Teaching in Pink

Walt Disney once said, “Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive.” The power of video texts can be used to convey an idea, message, and share information. Video texts “may be the form of digital writing many of us need to learn or convey information in the twenty-first century” (Hicks, 2013, p.104). These video messages come in so many different formats, and are still continuing to develop thanks to modern technology. How Can a Video Text be Prosperous in Use? According to Troy Hicks in his book, Crafting Digital Writing, he suggests important considerations with editing and creating a video text. These include: narration, panning and zooming, repetition, time effects, film effects, transitions, sound effects and music, and captions and texts (Hicks, 2013, p.111). Not using these considerations won’t ensure an ineffective video text, but seriously considering and implementing these tools can promote your video texts so that it may be as successful as po...

Social media is one of the most used resources for how humans communicate with one another. We use it to share joys and sorrows, our political opinions, what we did this weekend, and the big trip we just went on.  Nonetheless, social media is a way that humans unintentionally “share information that comes from sources they trust without challenging the claims, evidence, or warrants that make up the argument” (Turner & Hicks, 2017, p.94). We share too quickly based on what our close family and friends think about the topic rather than actually looking at the facts and thinking about whether we agree with what is being shared. Although social media can be negative, it also has multiple benefits that are used daily that users don’t even realize. Dan Lawerence said it best in his book, “it’s impossible to say that all effects of social media on humans and society have been negative” (Lawrence, 2022, p.49). Many advantages of social media include making connections with distant fami...

Whether a student is in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college, they are writing and creating images that communicate what they are writing into an image. In elementary and middle school, they might be making a slideshow project for their civics class. In high school, students may be on the yearbook staff where they have to decide which pictures and which quotes go on which page. College students may be writing a blog for a class like this one, where they are choosing an image that enhances their writing in the post. Students who are digital writers “must also, now, be competent graphic designers” (Lawrence, 2022, p. 108). Being able to find or create images that relate to or enhance your writing so that your audience has something else to relate to that keeps them interested in what you wrote. It is important to remember that humans are “visual creators as much as we are textual creatures” (Lawrence, 2022, p. 109) just like ho...

Haley I am a 22-year-old middle school math teacher in Alabama. I love my family, friends, and my school! Teaching has always been my passion. I am pursuing my master's degree at the University of Montevallo. I received my Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Birmingham-Southern College. 

Image from Forbes Magazine ( What To Expect From A Pre-Interview Coding Challenge , 2017)     Have you ever been scrolling on Facebook wondering why you haven’t seen a post from one of your close friends in a while to then pull up their profile and see that they post almost every day? Have you ever wondered why one of your posts only gets 5 likes on Monday but 50 likes on Friday? Once on vacation in New York City, me and my sister posted photos of our trip almost 10 minutes apart but she received far more interaction on her post than I did. This is due to the black box algorithm that different social media platforms use to decide what posts each user should be seeing. This algorithm used in social media is being noticed more frequently each day by its users. The algorithm “determines what is displayed to you: a process or a set of rules that sorts through the possible posts and displays them in a particular way to you” (Lawrence, 2022, p. 82)....