IDC Mumbles

The Inner Workings of Neethu Pavithran

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Personal Project Reaction

For the PEDs project, it was team effort in the planning stages, so I helped think up our different deliverables and courses of action. I had also contributed to our timeline of actions. I was in charge of a group of 5 members for my Slow-Starters group in the Slytherin household. I communicated to all of them through Facebook to remind them about using the new apps we were introducing each week, or to help answer any questions and concerns they may have. I also contributed to the final PEDs project executive summary by writing all of the conclusion and helping edit after. In my opinion, though our members did not show much commitment and we didn't end up getting very many exit survey results from them, I'd still consider our program a success. Our main goal was to introduce these new resources to the masses and show how technology can benefit our academics, and listening to the Greatest Hits presentations in class this week, even our peers in our class had taken our resources to good use even though they didn't even sign up to be a part of our program! If I could go back in time and change something about our PEDs project, it would have to be that we were more strict with our members in making sure each individual person had in fact, downloaded the apps we wanted to see and to urge them harder to send us their app usage reports and whatnot. The reason we held back on doing so was so that our members didn't feel like they had a choke-hold grip on them, and was doing this program out of their own free will to better themselves. But to get more efficient results, I suppose there was no other way. To improve the project for next year's IDC class, I would suggest warning students about how horrible the results may end up because we were mostly in delusions that everything would pretty much go well despite trying to be realistic. Along with the original plan, I would  suggest students to create an alternative plan for how to deal with a "worst-case scenario", so that in the case it becomes a reality they are well prepared instead of disheartened.

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TED Talk Review/Reaction

Angela Lee Duckworth - Grit: The Power of Passion and Perserverance

Why did you choose this talk? I chose this talk because passion and perseverance driving motivation especially in education was a topic that I had considered and covered several times in my life. I've participated in debates and attended lectures and conferences of people talking about the topic Duckworth covered in this Ted talk, about growth mindset and the "grit" maintain a solid work ethic.

What did you agree with in this talk?  Why? I agreed with the concept of growth mindset and how believing that your failures are not permanent but rather a tool of further learning is crucial to achieving success later down the road, especially when life throws you bigger and more complicated obstacles. In middle school, I had aced most of my classes without much effort at all, and was used to getting high marks with little effort and being regarded as one of the brightest in my class. It wasn't until I got to high-school that I realised that the method I followed wouldn't cut it anymore. I was forced to deal with failure and learn how to overcome it.

What did you disagree with in this talk? Why? I didn't disagree with anything in this talk. This was because every time she said something I disagreed with (such as when she said that when she first became a teacher, she believed every child would be able to learn the same thing the same way, and if they weren't able to it was purely a reflection of their poor work ethic), she would re-mend it by all the experience she's gained since that event. All of her words rung true to me, because I too had gone through relevantly similar experiences in which I had come to the same conclusions.

Did the talk make you reflect on your future/consider new choices or new decisions? Why or why not? This talk did make me reflect on my decisions. In grade 12, when everything is so tense and while it seems that any errors or mistakes that I make would jeopardize my future, I need to make sure that I give myself the room to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Failure can be a positive thing but only if you know how to both embrace and learn from it. In the end, I'm on an ongoing journey to become the best person I can become, and making mistakes along the way is a major part of that.

Would you recommend this talk to a friend? Why or why not? I would definitely recommend this talk to a friend, especially a fellow stressed grade 12 student. We in particular need to learn to give ourselves a break once in a while, and to not beat ourselves up over things we can use to our advantage for the future.

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My Self-Directed Project

For my self-directed project, the new technology I wanted to learn was Audacity, which is a free audio editing software. I decided to learn this through creating an acapella cover of Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye ft. Kimbra (click here to see original music video). I decided on an acapella cover for two reasons; I had always wanted to sing acapella but also, I thought the different tracks that have to simultaneously play with each other would be a perfect way to learn the most of audacity in comparison to singing off of an already studio-editing karaoke track.

I learned that singing acapella is really quite hard. I didn't think that it was that easy to begin with mind you but when I thought the only issue would be figuring out how to harmonize with myself, i was horribly surprised to discover that was only the tip of the iceberg. By the end of it, I had 8 tracks of my voice either singing the main melody, singing a harmony or doing some form of a background beat. First of all, I had to deal with the issue that was my voice sounding like it was in different places each time I recorded. When I recorded on the first day, my voice was naturally kind of echo-y and far away in a nice way, but I didn't realize then that in order for everything to sound put together, I had to mimic the way I sounded the first day of recording on the second day as well which was a lot harder than it sounded. It required a lot of shuffling my mic around and singing from various distances away from it. For each track, I think I may have recorded every one about 8-9 times before being satisfied. Secondly was the timing issue. Most people (I learnt after) tend to find using a metronome easy to keep track of time and beat when recording, but since I only got the memo after my first couple days of recording, it was too late to turn back. Thus, keeping every single track in beat to each other and flowing smoothly amongst each other proved to be quite a challenge.

Thankfully, Audacity itself was not too hard to figure out. My favourite effects to use were echo and reverb, both of which helped my voice sound more rich and studio-finished rather than a flat distinct voice. I only put a slight echo effect on the track that was singing the actual song lyrics, but I found that applying some heavy reverb on the supporting harmony tracks made them integrate more fluidly with the melody track and didn't steal the spotlight from it. The noise reduction tool was also super helpful because my house was somewhat busy over the holidays making having to record a bit of a nightmare.Despite the troubles, I am very glad I did this project, and will think about doing more acapella covers in the future.

For this project, I have created a video on YouTube showcasing the details of how I went about creating my acapella cover through Audacity. Check that video here. My finished cover can be found on my SoundCloud here. 

[allmymumbles-blog]

Issues in ICT

aI both do and don’t relate to the author’s distraction/addiction to the internet. As in, though I would most definitely describe myself as someone who gets distracted by the internet very often when I’m meant to finish work, I would still not consider myself addicted. 

Over the years, my homework, assignments and lessons have all been increasingly transferred to all being accessible from the internet. Though this was very a very eco-friendly decision to make, it also meant that whether I was working or having fun, I was on the internet pretty much 24/7. And of course, due to the unlimited set of distracting tricks the internet has up its sleeves, procrastination and distraction has been something I’d been struggling with for a while now. 

Despite it all, as I mentioned before, I wouldn’t consider myself addicted because believe it or not, I don’t exactly always prefer to be cooped up in my room watching YouTube videos. There are a fair number of days where I would much rather spend my time going out with my friends doing something physically exhilarating. I’ve also noticed that I’m not as addicted to my phone and/or connecting to the nearest possible WiFi hotspot as soon as possible as a lot of my friends seem to be. In fact, when I’m hanging out with another person/people, there are only 4 situations in which I’d be checking my phone:

I’m feeling horribly horribly awkward with the person I’m with and need some sort of mindless thing to do to not look as lame as I feel.

I’m out and I know my parents would hang me by my toes if I missed a call from them

I’m hopelessly lost and need to either check a map on my phone or call a friend for directions

I saw something incredibly eye-catching and was overcome by a desire to photograph it so that later, me and my children and my children’s children could forever enjoy its grandeur

I’m from India, the land of horrible internet connection services, and so whenever I go to visit my grandparents (for usually a month or so), it’s ultimately a digital detox for me. I’ve never faced a problem being away from the internet for that long unlike the author on their vacation because I spend my time reading books, exploring the new city, catching up with friends and relatives I very rarely get to see in person, learning new skills (I now know how to embroider and climb a tree), and immersing myself in the beautiful culture around me. I think I can pretty confidently say I’m definitely not addicted to the internet.  

I do think the distracting nature of the internet is a huge problem because as I mentioned before, it had caused me to deal with the massive issue that is procrastination. I’m not alone in this either, because after this PEDs project I realized almost everyone, especially my generation who grew up with this massive distraction, have in some form or another faced issues with procrastination. It prevents me from completing work, staying focused, using my time wisely and ultimately, learning. Thus I do believe schools should address this issue because as the years go by, the generations will keep growing up in higher and more advanced states of distracting technology which has the very strong potential of greatly hindering a student’s capability to do work. 

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Blog Post #3: Effective Technology Tools

I would say Remind and Block and Focus would be two technologies that would be the most helpful for me as a student. I, in fact, already use Remind in my biology class, in which my teacher regularly sends me texts reminding me about daily homework, project due dates and test review questions. It also makes it possible to immediately message my teacher (by simply replying to the text) should I have any questions, and receive immediate replies as opposed to emailing. I have used several variations of the Block and Focus chrome extension which is why I know I would most definitely use it. Apps/extensions like this helps me stay focused and keep on track instead of wasting precious time on social media as I so often do. This could be integrated in a computer technology course especially because it would help the students stay on focus in class during work periods when they are on the school computers, rather than just for their laptops at home. 

If I were a teacher, the technology most helpful for my teaching practice would most likely be Remind. Of course, all this does depend on the type of subject I am teaching, and I in specific are thinking of my biology teacher and how she utilizes this app, but a lot of students don’t tend to write down their daily agendas which causes a lot of missed deadlines and unfinished homework/assignments. I have seen first hand on how Remind helps students be on task and meet deadlines, and my favourite part about it is that it fully embraces my generation’s technological PED-”obsessed” culture and lifestyle instead of trying to avoid it like most focus apps. I can, for the first time, say that my usually distracting phone is now the number one cause that I remember and meet the deadlines in my biology class, and subsequently plays a part in my current high average in that course. 

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Blog Post #2: Procrastination

I’m not completely satisfied with the work I’m submitting today, not because it’s lacking in the quality of the content, but rather the medium in which I chose to present it. I’m not a huge fan of using prezis in projects in which I have complete creative control, but having to utilize technology for creative tasks is something I have kind of a hard time with. This is mostly because I haven’t ever been able to explore the internet to find cool websites to help me make aesthetically pleasing posters or general presentations, nor have I taken a commtech course to learn how to use programs like Photoshop. I haven’t compromised on the content though, because I researched from several different websites to get all the information I relayed in my presentation. Basically, I’m both satisfied and unsatisfied in my work.

I most definitely procrastinated on my learning task assignment, because despite having several class periods to work on it, I didn’t bother even touching it until the night before. This was a result of both being packed with tests and assignments from other workload-heavy courses, but also just plain laziness. Fortunately for me, the assignment itself was not very difficult to do, and since I am fairly skilled in researching and getting good information down to use, it went by that much quicker. However, I should have used my class periods more effectively, and follow the whole work hard and then play hard motto instead of the other way around. 

Do I feel like I could do well? Quite frankly, despite not having devoted a significant amount of time and effort to this assignment I still think I could do well. Mainly because, as I mentioned before, I didn’t compromise on quality. I know I was disappointing with the lack of creativity appeal with prezis, I still made an effort to include small pictures and shapes around each slide to increase its appeal so though my creative potential wasn’t at its best, I did make an effort with what I had to use. I will most definitely value the grades I’m going to recieve though, because they are what tell me if my procrastination habits are getting so out of control that they’re seriously negatively affecting my work habits and academics. 

I genuinely think the structure was fine. I can handle the workload of this course and the assignments I’m given, even if I don’t get to doing them right away. I’m not worried about any future tasks, but hopefully that mindset doesn’t give on me later on throughout the course.

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Blog Post #1: PEDs Project Reaction

As you may or may not know, the latest project our IDC class is working on is all about trying to improve the negative reputations of the use of PEDs, or personal electronic devices, in school and classrooms. My team in particular is working on changing up the whole idea of PEDs being time-invasive, and our experiment is about trying to help a group of students use their phones and laptops to be efficient and proactive with their time.

I do like the idea of changing up the negativity surrounding PEDs, because being someone who’s in a million different clubs and having to attend tons and tons of meetings and events at particular times of day, my phone is a life saver at scheduling everything for me efficiently. I like that I’d be able to show all the different useful functionalities of a PED to someone who might be struggling with not getting immediately distracted in the face of one. 

One thing I’m not a huge fan of is the intricate planning process, which is an issue since it is essentially one of, if not the biggest component of this project. And I understand that the planning procedures are a big aspect, not only to this class, but several real-life situations and careers as well, but I’ve never been one to pre-organize and plan everything to the tiniest detail. A lot of my best work comes from random, on-the-spot moments where I wing what I’m doing. Though I definitely appreciate organized layouts of tasks to an extent, I do like leaving a sizable amount of unplanned space for my creative freedom to breathe.

In my group, I’m responsible for a lot of the researching different resources and editing reports and surveys involved in the tasks we will be undertaking in the not-so-distant future. As of yet we have successfully completed our gantt charts and transferring the sticky-notes-on-chart-paper to the online google doc, in which everyone in our group including myself helped with. We all came up with the different tasks, activities, and goals we predict for our experiment, and assigned duties to each individual. 

My concerns going forward with this assignment is the fact that our entire project is based on the willingness of the students we’re going to be working with. Since we can’t hound them at every angle to try and determine whether our attempts at teaching them to not get distracted by their phones and laptops really works, we have to trust that they’d be honest about what they did and be willing to admit to slacking off if they did. It’s hard to find the perfect students we’re looking for (those who genuinely wish to fix their habits), because it’s such an abstract criteria and old habits die hard. 

Regardless, I expect the experiment/project to go well. I don’t expect to completely change the habits of these students because I mean, I struggle with avoiding social media and other distracting sites all the time, so we’re not the ideal examples for them to look up to. But I predict we’d make a significant impact on how these students will face their PEDs in the future because sometimes the biggest block to bettering yourself is simply just not knowing how to do it or where to start, and that’s exactly what my team and I are offering these students. Here’s to a hopefully successful project!