Keeping on with the Daily Create

The Daily Create with DS106 keeps me on my toes. Even on days when I don’t do the Daily Create, I find myself thinking about it during odd moments during the day, as if I were creating in my head. It’s strange. But that’s the power of a good idea, right?

Here are a few Daily Create assignments I’ve been tinkering with in the past few days:

This morning, the assignment was to create a persona poem. It could be real or fictional, and I went with a poem about Charlie Parker (see my blog tagline).

Bird
Musical, Inventive, Groundbreaking, Addicted
Pioneer of jazz saxophone soloing
Who loves riffing off a melody, making music on the stage in a dark bar and escaping from banality of the ho-hum
Who fears rejection of lovers, uninspired moments that lead to boredom, and lost notes played at midnight
Who wants to see all music transformed by creativity, an end to racial inequality, and the acceptance of Jazz as an authentic original American art form
Parker

Sometimes, I share out this old digital poem about Charlie “Bird” Parker.

Bird: a video poem from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo.

One of the strangest Creates in some time was something known as the PetSwitch. We went into a site that allows you to superimpose your image on your pet’s image, to create … this odd thing. The assignment was to write the story, but I could not get past seeing my dog Duke with my mouth and eyes, and so I went with a simple six word story.

What was in that kibble anyway?

And here is the image:
Dad and Duke
Weird, eh?

And finally, the other day, we had a Prime Number Poetry assignment, where we had to use five different prime numbers as part of poem where the numbers were the rhyming words of couplets. That’s not as easy as it sounds (or maybe it doesn’t sound easy).

Here’s what I wrote:

At the ripe old age of 89,
I came to the realization of something left behind
in a house whose address was 643
on Main Street, near the post office, by the big ol' tree,
and so if you would like to earn a reward of 109
dollars, I would be most appreciative if you took the time
to gather my stuff, including my pets, all 5,
if they happen to still be living there, and if they happen to be alive.
Give me a call -- my area code is 367
unless I've gone away, then you can text me in Heaven.

And how could I forget? The other day, in honor of my fellow dawg’s birthday (Alan Levine, aka @cogdog), the Daily Create theme was creating a dog-themed photograph for Alan, one of the minds behind DS106. I went into webcomic mode, riffing on a periodic cat vs. dog idea.
CogDog Party Time

Peace (in the creative spirit),
Kevin

 

Myself; My Selfie

Some convergence of “selfie” ideas came to my mind yesterday, with the DS106 Daily Create riffing off creating a “bad selfie” to someone sharing the cute video and CommonSense Media posting an interesting piece about girls and selfies and body image, and then I decided to do my own version of the Ellen selfie, but with webcomics.

This was my submission to the Daily Create, using a filter to warp my head an then photobombing my own selfie with my comic self.

Bad Selfie (with Webcomic Photobomb)

I love this video. It captures the oddity of the selfie with humor.

Selfie from Andy Martin on Vimeo.

And I did my own group selfie:
My Self, My Selfie (comic-style)

Peace (in the vid),
Kevin

Life, in Seven Words

life in seven words
The Daily Create prompt yesterday was a “tell your life in seven words” kind of activity. It reminded me of Six Word memoirs, which reminded me of the Mozilla Thimble template created by the National Writing Project, so I dug it up and worked on it for my seven-word-life-story. I was trying to get at the idea that even when I am nowhere near a pen or keyboard, my brain is always working on writing something. I just need to remember later what it was that I was writing.

🙂

Peace (Word!),
Kevin

PS — you can create your own seven word or six word memoir with Thimble, too. Either remix mine or remix the original.

Daily Create: Writing It All Wrong

Does spelling count? For today’s Daily Create at DS106, the prompt is to write a story riddled with spelling errors.  (That’s harder than it seems, particular for a teacher).

Here’s what I came up with:
BestestStorieEvreMispelled

Peace (in the storie),
Kevin

Daily Create: Get Crazy and Stay Creative

There is the very famous “stay calm” poster that you see variations of just about everywhere. Yesterday’s Daily Create via DS106 was to remix that poster’s saying. I went into Mozilla’s Webmaker tool and did my own version.

Get Crazy

What’s cool about Webmaker is that you can remix my project or you can go to the one that I remixed, and do your own. At the very least, check out the hilarious collection of remixed posters.

Peace (in the scream of creativity),
Kevin

 

Wrap Around Rhythm with Rhyme at the Start

This was a different kind of writing activity for the #ds106 Daily Create: write a poem with rhymes at the start of each line. That sounds easier than it is, because what happens is the rhythm gets all crooked in the poem. As I wrote mine, I started to rhyme at the end of each couplet, too. I couldn’t help myself, so you have this overlapping rhyming scheme taking place in my poem.

And this kind of poem deserves some voice, I think.

Audio recording and upload >>

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

 

Drip Drop Drip

The #DS106 Daily Create assignment for yesterday was to capture a drip. I aimed the camera at our bathroom sink (which does not normally have a drop, thankfully) and then decided to do a collage of views. Capturing a single drip was more than my skills and camera could do. Or maybe I didn’t have the patience for it. Probably that.
Four views of a Drip

I really liked the heat-element one because it seems like a face staring up at you. Right? It has to do with my shadow in the reflection of the faucet. And the ears. It looks like a pet.
Drip face

Peace (in the drop),
Kevin

Writing in Reverse

The Daily Create yesterday was a video create, telling a story backwards. Pressed for time, I used writing as my means for digital editing play. I had this idea of filming the writing of a sentence that could read forward and reverse, and then reversing the video so that it read reverse and forward. Or something like that. It didn’t come out exactly as I envisioned it but it’s pretty cool anyway.
And short. It’s wicked short.

Peace (in the vid),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Odds and Ends of This and That

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(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)

I’m feeling a bit of the Monday morning quarterback, with a lot of loose threads. So this Slice of Life is a mix of small parts of various things from yesterday.

First of all, my plan to assess a pile of student work at the mall while my son was watching 300 with his friends went south when I was told I needed to be in the movie theater with him and his friends due to the R rating. I understand but I was frustrated. I had my “teacher vision” on, only to be disrupted by a movie that I had no interest in seeing. I mean, no interest at all.

My six word review of 300:Rise of an Empire

Too much violence. Not enough story.

In the early morning hours, I often check out the Daily Create, which is a daily prompt by the DS106 folks that can really push your creative boundaries. (For example, this morning, the task is to create a video that flows backwards in time). Yesterday, the prompt was to create a weather map with something that would not be on a weather map. I have no idea where I came up with this but my ideas was The Great Pet Migration of 2014. Instead of a gold rush, it was a kibble rush from east to west, and west to east.

If you see a herd of cats or a herd of dogs outside your window, now you know. You saw it on the map. Maps don’t lie, right?

Map of Migrating Pets

And finally, I was playing around with a music app yesterday morning. I am trying to come up with some theme music for poems that I might write in April, and I am intrigued by an app I have called Musyc, that .. well .. it’s hard to explain. You create music by manipulating objects.

What this music looks like

It turns out you can also make a video of a musical piece, so I gave that a try. The first one I did was too large, and the app crashed, so I tried a second time, with a smaller piece, and it worked. Later, I realized that this piece looks like a face, and then I started thinking … that’s an idea for another time. A face of music. Stay tuned.


(The volume seems low to me.)

Oh, I did find time in the evening to get to my students’ writing, and am going to finish up as soon as I hit …. publish.

Peace (in the disconnected slices),
Kevin

PS — One more thing – it was NCAA Selection Sunday and both of my local men’s colleage teams — UMass and UConn — are in the mix. We were surprised that UMass got a higher seed than UConn, but we’re happy in our house to see UMass back in March Madness. Now, can they win? We’ll see …

Slice of Life: Blowing the Dust off the XO Netbook

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(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)

I was going going through my classroom closet the other day. You might have a space like that, too, where years of curriculum and resources get shoved. I can’t seem to throw much of it away, or give it away, but I also don’t use it anymore because of shifts in my teaching and curriculum and standards. So, in the closet it goes in hopes that it might still have some use some day.

Yesterday, I was digging around for a Dr. Seuss book (following up on our World Read Aloud Day activity of using The Butter Battle Book for a lesson on allegory) when I saw a flash of green in the way back. I reached in and pulled out … my old XO computer. Do you remember these? This little green machines launched the netbook push, although it was an experiment to build affordable computers for use in education around the world by the One Laptop Per Child organization (which wanted to build $100 computers). I paid for two XOs at the time, and received one for myself. The other XO was part of a shipment to some corner of the world, hopefully finding its way into the hands of students.

The XO was always quirky, particularly this first-generation model. So I didn’t know if it would even boot up for me. It did, and I was again interested in the design of the software interface (it uses an open source platform called Sugar) and how child-friendly it is.
ReDiscovering the XO

That’s when I realized that I could use the XO for the day’s Daily Create assignment, which had to do with creating a video in ventriloquist theme, promoting DS106 (an open online digital storytelling movement). There is a program that allows you to type in words and it says them in a voice back to you (when I opened the app, it called out “Welcome Kevin” as if it and I were best of friends and I had only gone out for a cup of coffee, not unplugged it for about three years).

I made this:

You never know what you will find in the back of a classroom closet, do you?

Peace (in Xs and Os)
Kevin