L. Leavett-Brown's EDCI 336 Blog

Albert Bandura and Bobo Doll sprites with Pixelorama

Category: Uncategorized

Topic 10 – Weekly Reflection Blog Post

21 March 2026 /

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:

  1. Pod 4: Old vs New School Projects
  2. Pod 11: Using Film in Classrooms
  3. Pod 2: Using Stop Motion Animation to Support Multimodal Learning
  4. 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.

Pod 4's "Robe Report" presentation in a podcast / daytime television style.

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.

I liked the Is My Phone Listening to Me? game: https://richmccue.github.io/learning-games/phone_listening_quiz.html

I scored 12/14. I probably would have done better, but I was reading too quickly and misread “legally” for “illegally.” Dumb mistake.

Topic 7 – Assistive Tech & Intentionality in Technology Enabled Learning Design

27 February 2026 /

The Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

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.

Photograph – Karl-Heinz Löblich

©Public Domain. This picture shows two members of the Wehrmacht, an Oberkanonier and an Obergefreiter (senior gunner and lance bombardier) smoking cigarettes with a captured French African soldier (Zouave?) as they sit on a bench in 1940. This photograph comes from an album in my private collection that belonged to Obergefreiter Karl-Heinz Löblich, who died on 6 November 1942 at Chataldon, Northern Ossetia. This album is meaningful to me whose grandfather served as a captain in the Royal Artillery. http://www.denkmalprojekt.org/2010/uichteritz_wk1u2_sa.htm

Accessibility Shortcomings I Often See

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.

Topic 7 – Free Inquiry

23 February 2026 /

It has been slow getting back to creating Bandura. Because he was a real person, I find that I have to be far more exact. After several attempts to draw his face, I have an iteration with which I feel the least dissatisfied. I have moved the other iterations and the Bobo doll (which I am using for scale) to the bottom layer. When it comes to rendering this, I shall make this layer invisible.

I find that once I have completed all the frames, I can see where improvements are necessary by turning on the animation in the preview window (top right in the first image). This highlights things like misshapeness, incorrectly inserted frames and details moving about independent of the thing they are supposed to be on. In this case, Bandura’s eyebrows were creeping about like caterpillars. You can see this in the animation below:

The neck is flapping about a lot with the head as it is at this stage. This is because I was planning to draw the suit over the neck and so I did not care if it was messy. By the end of Reading Break, I had competed most of Bandura, excluding his arms:

The arms I shall draw on a separate layer over the body. This will leave the body available for when I animate the final GIFs. This model still needs shading, but I am fairly pleased with it structurally.

2. Pain

6 February 2026 /

My plan moving forward is to create the models that I shall use to build the animations. As I showed in the last post, the Bobo doll has been created, but I still need Dr Bandura, Mini-Me Dr Brown and two delinquent children. I have started my attempts at Dr Bandura but, so far, I am not satisfied. I started with a Goolge image search:

https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=355ad82f6dcff9a7&sxsrf=ANbL-n6wnXY50WaXyqanOFuHUvBywhKLPw:1770448725891&udm=2&fbs=ADc_l-aN0CWEZBOHjofHoaMMDiKpaEWjvZ2Py1XXV8d8KvlI3p-ML-906rRL_m6h4jR-tdAeyw6pOVABma0FfM0NmtARdcuGnZVoiSrEQCt2b10nLjOqaGyNmf2lwTZco6lpYG6jkrYtzOQEXyWwSk4XNE4djwgopl4b9D1C9oC8CnUZud3WHW1ctJvaKNzdIIn__gFFA-M_Wf1RUd8x1f1WnqrzbHpRNQ&q=albert+bandura&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7h5m768aSAxWyJjQIHSU-PfcQtKgLegQIFhAB&biw=1421&bih=695&dpr=1.3

This provided me with plenty of pictures from different angles, but I have decided to start with the front. I took one of the portraits, straightened out the face and superimposed grid lines in Gimp.

The grid squares represent 2×2 pixels on my Pixelorama canvas. I tried to recreate this as pixel art and I played with the colouring.

It is not a good likeness. The white-haired face is the original. The one on the left is where I tried to make the colouring closer to the original, but I think that it doesn’t look like anything when it is small: too indistinct. You can see the scale of it by comparing it to the Bobo doll where it appears in the preview window.

I thought that scaling down the original to the size of the pixel art might help. It has given me some ideas on how to move forward and it has also helped with the proportions, but I do not think a direct copy is desirable. The face needs to be slightly cartoony for it to be recognisable as a face at this size. Also, the complex colouration of the photograph would require a lot more work to animate with little reward.

I could only get the pixels to be distinct viewing it through the Gimp editing software and making a screenshot. Image viewers tend to blur the pixels together.

Topic 5 – Creating & Curating Digital Resources

6 February 2026 /

Today, we looked at ways of keeping track of digital resources and curating content. The resource I am most likely to use is Google Keep, because it is part of the Google suite of apps that I already use. That being said, I tend to use Google Calendar for scheduling and the Notes app on my phone for keeping track random information, so Google Keep and similar software serve to fill a need that I do not have.

Currently, I frequently use Google Drive to hold materials that I have created. I started using this when I was in Korea and was sharing lessons a games that I had created. I posted links to them in the (now defunct) waygook.org forum for fellow ESL teachers to download. I have used Microsoft Copilot for this recently, but I find that the sharing of files is not as easy.

Google Classroom is certainly a tool that I would like to use. It is something that I shall have to look at more closely during reading break. I believe that it will be most useful to me for posting assignments and keeping parents informed. I am a little worried that it might be seen by others as a way for them to have round-the-clock access to me.

This is how Gemini improved what I wrote:

Reflection on Digital Resource Management

Today’s session focused on various methods for tracking digital resources and curating educational content. While exploring several platforms, I found Google Keep to be the most practical option due to its seamless integration with the Google Workspace apps I currently employ. However, since I already utilize Google Calendar for scheduling and a native mobile application for miscellaneous notes, Google Keep occupies a niche that—for my current workflow—is already largely addressed.

Current Workflow and File Sharing

Presently, I rely heavily on Google Drive to manage and store my instructional materials. This practice originated during my time teaching in Korea, where I shared lesson plans and educational games with the ESL community via the waygook.org forum. While I have recently experimented with Microsoft Copilot for similar tasks, I have found its file-sharing capabilities to be less intuitive than those offered by the Google ecosystem.

Future Implementation: Google Classroom

I am keen to integrate Google Classroom into my professional practice and intend to explore its features more thoroughly during the upcoming reading break. I anticipate it will be an invaluable tool for:

  • Distributing and managing student assignments.
  • Maintaining transparent communication with parents.

Despite these advantages, I do harbour some reservations regarding work-life boundaries. I am concerned that adopting such a platform might inadvertently create an expectation of “round-the-clock” availability to students and their families.

Here it is in Old English:

Hæbbun wē tōdæg scēawode hū mann mæg his hord gegaderian and his bōccræftas wel healdan.

Þone cræft þe ic mæst lufie is Google Keep, for þæm þe hē is dæl þæra tōla þe ic ǣr gearwode.

Swā þēah, ic brūce mīnes dægrīmes tō tīde weordunge, and ic wrīte mīne lytlan ǣrendgewritu on mīnum sēolfontācnunge; for þon ne þearf ic þone nīwan cræft tō þissum þingum.

Nū brūce ic Google Drive oft, þǣr ic mīne lār-timber healde.

Ic angann þis tō dōnne þā ic wæs on Corealande, and ic dælde mīne lāra and mīne plegan mid ōðrum gōdum mægestrum on þæm brādum folc-stede Waygook.

On þissum dagum hæbbe ic Microsoft Copilot fandode, ac mē þyncþ þæt þā gerynu nē synt swā ēaþe tō dælenne swā on þæm gōdan Google.

Google Classroom is sōðlīce tōl þone ic wille lurnian.

Ic sceal þæt gēorne scēawian on mīnre ræding-reste.

Ic gelīefe þæt hit biþ mē swīðe gōd tō rædenne þā weorc þāra cilda and tō cȳðenne þone mægeþ-rǣd þæm fæderum and mōdrum.

Ac mē is sum lytel drēdrǣd on mōde: þæt mænigfeald fole wēne þæt hīe mægen mē findan and mid mē sprecan on ǣlcre tīde, gē on dæge gē on nihte.

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