Let's have a salon

[jenett]

Several years ago, I ran a series of weekly salon posts, where I'd post a topic to get us started, people would show up in the comments, and conversation would ensue. Now seems a good time to try them again!

(You should not feel restrained to keep on this topic! Start other topics! Encourage topic drift! That's part of the point. Feel free to ask random questions, there's a chance someone might know about the thing.)

This week's question

What are you learning right now that you're really interested by? (That might be a project for work, for personal stuff, a gaming geekery thing, a book you're reading, a podcast you're listening to, the fact you're learning a lot about Dreamwidth and how it works this week, or anything else.)

What do you like about it? What are you finding more challenging?

Things currently contemplating

I'm currently reading Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones, which is well-researched and has a really interesting structure where he's looking at different pieces of it through small slices (individual people, towns, situations) and tracing back to the origins as much as possible. I really like books where the information part is well done, but the structure creates connections between pieces of information in helpful and new ways.

Notes:

* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.
* If this works this week, I'll do an updated FAQ and continue.
* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)
* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[used_songs]

Recently, I've started using some new (to me) technology tools at work - DocHub, Nearpod, Clips, Storybird, and Thinglink. I like using stuff like that with students, but the challenge is not spending too much class time on teaching the tool because I have so little time as it is. I teach mainly English language learners, so we are always pressed for time to get through the curriculum anyway and then we also do a lot of language study. But I want my students to have a lot of technology skills! Anyway, figuring out how to explain an online tool well enough that they can get started is always a challenge.

I really enjoy using technology in class. Today we had a catastrophic failure in 1st period with Nearpod and the co-teacher was panicking a little and the kids were all saying, "It isn't working! It isn't working!" But we got it straightened out with a little bit of calm figuring it out time, and it was worth it.

[dejla]

Oh, fun! It's so hard to be a teacher these days -- I don't exactly teach anymore, but I do work on the help desk at a large law firm, and a lot of that is teaching.

I'm going to have to look up those programs.

[used_songs]

Clips is a really neat app - you can make an edit short videos, apply filters, and (the best part) automatically close caption your video in multiple languages. It's so cool!

[springviolets]

ooh, i've heard good things about storybird but haven't used it!

i have a software/app problem in that i loooove trying out new tools, but mostly because i like playing around with shiny new UX designs. and then i end up with a hundred programs i don't use. oops.