchewan curriculum is all the way caught up when it comes to outcomes for middle year students, the age at which most students are first learning and interacting with technology in a more vulnerable way.

The Many Faces of LEGO Stop Motion

This week I challenged myself to do a deeper dive into adding faces to LEGO faces with the Stop Motion Studio app. This process proved to be a lot more time consuming than I anticipated. After taking to initial pictures of the frames that I wanted, I needed to copy and paste those images to ensure that I was using the same frames and only editing the faces on the LEGO figures.

Going through the different facial feature options was a lot as well as making the slight changes to the frames like changes the faces, moving the faces, and rotating them was very time consuming and a lot of work. While I was doing this, I was also adding sounds and assuring that the sounds were lining up with the frames and images. It may not sound like I did much and this is a shorter update than I’ve had in the past but most of my time was simply spent making tiny changes and copying and pasting frames to make the changes.

Below I have added some examples of what the app looks like while I’m editing and making these changes.

An example of the multiple frames and the added edits to add audio and pause frames to ensure the sound/voice effects line up with the images.

This is the look of the page when you add a face to your frame

These are different eye options. Only a few among many more once you start scrolling.

Different mouth features, similar to the eye features.

This is where you can rotate the faces on your image. This is often used to make a character appear as if they are facing a different direction other than straight at the camera.

Here is a short video that I made this week which uses different features such as the faces being added to the frames and voice over effects for the speaking parts. Please excuse my TERRIBLE voice acting… Enjoy! Faces of Motion.

 

Digital Literacy?… Wait, What’re We Reading?

I had the joy of growing up in the 90s and the early 2000s. I grew up with a GameBoy, SEGA and a N64. The big difference between video games today and back then, other than the obvious point of the sophisticated graphics and massive processing units, is of course that there was no online play back then. Once I hit middle school, in comes MSN Messenger, cell phones (flip phones of course) and an early introduction to online video games.

In school, we really did not have any digital literacy or cyber safety taught to us until high school. While I was in elementary school, kids being online seemed to be a fairly new thing and teachers were not talking about it very much. Although we were chatting with MSN, using webcams, and sharing photos, it felt as though teachers and most parents had no clue what was really going on while kids were on MSN and online, whether it was good or bad. Once in high school, I remember a little bit more digital literacy happening, but as discussed with some classmates, it was more of the police coming in and scaring you with committing a crime. Teachers were not educating about online usage. Teachers were not involving themselves with students’ online lives when I was in school.

Now that I am a teacher, I make a point of explaining and teaching my students about digital literacy. One of my favorite ressources is from Common Sense Learning. It is a great interactive resource for all grade levels which includes videos, activity sheets, and stories. I think it is very important to teach digital literacy because our children and students are online so often. It has become such a part of regular life for most people that we often forget the risks of being online so often. My students often tell me about things they’ve done or said online and most of the time I’m pretty surprised and I try to teach them about the dangers. Some students do not take it seriously and I do not think that they will until something bad happens to them unfortunately. I do my best with the resources that I have and hope that it helps most students be more conscious going forward!

Digital literacy word cloud

Photo by ibreakstock

Nothing to see here… but a lot to talk about

I have already come quite a long way in my journey of never making a stop motion video ever before, to experimenting with visual and sounds a few weeks later. This week I thought that I would take a break from making videos and decided I would instead focus on researching and fooling around with the app a bit more to better understand the more complicated parts of LEGO stop motion.

I started looking into some articles that I could find related to LEGO stop motion. Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot dedicated solely to LEGO stop motion, however, I was able to find one pretty good article that I enjoyed reading about another creator’s experience with LEGO stop motion. The neat thing about this article: LEGO stop motion for beginners, is that the creator was also using the Stop Motion Studio app that I’m using as well! What I really liked about this article is that it keeps everything simple. The article gives you some easy tips and tricks to improve for creating skills, as well as it gives you a list of supplies to use to make things easier. The article also included some videos for visual learners to use which was very helpful.

The next thing that I did was focused strictly on LEGO stop motion from now on and not just stop motion in general. The app that I’m using, Stop Motion Studio, Has many tutorial on all of the different aspects of LEGO stop motion. I decided to take some time and to watch and then practice some of the techniques shown in the video.

These video are super helpful as they walk you through exactly where to go on the app to add which effects. I am learning that there is so much time and effort that goes into the short video clips. I’m excited but also a little bit nervous when it comes to starting my final project.

As I was going through the tutorial videos, I was realizing that there are so many parts needed to make a successful LEGO stop motion video if you want it to be done well and to use the full potential on the video. I started looking at kits that are available for making LEGO stop motion and I found a fairly inexpensive one from the LEGO site that is also available on Amazon.

This kit comes with a platform, which is very useful for LEGO stop motion to assure that you mini figures stay in place. It also comes with several mini figures, different accessory pieces, and several different backgrounds that you can use.

 

 

I have made quite a bit of progress this week, even though I haven’t actually filmed anything. I learned a lot of the intricacies of LEGO stop motion, different accessories that will make my creating experience better, and I’ve been able to gather more tools. There are couple more skills I want to practice before I start working on my final project. I can’t wait to keep moving forward!

A LOUD Wedding

This week on my Stop Motion journey, I fooled around a bit with sound effects on the Stop Motion Studio app. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. The app makes it very easy to be able to insert different sounds that over lap each other and it also makes it simple to cut down the sounds to better fit your motion picture.

By access the sound section of where you can add things to your movie, I was able to scroll through and find some music that I could play in the background of my video. There are quite a few options but I think there could be more added in the future. My video is a wedding themed video for this one and I hoping there would be something labelled “wedding music” or something similar to that but unfortunately I could not find such things so I settled for some low key happier toned music that was available on the app.

The app also gives you the chance to record your own sounds. In my movie, I capture the bride and the groom kissing. Unfortunately, the app does not provide a sound effect for a kiss for I had to record the kissing sound on my own and insert it into the movie.

At the end of my video, I found a clip for a crowd cheering so I could emphasize the end of the of the wedding. In the screenshot that I took you can also see some of the other options for sounds.

 

Finally! Here is my latest creation using Stop Motion “Happily Married

Enjoy! I appreciate the comments and feedback!

The bird goes… TWEET TWEET

I have been using Twitter for a very long time. I feel like I jumped on Twitter in the very early stages of the app. I have seen all the changes that the app has gone through and I believe that it has become a great tool for just about anyone to use. I mostly use my personal Twitter for sports, news and following some of my friends and what they are up to. I do not tweet much from my personal account. At times, I will retweet and likes things, but rarely do I tweet my own ideas from my personal account.

I am only just starting to use Twitter professionally. I like finding new resources, reading about different apps and find new ways to engage my students through all the different spaces on Twitter. I have used Twitter Spaces a couple times which allows you to have full on conversations with people about certain topics which is a fairly new feature of Twitter. It is a neat feature that allows you to actually have verbal conversations with anyone in the “Space” and discuss the main topic. I have found it more useful than a blog because of the verbal conversation aspect and being able to immediately provide feedback or ask questions.

In my opinion, Twitter could be a very effective tool used in the classroom under certain circumstances. I think that it is a great way for students to share their ideas with a community and to learn new things as well. It is a great way to connect locally, provincially, nationally and even internationally. This allows students to broaden their horizons and really engage with different parts of the world, outside of their communities.

I do have some concerns with Twitter being used in a regular classroom setting. Twitter is not moderated from inappropriate material in the same way that other social media platforms are. I would have a tough time allowing middle school students onto Twitter given the fact that it is possible that they stumble upon violent and gory images, and even in some cases it is possible that they may find some pornographic images. I do think that there are other programs that could be supplemented that feature a similar mini-blog format such as Seesaw Blogs or Google classroom.