A girl Like Me Vlog

Whom do you think is the audience for this vlog and, in terms of “visual rhetoric,” what aspects of the vlog are designed to appeal to this audience? What video/editing techniques are employed in this vlog post and how effective are they?

I had an opportunity to view the vlog "A Girl Like Me" which featured female teens talking about race and identity. I chose this video because I am extremely interested in both race and identity of minority children. I feel that the audience that this vlog targets could be educators, teens or individuals interested in race issues. I think that this video blog could be used effectively to initiate conversation about issues of race and self-confidence. The study conducted during the video where children were asked to look at dolls (white and black) and choose which was the nice doll, the beautiful doll, and even black children chose white dolls... this is SO sad. I recently watched a similar study that was done and highlighted on Anderson Cooper 360 and the results are so disheartening. Society is damaging the souls of our children by negatively portraying race so that even children can't/don't love their own color of skin. The video techniques that I found especially good about this video was that variety was used. It was not just focused on the individuals that were talking. Multiple people were used and images related to the topic were used along with voice over techniques for variety. I wish I would have/could have had time to try these techniques out when I made my own vlog but with practice perhaps I can incorporate variety, still and motion shots and voice over techniques in vlogs of my own in the future.

From Blog to Vlog

Today I took the next big step in digital media exploration. I created a vlog. This experience for me became a family affair because, to be fair to my children, I can't do much of anything without them being far from my mind... or in this case, the screen. So, sit back, relax, and get ready to meet me and the real stars of my Vlog.



And, while we're in the mood of sharing videos, here's a video that I think better captures my roller coaster of a life. Though I didn't "make" the video myself, I was, I guess, the star. This video says what I couldn't in my 3-4 minute vlog.

So many choices

Scarcely three weeks into this course on the myriad of options available for the teaching of digital writing and my head is already spinning. It is hard to fathom what the teaching of English will look like in ten years, especially when most of what we are learning in this class wasn't even on the radar of my professor for two Educational Media and Technology courses eight years ago. While all of these advances are well and good, for my final project I was thinking of approaching the use of these exciting tools in the classroom with students with exceptional learning needs. For most users it is not too difficult to create an account on, let's say Diigo, for example, and start to use the product. Picking up a camera or camcorder and shooting some footage isn't too daunting of a task, but what about for those students who don't have full use of their vision, hearing or extremities. In this case do these amazing technologies become more of a hindrance than a help? Are there other things out there that are equally as exciting AND accessible? For my final project I'd like to delve into that, for both personal and professional reasons.

I was born completely blind and went through my entire K-12 education, and part of college, with no residual vision. I used Braille, human readers and audio books to accomplish my school work. Sometimes I'd use a scribe in class. I learned to type when I was six because even back in the eighties, the computer was the thing to do if one was blind, to "level the playing field". As technology evolved I was introduced to numerous assistive technology devices and programs developed to help students like me. AT has truly been a lifesaver for me and I can most certainly attribute at least part of my being in a PhD program now to their use. That doesn't mean the road to accessibility was or is easy. Even after regaining some sight in college after a cornea transplant I continued to be faced with computer programs and websites, designed to help most of the population, that would be completely inaccessible to me. My frustrations are not isolated. Individuals with hearing and mobility impairments as well as those with learning disabilities experience their own set of challenges. Even in college I was excused from nearly a semester's worth of technology requirements because the technology professor couldn't figure out how to make JAWS (my screen reader) work in tandem with many of the programs and sites we were using.

I don't mean to sound cynical because I can be lulled by all awesome things that are out there just as easily as the next person, but before jumping into ,and embracing anything full force, I like to be sure that the product/service is usable to all students, so that I don't have to make any of my students feel like a burden if I were to introduce and require the use of some program in one of my classes. The premise of my final project then is to examine and critique the usability of many of the tools we are exploring in this class and hopefully come up with some sort of project that could be helpful for all of us and we leave this course, something that we can all refer to in order to determine the usability of these cool tools. In order to find information on this, I plan to use texts that I will locate in the Education Full text database, speak with AT specialists in the U of Disability Support Services Office and explore some of the AT tools that I have heard about available on the web, but haven't had a chance to explore fully. What will result is a mystery to me at this point. Hopefully this is a suitable idea for a final project.

We need to learn this stuff!

Here's a video that I think speaks volumes about why embracing the use of not just digital writing tools, but technology in general is essential to the education of our children. They need this!!!