I recently had the opportunity to spend a day in my old teaching position; an elementary technology class. I was always big on working with media when I taught the class for the 4 years I was in the position, so I took the opportunity to give the students a challenge taken from the pages of ds106, the wonderfully playful and media-rich digital storytelling community. The particular challenge that I gave them comes from the 4 Icon Challenge...

The science teacher in me knows what’s going to happen in the video above before the cannonball is dropped into a vat of the silvery liquid metal, but the curious learner in me still squeals with delight when the cannonball actually floats! I’m a HUGE fan of trying to provide discrepant events for my students, whether it’s science based or not, and while I also advocate that it’s best to have a live demonstration...

What better to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon while waiting for a batch of applesauce to cook down then make lazy art? My previous attempt at the ds106 Visual Assignment didn’t fit neatly into the assignment’s paramaters, and I’m perfectly alright with that. In fact, it’s a general principal of mine that students are always welcome to change the assignment as long as it still gets across the learning objective or...

“Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons.” Those aren’t my words, but rather the instructions from the Four Icon Challenge ds106 assignment. Since this coming semester’s ds106 theme is apparently that of a “fantastical voyage” (the opening post for the course is “journey to the center of the internet”), I...