A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to meet a handful of local talented musicians in an afternoon session I delivered at the inaugural Port Moody Youth Arts Festival, where through the course of an afternoon we would set out to write a song. In addition to the afternoon workshop, my name was slated for […]
Read more "Port Moody Youth Arts Festival Songwriting Workshop"Photo by @cogdog I arrived at Unpludg this year without a finished draft of my letter. Either out of procrastination or by an unconscious but deliberate choice, I made the journey east resolved to not panic about not having completed my draft and to try my best to remain open to the vibrations of the […]
Read more "Carrying Stones"On Monday I’ll be giving a brief talk to the Langley cohort of Simon Fraser University’s Learning & Teaching with Technology Field Program about Personal Narratives as a framework for learning. Not particularly adept at the nomenclature surrounding and separating ‘frameworks,’ lenses, methods, and mostly considering myself self-taught when it comes to this stuff, I […]
Read more "Storytelling as Learning Tool"The Bears | We are the bears by GleneagleMusic Now that we have come to the final week of the semester and school year (where did it all go???), the Thirty Person Rock Band Project, since baptized as the Bears, is trying to make its various pieces “land” in time to showcase the fury of […]
Read more "We are the Bears"Today Iris and a group of TALONS grade tens removed one of the signature pieces of the classroom “cave paintings.” As part of her This I Believe essay representation (last year), she had initially come up with the idea of filling the large triangle above the back of the class with a synthesis of her […]
Read more "Cleaning the Canvas"A little twist on the Family Legend assignment from the Daily Create let me bring this neighbourhood legend to the Camp Magic Macguffin campfire. They had come from Burnaby, had the MacDonalds that came to reside on Garcia Court, and beyond the neighbouring suburb were from points across the breadth of Canada and back into […]
Read more "Family Legend"Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V Imagine a life where possibilities are opening at a speed that veers unpredictably between exhilarating and terrifying. The familiar, precisely because it’s familiar and safe, still tugs at you, but even so, you want out because your old life constricts as much as it […]
Read more "TALONS Hunger Games"Among the more ambitious spontaneous projects I’ve attempted as a teacher, the 30 Person Rock Band project came out of a conversation with my guitar class about what our next endeavour should be: songwriting, another recording of individual or group progress, a performance, or… something a little bigger. Something we’ll discover as we go, together. […]
Read more "The Thirty Person Rock Band"Though it’s not a newspaper (as the original #Ds106 assignment prescribes), I had the idea this afternoon while my teaching parnter was teaching the Arthur C. Clarke short story, “I forget thee, Earth” to give the front page of our handout the blackout poetry treatment. The text of the new work, Art Clark’s “I forget […]
Read more "Arthur C. Clarke Blackout Poetry"Inspired by the brilliant Scott Lockman‘s Slices of Life project, and wanting to begin this semester of Digital Storytelling 106 in a manner that would lead to an inspiring next few months spent blending pedagogy and creative expression, professional development and a variety of different learning communities – that is what this Life-Long Learning is […]
Read more "Slice of Life – Last Run of the Day"