Task 6

This one is all about exploring some possible tools and thinking about how they could augment a class.

I decided to pass over Skype, since I've been using Skype for several years, and "exploring" it doesn't really seem like something I need to do. Next up, I tried "TeacherTube" and was pretty unimpressed. All the videos are education related, but the quality and variety of education videos is far lower than what you get on actual YouTube. As far as I can tell, the only potential advantage is the usual complaint that YouTube comments are vile and horrible (which they are), but I'd rather use comment-circumventing technology than limit myself to the videos here. One note is that for non-members, there's a 30-second advertisement video you have to watch before each video, and then the videos are usually about 2 minutes long, which means 20% of your time is spent watching the same pointless insurance ad over and over. And a lot of the videos are clearly made for the purposes of Professional Development. Which means I'm trying to earn PD credit by watching pointless videos made by people trying to earn PD credit, and then my colleagues can comment on my post about it for their own PD. It all makes me want to sing "The Circle of Poo" from South Park.

Anyway, I ended up deciding to play with Pixton -- an online comic creator. I got to thinking about last year's BC Calculus class, and the fact that a couple of kids actually wrote down all sorts of bizarre quotations and discussions from class during the year. They ended up handing me a 9-page document of odd quotes ("Of all the things that equal mc squared, E is perhaps my favorite!") at the end of the year. I figure if we had a comics creator, the class would have enjoyed turning that into comic strips. This wouldn't in itself be so much educational, but if we were already doing a Calculus blog of some sort, the comics would keep people interested and entertained, and make the blog something that people might actually eagerly await updates on (assuming the comics got interspersed with actual content).

So, in that vein, here's roughly what it would look like. This is a somewhat cheezy first attempt at making a comic, but it worked fairly well for a first try.