Final Project Presentations

Last Thursday our class presented their final projects. I was very impressed with my colleagues' work. It was clear that everyone put a lot of time and effort into their projects. I thought it was interesting that Selena, Jennyerika, and I all chose to use Pinterest for our projects. I have always viewed Pinterest as a social media outlet for hobby-type activities. I rarely saw social justice issues come up on Pinterest before this project. I am glad that I chose Pinterest because it gave me the opportunity to use the website in a different way and see all that Pinterest has to offer in terms of social justice.

What I enjoyed most about the presentations were the discussions. I always enjoying hearing my colleagues' perspectives on the topics we are learning about. It was also nice to have Dr. Mattheis, Dr. Hafner, and Dr. Ulanoff join our class. They all made very valuable contributions to our discussions.

Overall, I think we all did a great job on our projects and presentations and I am grateful to be part of such a talented cohort!

Creating My Final Project

I decided to present the results of my page using Explain Everything. The process was actually a lot more difficult and time consuming than I had anticipated. Explain Everything is only an app, so you can not use it with a computer. At first, I attempted to make the video on my phone, however it became too difficult to add small details. So I decided to download the app on my iPad and that made things a little easier.

I could not figure out how to record changes to the video without also recording sound, so I had to create the entire video with my microphone on. To fix this, I downloaded the completed video to my dropbox and I downloaded it to imovie on my computer. I edited the video with imovie and added music. Next, I uploaded it to YouTube in order to make it easy to share.

Here is the completed project:

Even though Explain Everything was challenging, I am glad I chose it as my presentation platform because I became more familiar with the app and know what to expect should I choose to use it in the future. 

What is feminism?

While working on my final project Pinterest page, I came across a fun and informative Buzzfeed article. I wouldn't necessarily consider Buzzfeed a reliable source for educational research, however this article is very accessible and covered some important topics.

Fortunately, feminism is becoming more well-known and many women and men are now identifying as feminists.  However, many "feminist terms" are being tossed around and not everyone has a full understanding of what these terms mean. This article covers basic terminology any feminist should be aware of. So whether someone is a budding feminist just looking for equal wages, or has been burning bras and not shaving her armpits for years, this is a great place to freshen up on contemporary terms that will surely pop up in conversations and readings. 

The article covers everything from the definition of feminism

to transmisogyny 

to "mansplaining"

So check out the article if you would like to stay current on your feminist lingo! 

Final Project Progress

I have made some progress over the past week with my Pinterest board. I continue to pin things related to latinas in leadership, feminism, and social justice. I still only have 3 followers, but have now had 4 people repin or like my pins. I am finding that it is more common for people to use Pinterest for things like hobbies, cooking, and crafts, as opposed to discussing social justice issues. I think people also enjoy spreading quotes and memes through Pinterest, so I have begun pinning memes, gifs, and quotes related to my issue in hopes that they will more likely be repinned.

I have also started playing around with Explain Everything to try and figure out how I will present my final project. It is more complicated and time consuming than I anticipated, however I think that is only because it is unfamiliar to me. I'm glad I decided to use Explain Everything for my presentation because it is giving me the opportunity to get used to the app and hopefully I can use it for future projects.

Final Project Proposal

Last week our class proposed our ideas for our final projects. For my final project, I want to advocate for women in leadership by creating a Pinterest page dedicated to Latina leaders. I created a profile that focuses on Latinas in leadership, but also covers other feminist issues. My objective for this social media activity is to spread awareness about women in leadership by creating at least 5 boards dedicated to various feminist issues. I will consider my objective achieved when at least 10 of my pins were either repinned, “liked”, or commented. For our final presentation, I will use ExplainEverything to present my final project.

So far I have made good progress with my Pinterest page. I created a new Pinterest profile called “Latina Leaders.” I created 5 boards under this profile: Women in Leadership, Latinas, Social Justice, The Wage Gap, and LGBTQIA. Each board has between 15-20 pins. 

I followed several people who pinned similar content in hopes to gain followers. However, so far I only have 3 followers. One person has repinned one of my pins, so I am making some progress toward my objective. I plan to continue pinning to my 5 boards and following people with similar interests in order to get visitors to my boards and content. 

Diigo

I am really glad that we learned how to use Diigo because it is definitely a valuable tool I will be able to use when working on my dissertation. I am very very organized and love organization systems, however I had never really found a useful way to organize content from websites. Diigo is the perfect solution because everything I bookmark is in one place and I can search using tags, annotations, or titles.

I also love the sticky notes feature in Diigo. I often have thoughts I want to jot down when reading content online, but if I type or write it down, I usually forget what I was reading when I return to the note. Diigo is a great way to connect notes directly to websites or online content. 

Overall, I am really excited about Diigo and I am looking forward to using it to support my own research, as well as my work with my own students.

Theory Presentations

I had a great time collaborating with my peers to create our theory presentation. Google Slides was the perfect medium for the presentation because we were able to see each other's progress and never had to worry about updated versions. I am glad I had the opportunity to research cognitive apprenticeship theory because it is a concept often discussed during PDs at my school. Cognitive apprenticeship is a theory of the process where an apprentice learns a skill from a master. It uses elements of the old idea of apprenticeship incorporated with schooling.  

 

I can apply what I learned from my research directly to my own teaching practice. I particularly like learning about how cognitive apprenticeship occurs through gaming. I know Minecraft and other games are used in schools, but it was useful to learn specifically how gaming is beneficial for students.

 

I also really appreciated the thoughtful and thorough work Selena and JennyErika produced. Both of my team members did an excellent job and I learned a lot from their research and parts of our presentation. Overall, I am proud of our team and think we did a great job working together to present our theories.

I was also very impressed with the other team's presentation. I think Maryann and Betinna did a great job of explaining their theories. I loved all the video clips they included to help support their ideas. I also thought they led a very productive discussion. I supposed the bottom line of the blog post is that Cohort 5 is the best and we all kicked butt.