Future Vision Project Reflection Post

We have somehow made it to the end of LIBE 477! I've appreciated learning with and learning from my colleagues throughout this course. I have so many resources and things to look forward to in my journey to becoming a teacher-librarian!

As a TTOC with no classroom or library of my own, I have decided to immerse myself in technology and create content to get other educators excited about the 21st Century Literacies in the form of a comic strip. As mentioned in my last post, I had to re-write my script a few times, as the short, quippy writing style isn't something I am used to. I also had to revamp how I was going to illustrate my comic. I wanted to do a comic specifically as a challenge to myself. Both my students and myself read comics and graphic novels, but I have never seen myself as an artist. I wanted to use this opportunity to try! Maybe drawing with a digital program like IbisPaint would give me confidence in my skills. Maybe I was better at art than I thought I was! Nope. I was right. I peaked in grade 7. This was awful. But I wasn't about to give up, I just needed to change my method.

In my last blog post, I tried out a couple of apps and played around with a wooden robot toy that folds up into a block (kind of like a rubik's cube). After making that little example comic strip, it sparked an idea! I originally tried to use an image on my laptop as the background, kind of like a makeshift green screen, but every time I tried to take a photo, the screen had weird lines on it. So, I went to google and found an image of a living room (mine was too messy after a 2.5 year old rampaged all day) and set to work using the Seedling Comic Studio App for iPhone. The living room photo I chose can be seen here along with a long list of other very nicely decorated and cleaned kid-friendly rooms that look nothing like my home, in case you need some inspiration.

I enjoyed using the app, and then got to the part where I was going to add myself. Originally, I was going to actually take pictures of myself and superimpose me into the comic. That seemed like more work than I was ready for with just my phone, so I took some inspiration from a middle school teacher that I am working with who uses Bitmoji images on daily schedules, lessons, and worksheets. It was actually really fun to use and explore and, as the Bitmoji themselves are .png files, were really easy to add to the Seedling Comic Studio app! I then brought my robot to school to use my colleague's classroom as a backdrop for the second half of my comic, as it was actually really tedious cutting the part of the image out that I needed from a .jpg file. I was worried that it would be too much of a contrast by having the robot superimposed at first and then included as the background later on, but I like the change stylistically with the change in setting.

I also used Canva to create the infographics about the 21st Century Literacies and my five visions for my future classroom. This app fit my purpose, but I found that the free version wasn't as adaptable as I had hoped. Trying to find pre-made templates to fit with the amount of text that I needed was tricky, but I guess that's the nature of the infographic. I ended up using the program through my browser, as it was way too frustrating to try to edit on the phone.

Going through this process of figuring out a new technology and how my old skills (or lack thereof) can fit into it was really fun, and definitely made me more excited about doing more student-led, inquiry-based projects with students in the future. It is exciting to have a vision, but even more excited to be able to adapt and change and come up with something better than your original idea. I would love to share this project with my future students someday to inspire them to try something out of their own comfort zone. I purposefully have not added any pictures to this blog post as my comic strip was literally just posting jpeg after jpeg after jpeg. I hope that this is okay and that the comic speaks for itself (and actually makes sense).

To view my final comic strip about my vision of teaching and learning for the 21st Century, click here or the "Vision of the Future" tab at the top the page. My references and resources can be found here or under the "Resources" tab.