Author Archives: Andrea Olesen

BeReal

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About two weeks ago I was talking with my son and asked him a question about a message he said that he had gotten from a friend. I said was it a Snapchat and he looked at me like I had a horn growing out of my head and said, “Umm no it was on BeReal.” I just smiled and continued on. When this assignment came up I quickly thought of this Social Media platform and how this was a golden opportunity to teach myself about something new and cool!

I signed up for BeReal and thought okay this seems pretty cool and simple. I posted my first picture and it stated under it 5 hours late. I thought okay well I did sign up a little later in the evening. I read that I would get a notification that would give me a 2 minute window to take an unfiltered picture of myself and my surroundings. Fast forward to the next day. I am walking down the hall at school and my phone goes off and I look and see that BeReal is giving me my notification to take a picture. I was on a break so took a quick picture and shared it. I then looked at my two friends one of which is my son and see that he also took his picture when he got the notification. This was during class time. So, with the random notification times students that do not want a mark of shame (with how much they were late posting their picture) are being distracted during class to take a random picture.

 

BeReal has become very popular as the photos are unfiltered, unedited and show an asterisk if they have been taken more than once. If you chose not to post a picture on a particular day you are unable to look at those pictures in which your friends have taken. Just like Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok and other Social Media you are able to post a reaction to the pictures. If you would like to read more about BeReal I have attached a website for you.

With the little bit that I have played around on BeReal I do like that there aren’t the filters so that what you see is what you get in a sense. I think that too often in today’s society we are putting a filter on every picture we take and so the real us is not being shown/shared with the world.

 

I am the type of person that has a very competitive nature and so when I hear the notification go off I know that I am going to want to get my picture taken quickly so that I do not get a mark of shame. I think that as yes this helps in keeping things real it also isn’t doing a true portrait of ones life. How often do I give myself a time limit when I am taking a picture? I guess that this is a part of keeping things real but I think it is also adding to some of the stress that we find in our youth today. Kids are dealing with anxiety of fitting in, trying to be perfect, getting good grades, being cool, etc. This app helps in adding to those areas of anxiety by putting a time limit on the picture being taken as well as having the app notifying at random times. It keeps an element of surprise but for anyone that deals with anxiety or likes to be very organized this is a difficult concept to not know when the notification might come. Pros and Cons of BeReal.

BeReal was launched in 2019 in Paris, France. This website has a list of statistics all about the BeReal App.

BeReal US age demographics 2022 (%)

Age bracket Percentage of users
16-25 43.2
26-44 55.1
45+ 1.7

I found it surprising that the percentage of users that is the highest is those between 26-44.

I am only on my fourth day of my BeReal journey. My son tells me that I am not cool. I have a total of three friends as of yesterday and am excited to learn more about this Social Media platform so that I can have an actual meaningful conversation with students if they ask me about it. Is it an app that I think I will leave on my phone forever? I am not sure yet. They say that things take time to become a habit. I am unsure at this time if I want BeReal to become a habit or just another form of Social Media that I use. Only time will tell. For now I am liking the simplicity of the app and the fact that it is raw, unedited, realistic images. I can’t believe that I shared on here one that gave me a double chin but with the second camera you can’t always see what it is taking a picture of so there I am in all of my glory.

For now I will continue on my BeReal journey and I will see if I can find some friends to follow and that want to follow me as well.

A Work of Love

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I sat down and drew up a design for my blanket. The middle section with all the embroidery and handprints will be a 32 X 32-inch square. This will be framed by denim squares. I was planning on using 8 inch squares but might be changing this to 6 inch squares as I was able to find some that were already cut. I began working on my blanket for my mom. I emailed all my siblings and got them to send me the handprints of all of their family members. I am still waiting on a few handprints. I traced all the handprints with fabric markers. Each family got a different color and they were each traced around a heart with the family name in the middle.

I knew that I wanted to do more than simply use fabric markers for the handprints. I watched a YouTube video on 15 Basic Hand Embroidery Stitches to get me started. As I sat at the ball diamond watching my son at baseball practice I watched the video and practiced my stitches. After I had practiced all of the stitches I decided I would try my hand at making some simple flowers. I made 6 daisies on a yellow background. I know that before I begin doing anything fancy on my actual piece I need to do some more practice pieces. I am feeling that I could embroider the names as It would be either a simple running stitch or a back stitch.

Here are the stitches that I have taught myself. I am going to continue to work on these as a few of them I was pretty shaky on. I have found that the tighter the material is in the hoop the easier it is to do the embroidery. I plan on starting to embroider the names this week and then start on doing the hands. I know that they are currently done in fabric marker which should be fine but if I want this piece to last I feel that it would be best if I embroidered each hand on its own. For this I will go through my embroidery thread and will pick different shades of each of the colors so each family member will have a slightly different colored hand but they will all blend together. Before I begin working on this embroidery I am going to take the time to make a heart like you will see in this Heart Embroidery for Beginners YouTube video. It shows a bunch of different embroidery stitches again and I think that some of these would make the names very unique and distinctive.

As I sit and am practicing and learning how to embroider I am thinking about my Mom and Dad and that over the long weekend they would have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and all the love that they shared for so many years and the love that they showed to all of us kids and grandkids. I am putting this love, these memories and more love on top into this blanket. Each stitch is a work of love and each handprint is a hand to hold in a moment of sadness, joy or happiness.

This might take me longer than I originally anticipated but it is a work on love and I am learning along the way and loving the journey that I am on.

Videos of me learning how to do some of the basic embroidery stitches: (Was sitting at the ball diamonds for a bunch of these or in my car as my son had ball practice)

Running & Back Stitch

Stem Stitch

Split Stitch

Buttonhole Stitch

Cross Stitch

Lazy Daisies

EC&I 831 Course

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This Spring I am taking the course EC&I 831 Open Education and Social Media. This course is going to give me the opportunity to develop a practical as well as theoretical understanding of Social Media for teaching, learning and professional development. I will be growing my technological understanding and experience and you get to come along on the journey with me.

I have three categories in which you can follow my journey. They are as follows: Networked Professional Learning – This is where I will do a weekly blog to show my learning from course material, posts, blogs, etc. Second is my Learning Project – This is where you will be able to follow my journey of learning to sew a memory blanket as well as learning to do some cross stitching. Thirdly I will have a Summary of Learning where I will have a project that encompasses all that I have learnt through this Spring course.

I hope that you decide to follow me on this journey of learning and growing a deeper appreciation of technology and not being so fearful of it.

Sew I want to learn to sew!

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For this project, I am going to learn new sewing techniques both for using the machine as well as hand sewing. I know the basics for both but would like to figure out how to do things such as cross-stitching, blanket stitching, and sewing using a miter corner just to name a few. I believe that sewing is an art that is becoming lost and I would like to learn it so that I am able to fix things and make things when they are needed for my family.

I have done a bit of sewing in the past but have been wanting to make a memory blanket for my Mom. My Dad passed away 7 years ago in January, and I think that this blanket would be a nice way for my Mom to feel that her kids and grandkids are close by even though we live all across the country.

I have used YouTube to teach myself to crochet in the past and now I am able to do that without looking at what I am doing so hoping that this goes as smoothly. Fingers crossed that I only prick myself a few times with a needle.

  1. I must decide before starting what size I want the blanket to be and then I will design the blanket.
  2. I am wanting for my siblings to all send me a copy of everyone in their family’s handprints. I will be using fabric markers to copy these onto white fabric. I will have each family’s handprints put around a heart to form a flower. Each flower will be made in a different color.
  3. After I have done the drawing, I will be doing some hand stitching/cross-stitching to add extra details to this portion of the blanket. I will add some butterflies, bees, ladybugs, and family names to the hearts.
  4. For the main part of the blanket, I am planning on doing a denim blanket where I will have to cut out squares. I think that I will do either 6- or 8-inch squares for the main part.
  5. On some of the squares I am going to try and do some hand stitching/cross-stitching.
  6. I have a machine that my Mom gave me but it hasn’t been used in a long time so I will need to make sure that it is all clean and running smoothly.
  7. I will then sew these squares together and make sure that in between I iron my strips to ensure that everything is laying really flat.
  8. I will have to pin strips together and sew them together and iron this so it lays flat.
  9. After I have the strips sewn I will have to sew these to the white fabric that has the handprint flowers on. This will become the top of the blanket.
  10. I will then have to find some material to use for a backing. This could be a fuzzy blanket, tale cloth, sheet or piece of fabric.
  11. The top and bottom need to be laid facing one another and I will have to pin along the sides. I will sew the sides up leaving a space at the bottom to be able to flip the blanket so that it is right side out.
  12. After this I will need to iron it once again to ensure that everything is laying flat and then sew along the outside edge to help and keep everything together.
  13. Then I will need to hand sew ties onto the squares to help hold the blanket together and keep it from moving around when washed.
  14. The final touch will be some handmade feathers. My Mom taught me how to make these out of different material and whenever she sews a blanket she adds a few to it. As a sentimental gesture I will do the same.

To Love or To Hate Social Media that is the question

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I have a love-hate relationship with Social Media. This has been a long time on again off again relationship. I will begin to think that I understand how to use a Social Media platform and then there are changes and I am back to square one. I rarely use Social Media in my classroom as I teach early years and have not found a platform that I am comfortable using in the class. I use a variety of platforms on my own that then I take and incorporate pieces into my classroom. In my personal life I use Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, and I have Snapchat and TIKTOK but these are more so to have another means of keeping in touch with my oldest child and knowing what types of things he is watching and interacting with.

A negative experience I had with Social media involved me niece that is now 16 and when she first started using Social Media some of the things that she would post scared me. I was seeing the innocence of a child asking a question and the responses that were given that could be very detrimental to the self-confidence and mental health of a young child or anyone. I as an educator reached out wanting to bring this awareness to her parents and was met with hostility. I learnt to watch from the side lines and learn from what I was seeing so that I could be more aware with my own boys. I wanted to protect her from the outside world and how cruel it can be and I was unable to do this.

I have had great experiences with Social Media especially over COVID when it allowed me the opportunity to still talk and do video calls with my Mom and siblings that live in other communities across the country. Even though we were far apart it allowed us the opportunity to feel a bit of connection.

Professionally I appreciate Social Media platforms when they are laid out and explained on how to use them and integrate within my classroom. I do not like when I am given a platform to use and told play around with this and see what you like or don’t like. I do like that since COVID meetings can be done over different Social Media platforms which saves me driving time as I am 2.5 hours away from my Division office.

So, in the end I am still left wondering should I love or should I hate Social Media? I guess I could also decide to make the decision and to learn to just appreciate Social Media for what it is and to take the good the bad and know how to find a happy medium of what is just enough and what amount of Social Media is too much.