Curr501: Digital Media Literacy

We all know "the cloud"... this endless theoretical space where our data lives and exists on the internet. Keeping our documents, photos, school projects, and music in one space is important! What's even more important is keeping it organized. Google drive is a space where we can keep, and organize our files and create new ones. Here are my tips and tricks for managing your google drive: First - Sign in First things first... You'll want to make sure you're keeping your files under one profile. Be mindful of which google account you are going to be using primarily and make sure you are logged into that account before beginning. When you open your browser, type in "drive.google.com" into the search bar. The website will prompt you to sign in. If already signed into an account, double check to see if it is the desired google drive account you want to use. Second - Upload your documents  In order to organize your files, you'll first need to upload all of...

  My name is Genevieve Medina, this is my change project:  As a student, I got involved in as many programs as I possibly could. I joined summer schools, STEM programs, swimming lessons, volunteering/internship opportunities and everything in between. And as a youth worker I’ve worked with just as many programs.  Looking back now, now having started my career as a youth worker, I keep thinking “there are so many programs”. Why aren't they better connected? Why are there 5 different programs with the same mission? How can we make this work for young people? How can we make sure they have all the information they need to take advantage of every opportunity they can? There is my “why”. I believe young people deserve to be given access to every possible opportunity to further support their academic, socioemotional, and artistic needs/desires.  In thinking about this project, I had difficulty thinking about how to address this need. As Wesch felt thinking about the vast e...

(yes i'm very impressed by the title of this blog)   View my Disney Princess Conventions Chart here.  Notes from Gen: Going through this assignment reminded me about this video I had come across before regarding Disney Princesshood. It is not a perfect video but definitely interesting and worth watching.  __________________________________________________________________________________ I love Disney - since I was very young to now being an adult. I have definitely bought into the magic that Disney has been selling to us over so many years. But as recently as 2016, I have learned to think critically about the media I consume and Disney wasn't counted out of that. In 2016, Zootopia was released, and while i enjoyed the story and the music, i also thought about what the message was behind it. What was it teaching us about race? Who were the characters afraid of? Why were they scared? I took film courses in school so I was able to engage in conversations, and dissect these ...

Both Wesch and Turkle share interesting ideas about technology and our connectedness. If you ask me, I would say they are allies in the conversation around new media and tech. Essentially, they both say we need to focus on our human connection.  While technology has made great strides in being able to connect us to people halfway across the globe, it also has inhibited us from connecting us to the people across the table.  We've all done it. We turn our desks into cockpits (as Turkle describes it) with screens -  getting into class or a coffee shop and  pulling out our tablets, laptops, and phone all at once and laying them out in front of us. Or maybe we have been scrolling through our phones when walking to class, or through the store. Maybe having our airpods in our ears as we walk through the park.    We avoid human interaction. (If you ask me, there are so many psychological reasons we do this - but for the purpose of this class I will be focusing on t...

"Learning happens when the educational process self-organizes. Not making learning happen, but letting learning happen." The Experiment : Set the process in motion, step back, and stand in awe.  In this TED talk, Sugata Mitra explains his experience running "hole in the wall" experiments in  small communities where he discovered that students, when given a new form of technology and a new set of ideas they have never seen before, will inevitably pick it up and teach themselves and each other.  The Results : SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environment) Mitra believes that young people have the innate capability of understanding, absorbing, and organizing new concepts in ways that we cannot necessarily teach. We, as teachers/youth workers, can simply put forward a question or a concept and step back. This idea of letting young people "figure it out" is something we often have a hard time doing. I know I am guilty of thinking this concept is way too hard for th...