Last week, I decided that I needed a “cleansing weekend” to focus on myself and de-stress from the rigorous academics at Middlebury.  So this past weekend, I did just that.  Throughout the weekend, one realization really stood out to me: I honestly don’t know where I would be without music.

On Friday, I worked on a sculpture that I had to make for one of my classes.  As I was sitting on the floor of my room gluing pieces of wood together, I was also blasting music from my computer. On Saturday, I spent the day just painting for fun (I love crafting, it’s fine), and again I was playing music.  Today I walked up to Shaw’s to buy some food, and I listened to my iPod for the whole walk there and back.  (I live for those little moments when I’m walking down the street listening to music and I feel like I’m in a movie.)  And as I write this right now, of course, I’m listening to music.  Since it’s officially November, I’m beginning my Christmas music phase….. I don’t even care if I’m a month too early, I love Christmas.

So to sum this up, my weekend alone made me realize how much music enhances my life and how important it is to me.  Whether it’s country music (my fave), throwbacks to my middle school days, or the current Top 40 songs, I always have music playing in my room and wherever I go.  Computers and phones have made it easy for me to have music literally at my fingertips.  I’m pretty thankful for digital media, because I really really really don’t know how I’d live without music.

Here’s a few of my faves if you’re in the mood for some chill tunes:

Some country:

A throwback:

Recent stuff:

Last week’s combined class was very interesting, and it taught me the importance of preparing a lesson plan. Though I never believed teaching to be an easy task, I had not considered that the key to a successful class lies in how the teacher prepares the lesson. Teachers must examine the manner in which they introduce new material to students. Good teachers teach with the goal of instilling a deep understanding of the material in their students. Understanding means more than simply being able to recite information; rather, a quality understanding of the concepts means that the students can analyze, form opinions, ask questions, and make applications with what they have learned. In order to achieve such an understanding in their students, teachers must first decide the general objective of the lesson and develop essential questions, which encourage students to connect the many different ideas included in the lesson. Then, they must work backwards to determine the skills they hope their students will gain, and how they will present the information in order to achieve this.

In my previous post, I discussed a current educational situation in Macedonia involving technology. As I wrote, that didn’t turn out to be as successful as people in charge thought it would be. But none of the potential participants ever thought it might be successful, so skepticism was born before the idea was even implemented, and that might have been the deciding point regarding this teaching failure.

I was certainly not used to technology in the educational centers, paper and pen worked best there, but nowadays, especially here at College, technology is vital to our learning advances. Try to do your homework or class/exam preparation without your computer – if nothing it is a big challenge.

And then we had the teaching class. I never imagined needing to teach kids, so I never really bothered the thought of knowing how to. I am aware how to present it to them, but even as a young student, and a small kid in middle school not so long ago, I still don’t have a good enough idea that might interest the ‘younglings’ with what I have to say. So there we have it – two challenges that I have to combine and both teach and learn something from. Technology is starting to become a necessity in education, and being technologically literate is not an advantage anymore – it’s a demand. The way I learned about technology use and implementing it towards my education was through self-teaching methods. I was interested in the time when kids my age did not need to know stuff about computers. When it became so, knowing elementary stuff about technology did not suffice, so I went ahead to the advanced part. Luckily, that is not quite necessary today, but the more ways that people know how to use technology to their full advantage – the easier the process of learning, not just about technology, but with it, becomes.

So what do I teach? Well, combined with English as a subject, technological language and usage sounds important, proper Internet appearance, abbreviations and shortcuts that help sound good and software that helps towards better writing. And now all we have to do is, explain all this to middle school kids in the best way we can. What way that is… We’ll know soon.

It’s the little things that change when a holiday season comes around. Clothes, decorations, advertisements, and the digital world. This Halloween, I realized more how the internet and different programs tailor toward the seasons. Advertisements on the sides of my windows fashioned pumpkins and other Halloween-related symbols. On my front page of Spotify I found a Halloween playlist ready to go for the special holiday. Facebook photos from all my friends and family around the world showed a great variety of costumes and festivities. Google, of course, had its ritual holiday home page variation. Buzzfeed tackled some hilarious Halloween themes, and I’m sure billions of Snapchats and Vines were zapping around the air featuring costumes, candies and parties.

The digital world has its ways of reflecting society. Whether it reflects trending debates, relevant current events or simply just the holiday in season at the moment, media spits out exactly what people are talking about. It’s interesting to think how whoever-is-behind-media-sites makes these decisions. How much of it is generated from the public? How much of it is decided to be relevant before people even care about it? I know that the day after Thanksgiving is over and the radio starts playing Christmas songs and the stores all start to advertise Christmas sales, it’s not coming 100% from consumers. It’s mostly pre-decided to be relevant for us.

But can I also apply this to aspects other than radio and advertising? News sites, to an extent that varies from site to site, decide what is important by putting different articles and different pictures in more prominent places than others. To another extent, publicity is generated from the public, but what we see on the internet comes from a mix of these two influences: the people who are in charge of the sites and us.

I grew up in a town of less than 10,000 people. We are a ski resort community who’s economic drive is tourism. The town is relatively racially homogenous. I had a rather privileged childhood in this town.

Despite Colorado being ranked 49th in education funding, our public schools had computers everywhere and required computer education classes from elementary school through high school. I had a Mac computer in my room from the time I was in third grade. I got new ones approximately every three years and got a laptop when I was a Junior in high school. I recall using Wikipedia and google to supplement my education from the time I was in third grade. I remember spending hours looking at various Wikipedia articles simply because I could. I took this for granted. I didn’t realize until I was in high school that not all students had this advantage.

I don’t know what I would have done without an internet connection and a computer growing up. If I was subjected to using the school’s computers or the library’s I would not have been as motivated growing up. A computer was as vital an instrument in my education as a classroom. The amount of research a computer provided me was unsurmountable. It has brought me to the determination that digital media literacy is a vital part of getting ahead in the contemporary world. Education is the source by which our future leaders will be created. Therefore, the employment of effective technology is a mandatory factor in the development of our society as a whole.

It’s interesting to see the thought process that goes into teaching a course, as we saw in class on Thursday. Obviously not every teacher uses the same method or puts the same amount of time in their course outline, something that I’ve been able to pick up on over my years as a student. As a teacher I believe that a main goal is to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to learn and understand the material. This isn’t to say that a class should be taught to the strengths of its weakest student, but to understand the way each student learns the most effectively. On Thursday I picked up on the idea of an essential question – a broad, centralized question related to the course content that can be used to tie back topic questions – and thought about how it can relate to everyone. Since these questions have no one answer, there is no one way to approach them. I believe an essential question can be beneficial to a classroom as a whole, and be advantageous to varied thinking methods.

Sitting in class, listening to the statistics on the digital divide, it’s hard not to believe that technology might be the key to ending poverty. Now before I come off like the Canadian socialist that I am, I should probably add that I don’t actually believe that we can eliminate poverty by putting computers in schools. I do however believe that media literacy education might be the key to reducing the performance gap between schools… If we do it right.

It’s almost common knowledge that the internet is the largest and most comprehensive resource that the human race has ever seen. With an internet connection, you can talk to people from around the world, look up the answer to any question, and engage in social networking. That having been said, the rich have an unprecedented advantage in media literacy. It’s been consistently shown that the wealthy have greater access to technology as well as a better understand of how it can work to their advantage. Inversely, the poor don’t have the same access to information. More than anything, this inequity just furthers the cycle of poverty.

By educating all students in media literacy, you bring up the average. By educating students on how to properly use media, you don’t just teach students how to turn on a computer – you teach them how to search for jobs, use websites like Khan Academy and Wolfram Alpha, and use resources like Google and Google Scholar. A digital education is important because it equips students with tools that will help them far beyond the classroom. Having a working understanding of the internet will help kids across the country grapple with social and political issues as well as educational tasks. What’s important in the 21st century isn’t knowledge but the skills that will allow them to succeed. Never has a class like this been so important.