This is the finished Bandura model. It is as far as I have been able to take it during this course, but I plan to use the model to create a more interesting sequence involving other characters.
This is the beginning of that process where I take the models and manipulate them to create a scene. This scene will have Bandura strike the bobo doll and spin it around. I will then be able to use frames from this project to create others.
This is what the next stage looks like so far. The arms are on a separate layer and I haven’t finished them on the later frames, so they disappear. I have kept the same head, but I have changed the body in the later frames so that it twists as he follows through, this will need to be improved with shading later, but because I have already shaded it so that the light is always in the top left, the adjustments need only be minimal.
I am not a sketchnoter. That is not to say that I do not use pictures (doodles) in my notes, but I typically do not draw anything unless the lesson is incredibly boring or the content objectionable. I am pleased to say that there have been no doodles in my notes for EDCI 336!
This week, we watched the first batch of group presentations and also heard about Citizenship Online, Privacy, Safety, Bullying & Consent.
Group Presentations – Pods
The pods to which I was assigned before Friday’s class were:
Pod 4: Old vs New School Projects
Pod 11: Using Film in Classrooms
Pod 2: Using Stop Motion Animation to Support Multimodal Learning
Pod 15: Can teachers use Slido effectively to engage and help students learn?
My takeaways from these were that both digital and analog projects are useful depending on the context, film and stop-motion animation are useful for the engagement and that Slido was a resource that might be more trouble than it is worth for classroom use. I was impressed with Drew’s curated collection of films for classroom use, which he had organised according to the subjects in which they would be likely to be useful. I also liked the creative way in which Pod 4 presented their material.
Online Citizenship
This is mostly about online safety and online conduct. I conducted a Google search of my name and I was pleased to find that I am largely absent from the internet. There were few exceptions. I have a Facebook account, but it is private and I haven’t posted anything to it in years. My name appeared associated with UVic on ResearchGate and LinkedIn, but I have no posts. I have an X account, but I don’t follow anyone, don’t accept followers and I don’t post. I was surprised to find someone with a similar name to mine: Lindsey Leavitt Brown on Instagram @justanotherlindsey. While I used (early 2010s) to be more active online, these days I use Discord and WhatsApp and only sparingly.
For my children, we limit their screen time to a maximum of 30 minutes per day and they are only allowed to watch Korean content. They are not allowed to select the videos and they must watch it where we can see them. Regarding mobile phones, we may buy them a basic phone with which to call home, but we have decided that they may not have a smartphone until they are 18 and only if they buy it themselves. When I am teaching, I do not intend to make having a smartphone a prerequisite to success and I expect my children’s teachers not to make Chromebooks or phones essential either. My own parenting decisions notwithstanding, I can see that teaching students safe practice online is important where they have much broader access to social media.
Today, we did an EdCamp. This is where each of us proposed a topic that we would like to discuss, posting it to a board. We then voted by individually choosing three topics that most interested us. The 5 topics that received the most votes were selected for discussion and assigned to breakout rooms, after which we joined the breakout room of our choice and had a discussion.
I thought this was a very good way of having productive discussions, because it rather nearly guarantees there will be a topic that interests everyone and to which everyone will be comfortable contributing.
The discussion I joined was “Student Motivation and Reluctant Learners” which included the two main questions:
How would YOU approach a reluctant learner?
At what point do you think you should get the parents involved? What are some of the next steps?
Some of the reasons for a lack of motivation that were mentioned were the absence of higher education as a goal for some, the prevalence of smartphones both in and outside of class and lack of proper scaffolding. The lack of scaffolding stems from the gulf between the high expectations we have of students in secondary education and their actual ability and knowledge. We also considered the students are bored because of our boring lessons. My question related to this point was: “Would you watch a YouTube video of your lesson?”
When I was in Korea during the Covid pandemic, I had already been teaching at middle school for two years. As part of the remote learning, I had to make videos of all my lessons so that the students could access them on the school website. Making the lessons into videos showed me how boring my lessons were and forced me to make changes in order to make a lesson the students would actually watch. I radically rewrote all my material and I was much more effective and the students were much more engaged. They need to want to watch and take part.
This was a good experience and I would prefer this way of doing things whenever I have to take part in group discussions professionally.
This is where my Bandura is now. This GIF is in a lower resolution. The progress is very slow. The changes I made since the last time include eliminating the dark, goatee-like shadow from the chin. I think I might need to do the same for the nose shadow, although this may just need to be lightened. The back of the collar looks a little flat, too. I have reduced the height of the shoulders in the front and rear views. They gave the image the sense that he was flapping his arms. I made his trousers less baggy and shorter at the heel.
The arms
O, goodness, the arms! They look rubbish right now, I know. They seem to get longer at certain angles. I anticipated that these would not go right at the first attempt. That is why I have done only the suit sleave. Once this in place, it will be easy to draw the shirt sleaves and hands.
The arms are on a new layer. This allows me to work on them without destroying the body. It also means that when it comes to animating another movement, such as walking, I only have to modify the arms and legs. In the past, I have overdone layers, giving each limb its own one. This was stupid and it made the whole thing unmanageable.
Update! – Arms sorted
I have fixed most of the problems mentioned above. I found that the reason the arms were so peculiar was that I had too many guidelines set up on my canvas and I was making my arms shorter except for the frames for the front and back. I have added cuffs, which are far from beautiful but, as they will mostly be covered when I add the hands, they can stay as they are. The hands are going to be hard, I suspect but, once the are complete, all that will remain will be shading.
Garzón J, Lampropoulos G, Burgos D. (2023). Effects of mobile learning in English language learning: A meta-analysis and research synthesis. Electronics, 12(7):1595. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12071595 https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/12/7/1595
Partsei, K., Shevchuk, B., Buksar, S., Kurtyak, F., and Barabanchyk, O. (2025). The impact of using mobile apps on student engagement and involvement in the learning process. Periodicals of Engineering and Natural Sciences Original Research13(1), pp.219-232. https://pen.ius.edu.ba/index.php/pen/article/download/248/205/749
Lone Star Neurology. (2025). Smartphone addiction: Effects on Cognition and Attention. https://lonestarneurology.net/others/the-impact-of-smartphone-addiction-on-cognitive-function-and-attention-span/#:~:text=Studies%20have%20shown%20that%20excessive,implications%20of%20our%20digital%20dependency.
Abi-Jaoude, E., Naylor, K.T., & Pignatiello, A. (2020). Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health. Canadian Medical Association Journal 192(6), 136-141. https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/192/6/E136.full.pdf
Probably not. I think that even with the simple stuff, there is quite a learning curve for me and I suspect that many of my students will be far enough ahead that any lesson I gave them on the subject would useless at best and laughably wrong at worst.
I wish that I were better. The blocks in the above screenshot did manage to complete the shape, but it still was not right and I have no idea why. I can see that the ability to code would be an asset and I am sure that in my teaching areas of Social Studies and English I could find a use for it. Perhaps some dull summer I shall get stuck into coding to try to make some game or activity for my class.
I like making games
I hate playing games. Sport bores me. I haven’t an jot of competitiveness in me. Games, however, are a fun way to teach things to secondary students. When I taught English in Korea, every lesson ended in a game. The mandate from the principal was to make English fun for the children and games were a big part of that.
I made my games enjoyable with a few techniques. First, I had a rotation of the types of games that I would employ: teacher-led, games played in groups (i.e., board and card games) and games that involved a lot of movement. Second, I tried to make it so that students felt that their decisions influenced the outcome of the game. This could be done by giving them choices, even blind choices, in the game. It could also be done by having success simply depend on how well they studied. Third, I liked to put surprises in the game. For instance, students would watch a video series, one episode per lesson. My games often had video clips from the series, edited to be amusing, so wrong answers would have the main character trapped in a block of ice, being fed to crocodiles or accidentally turning the queen into a harem dancer, Father Christmas or a flatulent little girl. I think these games effectively work as flash cards, but they are more engaging and, hopefully, more effective.
This week, we looked at making the content we produce more accessible. We also were introduced to a tool that allowed us to see how accessible our content is. This is the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. I used this tool on last week’s Reflection post, and found that I had received a 3.9 out of 10 as an Accessibility Impact score (AIM).
This picture is a screenshot of the WAVE report of last week’s Reflection post. It shows that I have a whole heap of deficiencies – bollocks!
This provided me with information that would be more useful if I knew how to change the colours of the hyperlink text. I tried; I failed. This also shows me that YouTube videos are not very accessible because the automatic captions are inaccurate. That may be true, but because editing captions is a lot of work for little reward, YouTube auto-captions must suffice.
SAMR and the Triple E Frameword
SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition and it is a tool for assessing new technologies do for education. The Triple E framework of Engage, Enhance and Extend is a way of determining the educational usefulness of a technology. Previously, I have used intuition and observation to see how useful I think a technology may be, but I can see this as a more scientific way to assess this.
The biggest failing that I see in presentations is that they often contain slides that are loaded with text and with visuals that are either absent or do not advance the message that is being presented. Last year, I endured a presentation by a guest speaker and it was the model of a poorly designed presentation. All the slides used an unchanging and monotonous Canva template and were filled with text that nobody read. It certainly didn’t help that the presenter delivered her talk in the dullest and flattest tone she could manage. I don’t remember anything from that presentation and I excused myself from the second half.
Why are accessibility practices not more widely used?
In the case I mentioned above, I believe that some teachers do not understand how to present what they are teaching in such a way as to make their audience receive it. We have not had a course that taught us about class management or how to put together and deliver a good presentation. It has been mentioned in passing in some of the courses, but never as the focus of the lesson. Teachers may also feel that finding relevant and useful visuals is more difficult than simply pasting their material onto a slide and then burbling away at their students. As for accessibility aids not being employed more generally, I believe that many people are not aware of the things that reduce the ability of students to access their content.
For this post, I wanted to show clips from the presentation that covered the points I chose, but my screen recorder failed to capture the sound. In all honesty, the presentation did not raise anything new that I had not already heard at UVic, except for some details that were mentioned in passing. The two points I wanted to cover were:
The use of AI servers to heat buildings; and
The resources that were provided at the end of the presentation.
AI Servers Heating Buildings
This is an interesting and seemingly intuitive way to use the heat that is produced by AI data centres. It turns the problem of excess heat into a money-making resource. This is an improvement on other solutions, such as building data centres under the sea in order to cool them. Such a use of the heat means that fewer resources are required overall. Because buildings are receiving their heat from this source, they do not have to waste the energy that they would have used if they employed a traditional method of heating. I was quite surprised at how much of America’s electrical power is from gas and coal. I was not surprised that electricity prices had risen near data centres, although I would not have guessed that it was 267% higher than five years ago.
I think that this technology is a great way to turn a problem into a boon. I do not see many problems with it except that, for heating, it would only be useful for those buildings that were close and that it would not be as useful when the data centres were located in a hot climate. Perhaps another way of using the heat as an energy source is possible in this situation.
The first link that Cari Wilson shared was to the Focused Education Resources page, which has resources, including slideshows and other tools. A quick look at the resource did not turn up anything that immediately struck me as the thing for which I had been yearning. There was no damascene moment, but I remain optimistic that, in time or with a deeper dive, I shall be able to find something useful. The problem for me is that I am looking for material that supports the things I want to teach, and I do not see anything that does that.
This is a slideshow for teaching about the impact of AI on the environment and on one’s health. The slides early in the presentation are good because they are not too text heavy. It rather lets itself down at the end in this regard. If I were to teach this as a lesson, I would want to rework all the slides in Google Slides or PowerPoint in order to make them more engaging.
I had a bit of a play with trying to get AI to generate an image. I found that Copilot was too restrictive. It would not let me generate the following image, which I had to use Gemini to create:
Gemini let me do this image, but would not animate it unless I had a subscription. It also could not add Rubio, Vance, Bessent, Lutnick and co. staring up at Trump sycophantically. I guess they know where their bread is buttered!
1. In the context of this program, I have found Generative AI useful for summarising readings. I am a slow reader and, when I started the program last September, I found that I was spending far too much time and absorbing far less of the information than I thought should. I found that having Gemini summarise the readings allowed me to quickly understand them and also have time to do my assignments.
2. Generative AI could be useful in a class setting for marking writing. I have found that I can be a little inconsistent with my marking as I get tired, which I think is unfair for my students. There is also the chance that I could miss things when I get near the end of a lot of marking, meaning that students are getting unequal service. AI could be useful for finding technical issues with a piece of writing, like with conventions or sentence structure, for instance. It could flag these things for me to look at to determine what corrections to make. I could prompt it to only flag the things that were taught in class so that I am not penalising students for things they have not learned. This would allow me to be fair with all my students and allow me to focus on the more creative aspects of their writing.
