Category: playingwithmedia
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Social Media Stories, Instagram Reels and Mojo Videos
I love to play with media. As my wife, Shelly, has become a health coach this fall and learned more about ways to use social media to “share our story” of weight, diet and health transformation, I’ve been learning some new things about social media along with her. One of the things I’ve learned in…
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Updating My Food Blog: Cook with Wes!
The past two nights I’ve spent several hours updating my food and family recipe website sharing site, “Cook with Wes,” and I’m happy with the results at this point! I’ll recap my updates (in WordPress) in this post. I dabble in web design and WordPress customizations rather infrequently now, so this was a significant catalyst…
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DVD Subtitles with Handbrake
For the third year I’m teaching an adult class at our church, and I’m finding it helpful to use the free / open-source software program “Handbrake” to create short clips of videos we’re using in lessons from a DVD. It’s a bit tricky to select the correct options within the program to “burn in” the…
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Rediscovering 10 Year Old Deleted Podcast Files
Have you ever discovered an old shoebox of family photos? That experience can feel like striking gold, from the perspective of preserving precious family memories. This was my experience tonight, discovering that many (maybe all) of my iPhone audio recordings from 10+ years ago on the (now defunct / offline) website cinch.fm were backed up…
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Lesson Ideas and Tips for Language Teachers using Scratch, Minecraft and more!
A few weeks ago, I had a wonderful opportunity to share a Saturday morning Zoom webinar (for me in Oklahoma) with language teachers in the United Kingdom, as part of a webinar series hosted by the Association for Language Learning’s All London Branch. The title of my webinar presentation was, “Lesson Ideas and Tips for…
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Amazing #STEM Animated Visual Notes by Dominic Walliman
I agree and resonate with many of the things Jaron Lanier shares in the Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” but I disagree with his advice on YouTube’s “recommended videos.” Jaron advises we should never click on “recommended videos” on YouTube, since that furthers the dystopian economic model of “surveillance capitalism” upon which many of Silicon…
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Designing And Narrating a Dream House Tour in Spanish
This semester, for a variety of reasons, I’m having the opportunity to teach two classes of introductory 5th grade Spanish in addition to our 5th and 6th grade Media Literacy classes. 5th graders at our school take a semester of Spanish and a semester of French, and based on those experiences decide which language to…
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Lesson Cast: Sharing a Class Recording with Minimal Steps
This past summer as we prepared for the challenges and uncertainies of the COVID-19 dominated 2020-21 academic school year, our head of school asked me to work on an educational technology challenge. How could our teachers best share face-to-face / in-person lesson recordings with students who either chose or were required to learn at home…
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YouTube Tips and Tricks (September 2020)
A group of teachers interested in Google Educator Certification has started meeting periodically at our school in “Genius Bar Sessions” to dive into different Google products which we use as teachers. This week’s session (yesterday) focused on YouTube. The recorded lesson portion of our meeting is available as a 45 minute video on (where else?!)…
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Ad Blocking Lessons Learned with Pi Hole, Google (Nest) WiFi and AppleTV
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a relatively inexpensive and straightforward way to block all the advertisements in YouTube and other apps on the AppleTV? (Besides paying a monthly subscription for YouTube Premium?!) Wouldn’t it be great if this same method provided advertisement and malware blocking for ALL Internet-connected devices on your home network?…