Illustrated Language

This summer has been a difficult one for me in terms of work...really, the past year has been. This class, however, has been a huge bright spot. I have learned so much about Web 2.0 and the tools that make it work. I have met (virtually) some really wonderful classmates whose work I admire. I have benefited from the knowledge and guidance of Dr. Dennen and Lauren. Thank you to all...and I hope to see you in future classes!

I have been using Slack for work pretty heavily for the past week. We are all busy getting our programs set up for the start of school in just over a week; we are trying to lessen our load by sharing resources for our orientation lessons, which are mainly about US culture but now also include support for the summer reading assignments our students did not do (visa issues, late registration, etc.). I have sent and received powerpoints, links to online sites, and documents via Slack and am getting used to how it works. I have not yet sent tacos to my colleagues, but I might do so just for fun!

One of my responsibilities in my new job is to help students identify and adjust to American culture. Our director identified independence, self-sufficiency, the American Dream, and equality/diversity as the key values we need to introduce first...via a mass-market movie. We have been going back and forth about what to show: something Disney like High School Musical or Lemonade Mouth, something more like The Duff or Mean Girls or Edge of Seventeen (all nixed for various reasons you might imagine when thinking about parents!). I think we've settled on Spiderman: Homecoming. That said, I had to get moving on the values lesson and also on the two summer reading books each grade level had been assigned but no one has read. I needed a compelling video to illustrate these values and link them first to teenagers, so I re-purposed classmate Tyrone Sandaal's link to a New York Times video of NYC kids, which he used for his shared knowledge project on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Clos

I took a partial "tech-free" day today. My husband, younger daughter, her friend, and I went to the Venetian Pool , probably my favorite place in Dade County. You can see why I like it in this video I took while waiting for the pool to open today. We put our phones in a locker and then dove in. Floating in that cold spring water, looking up at a sky framed with palm trees was a slice of paradise! It was refreshing to see so many people talking, playing, and swimming without being connected at least for a few hours.