the good ole days .... brought forward in time

I have been in charge of collecting photographs and memorabilia for our school’s closing ceremonies.  The Student Leadership Group and I are working on a power point presentation and we are also running a slide show during the open house. So I have been scanning in photos, downloading emails and my external hard drive has been passed around over the past few weeks.  I now have a collection of over 15 000 photographs on that hard drive…which by the way is approximately 8” x 6” x 1.5” in size.  Can you imagine how much space 15 000 actual hard copy printed photographs would take up?  The average photo album is  approximately 10” x 12” x 3”… taking up about 4 times the space of my external hard drive….and at 8 photos per page and maybe 75 pages per album…..well, you get the ‘picture’.

We have been using visuals in education since I was in school, back in the Jurassic period.  …but that usually meant pictures in books, ditto copies or reel to reel films from the National Film Board of Canada that never seemed to arrive when you were studying that topic…or relate to much of anything else at all (yes, I am that old).  Visual Learning has evolved immensely since those days, and especially in the past few years.  We now have immediate access to visuals of any nature from anywhere in the world, or the universe for that matter.  We can download videos and show then to our students that are appropriate to the subject and topic we are teaching whenever we want and as many times as we need to show them.  And better yet….our students can create their own digital visual creations and videos to demonstrate their learning!!

So back to the closing ceremonies and  all those photos…..how long will it take to show 15 000 photos in a slide show if each is displayed for 10 seconds?  I think I have some more editing to do…..

a picture is worth....

There are 6,800 known languages spoken in the 200 countries around the world. The number of human languages spoken and the number of different dialects that exists in the world remain a mystery. Of these different forms of communication only a few languages are understandable to the greatest number of people, one of which is visual language. Paintings found in Egyptian caves, Mayan astronomical glyphs and the ancient Chinese pictographs are visual images that still continue to communicate to today’s historians. Visual language serves as an important form of cross cultural communication, but is key as well to navigating an increasingly image and multimedia-centered landscape of information. Many visual literacy research studies and projects have been conducted to provide further understanding in the importance of developing visual literacy skills in order to thrive in our fast-paced, networked 21st century world.

http://sites.wiki.ubc.ca/etec510/Visual_Literacies#Visual_Literacy_and_Technology_in_Education

Visual Literacy … A picture is still worth a thousand words….

…..or maybe a million or so………….

digital imagery meets classic cars

Remembering Bruce

Today we laid my Uncle Bruce to rest, four months shy of his 90^th birthday.  He had seen a lot of things.  He had done a lot of things.  And he had collected A LOT of things.  Bruce’s passion for classic cars was well known and the parade of beauties that followed him to the cemetery….well I’m sure it made him smile.

It’s hard for me to imagine what life was like growing up in the ‘dirty thirties’ or training military men how to drive Bren Gun Carriers during the Second World War.  Bruce had many stories to tell, and he did share them with all of us over the years, with a sense of humour that will be greatly missed. 

But even at 44, my life as a youth is vastly different than that of my own sons.  I remember the days of cameras with film and having to wait two weeks for developing on to find out the flash didn’t work properly and I had nothing but blurry and dark images to show for my time and money.  Movie night meant going to the theatre, sometimes 2 or 3 times to see the same film, and if you missed it maybe it would appear on a double-bill at the drive-in the next summer. Eventually you might find the movie in VHS release. Television was in colour of course and we had cable, but we viewed according to the big networks’ schedules.  Oh, and phones were connected to the wall with a wire.

Today, not only do we carry our phones in our pockets, we can take photos with them, instantly see our image and email it to anyone we know or post it on the web within seconds without moving from the spot.  Satellite television and internet streaming allows us to see just about anything we want, and according to our schedule.  Visual imagery is overwhelming, immediate, and sometimes difficult to authenticate. 

We had a chuckle today at the funeral for a few of us had casually commented to colleagues this week, “Is it wrong to take a camera to a funeral?”  No, we not a gruesome group, but we knew on such a bright, sunny afternoon Bruce’s cronies would be cruising in their classic cars.  It was quite a sight to see.  No, I did not take my camera….but there were sure a lot people holding up their cell phones out in that parking lot.

finding time to learn

So I guess blogging is not my forte....neither is homework.  It's not that I feel it is unimportant.  On the contrary it is of utmost importance to me...that it in itself is the problem.  It is for me...so it tends to get pushed to the end of the list behind my kids, my husband, other family, students, teacher partner, etc....

I was lying in bed awake at about 4am and everything seemed so clear.  I wrote my blog in my head, planned the program template and artwork for the closing ceremony, decided on the kids final task for science, figured out my next  AQ assignment and sorted out shopping lists.  Everything was calm and quiet ... and all goals attainable.  It is at times like that I wish I could plug a USB cord into the side of my head and transfer all of the data to my laptop....because once my day actually started....nothing seemed clear or do-able anymore.

While working through my ever-growing list of things to do, it has become painfully obvious that no matter what technology is available, if you don't know how to use it...it really isn't much use. I have recently loaded Photoshop and Illustrator onto my laptop.    They are great programs and will be very useful in the creation of artwork and media and a million other projects.  The problem is I don't know how to use the programs properly.....just another thing to learn.  And I WANT to learn....that is why I got the software.  That is why I am taking this course.  I guess I should start by learning how to schedule my time more efficiently and prioritize time for my own learning.