The high school class we got a chance to visit with was great insight to what future education will be like. I think the creative and open style of teaching is a difficult path to steer, but I feel that it is worth it. It teaches aspects of learning that can only be learned on your own. Growing up around a poor education system (Birmingham, AL) made me relate to the question Alison asked in class about how this would work for a student with a second grade reading level. The poor education system such as the one mentioned has not changed to help students with a lower starting point. This creative style of teaching could be good and bad in this situation. It would bad, in my mind, if the student does not take advantage of the open-endedness of the environment and does not feel they have a good starting point of interest, so they never start. On the other hand, I see many beneficial factors of introducing a class environment such as the high school class that visited. A class like this could be seen as intimidating, but if presented in the right manner, a student of this caliber could see this as an opportunity to discover an interest of some sort. From past experiences, many of my friends who struggled in school just were did not like what they were learning and they eventually stop caring about school. I think introducing a flexible background that the students are allowed to make could help someone find a passion, but also learn about themselves and what they can make of themselves. The flexible learning environment also could help with students who work better outside of classrooms. From past friends, school represented something that they were being made to do. A flexible environment would represent a way to express themselves and achieve personal growth with feedback.

I would suggest adding an option that is not academic to the creative learning environment. Options like sports could help with students who have not achieved much success in the classroom. Being an athlete, I remember being motivated by the opportunity to play basketball and how basketball in many ways kept me discipline and on track. Sports are an unifying activity and could be helpful when trying to spike someone’s interest.

https://storify.com/allenjames890/icebucketchallenge#publicize

Storify is a very useful tool. I was planning to use it last week for my learner lecture, but I decided to use Prezi. Now that I know more about storify, I can see how much easier it would be to use storify for a presentation that includes various social media bookmarks like twitter/ Instagram/ YouTube. Its a creative, yet adaptable tool for many different projects. For my story, I continued with the #icebucketchallenge. I found mainly the same information from tweets and YouTube, but I had a different perspective after being to compare information and stories from different social media outlets.

I can see how storify is a useful tool, and I want to see what else it could be used for. I can see it being used as a virtual scrapbook that could include basically everything from real time tweets to comments on pictures. It would be interesting to see how an intimate event like a family reunion or a wedding could be documented on storify. I think it would be interesting because of the amount of people of all ages that love to use social media and how accessible social media is because of smart phones. It would cool to see an event from many different perspectives combined. I’m excited to see what I can use storify for. Its a fun descriptive tool that is self explanatory.

As everyone knows, its homecoming week and a good friend of mine came in town for the game. He happens to work in product design and marketing at a major sports brand in Portland. The three major sports brands who have headquarters there are Nike, Adidas, and Jordan; they are all within a 10 mile radius of each other. My friend told about the steps he has to go through to spread the word about their new products and the extensive measure they take to choose when/ where products are seen. He brought up that marketing through social media has basically taken over the marketing department and that being social media literate is crucial no matter what department you work for. I was not surprised by this but it was really interesting to hear this from someone in the work force that seems so unrelated to the field. It really makes you think of how social media has not only changed how businesses are marketing, but also affecting what businesses are producing. He was telling me how logos on certain products are placed on the apparel in a way to make picture taking easier. It somewhat hard to explain, but basically the logos are attempting to get into a position where people take pictures. I think that it is amazing how aged old brands are now attempting to adapt to the world with social media.

Before this class, I would not have considered myself an active online participant. I have shared in class about the regulation I felt that I had on social media because of sports. Now that I am participating in a number of different ways, I am starting to understand how participating online can benefit you personally. From my former experiences, I saw online as a place to be cautious of my input and a place to observe from a distance. But now that I am more active online, I am starting to explore other forms of participating online along with furthering my knowledge of other ways to digitally share my interest. Professor Rheingold mentions in his book in a excerpt from Rosenberg on how participating online provides one with a perspective that is valued later in life.

“The now-unfashionable word “of empowerment” describes a part of that change: writing is a way of discovering one’s voice and feeling its strength. But writing in public involves discovering the boundaries and limits of that power, too. We learn all the different ways in which we are not the center of the universe.”

I feel this is what is being missed when criticism arises about younger generations use of the internet. The participatory culture will be a fluent part of generations to come and will be advantageous for them to learn this valuable tool. I believe that through better education of the filtering tools and effective ways of participating online could be helpful and provide older generations with a more open-minded perspective.