Glide Tutorial (app building, but tragedy strikes)

 

The first thing Glide will do is ask that you log in with Google. It will take you to this screen, select "new app". 

At this point, I knew I wanted to create a basic app, I pressed the "basic app" button. 

On the lefthand side of your screen, you'll see this black "+" button...

...pressing the button will give you many options, I chose to explore the AI "custom build" option

Begin by telling AI what kind of app you'd like to create and what you'd like your app to look like. Here you can see the prompt and the output. I knew I wanted my app to be clearer though and this basic version gave no place to input tasks. I refined my prompt (below) and you can see how it changed the app interface. 

Here I learned that it doesn't matter how many details you give the Glide AI, it can really only handle one task at a time-- the tasks that were listed under me asking for it to include a place for a link were ignored. 

Once I liked where my app was, I hit publish. You're able to change the URL of your app (as it's also accessible by website)

And here is where tragedy strikes! A knife to the heart-- I hadn't realized it was a pay based subscription. 

Regardless, there's your tutorial :)

Rethinking Popular Culture and Media: Stenciling Dissent

 Stenciling Dissent 

Political graffiti engages students in the history of protest for social justice

Andrew Reed 

Preface: instead of a regular summary, I decided to "teach" about this chapter using digestable answers to basic questions about the chapter. 

Who?

Andrew Reed and his students in his U.S history classes in an urban school in Wichita, Kansas. Many students of his are immigrants (either first or second generation*) and from lower socioeconomic households.

What?

Reed decided to create a stencil project-- a project where students would engage in research and use technology to create stencils to support their learning of an important person or group that was responsible for an important protest in the United States.

What does Reed believe?

Reed believes that history is a vehicle to learn what you're capable of-- that students can use their knowledge of history and of protest to internalized the importance of protest in United States history, especially the United States history of minorities. Reed believes art is an effective way means to reach out to other people-- especially public art. Reed believes his teaching should be culturally responsive and engaging-- that it should relate to his students and believes in teaching a wider view of United States history, more than the white-man's take on things. 

Why protest?

Reed understood and taught that protest served as a way to speak for those who couldn't "...dissent, strikes and protest have given the poor, minorities, and immigrants a voice when the vote hasn't". He recalled a time in 2006 when his students learned about a Chicano protests. His students learned that their voice matters, that protest does something and led a walkout to support immigrant rights rallies !!-- around 500 people joined from different Wichita schools. 

Why stencils?

Stencils are often used as a form of street protest throughout the world because "they're easy to make, quick to apply, and can be used over and over again."

What did students do with the stencils?

Reed bought a piece of canvas to use as a wall, students then spray painted their stencils onto the "wall." Later, Reed displayed the "wall" on a prominent wall in the school. Students also worked on a paragraph to be displayed near their stencil that detailed the most important details about their person or group. Having to take weeks of research and form one 5-6 sentence paragraph proved difficult for students but also meant students had to hone in on the most important parts of their research. 

What were reactions to the "wall"?

A lot of students engaged positively to it, going up to the wall, seeing graffiti figures and paragraphs of the impact and importance that these figures and groups had. 

Not all reactions were positive, some people came up to Reed and let him know that he was missing certain figures or groups-- but Reed poses this as a positive, the wall was making people think critically: "Who else should be up there? Who else have I learned about whose protest was important to U.S history?"

There were also (as can be expected) some negative reactions to the wall--  a staff member told Reed he wanted to get paint from his house and paint over the whole thing, some other staff members declared it was Anti-American. Some staff members also had strong feelings about graffiti being present-- due to their preconceived notions of street art being gang related.

Final take away-- quote:

"Especially in an urban school where students appreciate graffiti and other street art, stencils hold the potential to engage students. Youth can create something that might get them in trouble on the streets but an A in the classroom. And students can use stencils in other ways; to create their own shirts, posters, book covers, or postcards. Whether in a school or on the streets, stencils-- at least political ones-- can catch onlookers' attention and make them think." 

* second generation immigrants refers to the child or children of immigrants 

Final Project Ideas

 

I believe students learn through struggle, a healthy amount of productive struggle. I believe that learning should be made accessible (through scaffolding) to all learners so that all learners can engage in productive struggle (I'm using this to guide the idea that I have about my final project as I was struggling a lot in the brainstorm process).

I thought a lot about this in my Action Practitioner Research class where we were told to design a research question, my question was "What is the impact on students’ engagement with productive struggle in the classroom when the classroom community normalizes uncertainty through the learning pit?"

I broke down my question into sub questions to be able to frame my research:  

• Does engagement with productive struggle increase when students are able to point out where they are within the learning pit?

• What other learning or environmental impacts does the use of the learning pit have on the classroom community?

Knowing that I wanted to lean into my action practitioner research (especially because I already have half of the research project thought out), I wanted to investigate the way that I could meld together technology and media with the learning pit.

I did in fact know that I wanted to use AI to help me ideate to be able to have a succinct project that I can fit into the next week.

Here's a link to the conversation that I had with Claude (more information on the prompt down below).

My idea is to build an app that students can access on their chromebooks at different checkpoints during a math unit. The app/ website will be very student (second grade student) friendly. The app will include an illustrated version of the learning pit with 5 tappable zones "I've got this" (signifying not yet having entered the learning pit), "It's getting tricky" (beginning to descend down the learning pit) "I'm stuck in the pit" (being solidly in the learning pit), "I'm climbing out" (the ascension out of the learning pit) and "I've figured it out" (out of the learning pit).

After students select a zone, data will automatically populate into a pre-made Google Sheet. You might at this point be asking yourself how this will help learning and it all connects to both practicality with me following my action practitioner research, aligns with what I believe about the relationship between productive struggle and learning but also at the same time normalizes the use of the learning pit by normalizing struggle (productive struggle). By attempting to remove a negative connotation from struggle, students can see struggle as something that at the very least is neutral or ideally helps them learn. Another feature of the app or Google Sheet set up is I can easily make a bar graph to show students that other people are also struggling at a certain checkpoint in a unit. Removing solitude in struggle will ideally not only create a bigger sense of community and community help (shout out to Wesch's idea of helping students up the staircase) but also will once again reinforce the normalization of the learning pit as a tool.

Amy's (2024) project inspired me not only because her project surrounded the idea of student engagement (and how to increase it) but also because she was using her work in the action practitioner research class that she took to set the scene for her research and project in this class (much like I'm doing)