He is Asian, yet he towers above everyone like a skyscraper in a farm town. You can pick him out from his stocky build, tan skin and cropped black, Asian hair. He also has his always present red jacket zipped up all the way so that you rarely see his shirt. It is ripped half way around the right sleeve and has not left his back since we started school even in the hot Oklahoma summer. His light-brown backpack that he’s had since elementary school looks even more beat up.

As he tosses it on the ground next to a desk, his last two colored pencils tumble out. He sits down heavily in the old wooden desk that does not have enough leg room and proceeds to lay his head down with his forearms covering his face still grasping the pink pencil that he had grabbed not a moment ago. He continues to sit like this for awhile until I walk in, only the second person to enter the classroom, and open the heavy door.

Immediately his head popped up, quick as a fly, and grabs a textbook on the desk next to him proceeding to open it to a random page and pretend like he had been reading it the whole entire time. I laugh and joke with him on how he thought I was the teacher while making my way back to him. In response to my joke he just flipped his hair to the side by looking to the side and uttered a very dramatic, “Well.” This was usually his way of responding to my jokes whenever he couldn’t come up with a response.

He has been getting better at putting up more of a fight ever since he joined me in our debate class. That’s another thing we share, love for arguing, and we love to practice whenever we’re together, even if I win most of the time. He’s also been getting better at chess since I started playing him even, when no one at school can repeatedly best me.

But, probably one of the best things I like about him is that he will never back down from a challenge and will never give up no matter what happens. Just recently he went up and challenged our best debater, a senior, to a match. He knew he didn’t have much of a chance but he still stood up there and did his best to prove himself, and he did an awesome job. From all of this I know, that Phu Tran is my best friend.

Part 1

Part 2

Discussing Oak Ridge Glogster Project at Oklahoma City, OK by wfryer

For more background see my post, “Share “timed” comments on Audio Recordings with SoundCloud.”

Technorati Tags: audio, edtech, history, playingwithmedia, recording, social, soundcloud, technology, studies, english

ART HISTORY PAPER

The art of Lego building is not known or recognized by most people. Many people will say legos are just something I use to play with as a kid. In all actuality Lego building by adults and kids is fine tuned in the creativity side of things. Of course people building with Lego is only as recent as Lego itself which is fairly new. Lego building is something that requires a lot of skill and practice to do well and something many people have mastered.

Lego building in some ways is a lot like sculpting. When you sculpt something you are chipping or cutting parts away to reveal an object that the artist has in mind. Building in Lego is not as different as it seems. When building with Lego you start with one piece than add another on top of that. In many ways Lego building is a lot easier and you an create a lot more complicated and bigger art work than you can sculpting with clay or rock. There are different sizes, shapes, lengths, textures, detail, color, and the list just goes one and on with all the uses and ability of all the pieces that you have access to. There are also different types of creations you can make. You can build something in mini-scale just meaning in looks smaller or makes something huge into a more buildable scale. You can build in mini-figure scale which means you can use Legos version of a person and use them in your build. Another thing you can build in is just a larger scale which is too big for a mini figure to use. Then you can also had design creations that use different pieces in unusual ways to make designs or pictures.

There are many wonderful but right now I will only mention one. [sic] Katie WAlker is a AFOL – Adult Fan of Lego – and makes wonderfully detailed mosaics. Using small cheese slopes (little angled pieces) and tiles she is able to make intricate designs. This is really something amazing and incredible. You can find more of her work and examples by searching for eilonwy77 on Flickr.

Creating art is lots of fun and something I love to do. Even though they haven’t been around that long they are still great. Lots of very skilled AFOL’s are still creating amazing creations and art. So next time someone asks you what an awesome new art you can reply Lego building.

Technorati Tags: art, lego

The Fire

There was a fire ban that year

But the carless campers left

Leaving smoldering remains behind

The fire that ate the forest

Wind whispered wordlessly in the trees

The fire was given new life

Like a new small heartbeat

The fire that ate the forest

The fire lit the dry grass

It was gathering in strength

Like a lion preparing to strike

The fire that ate the forest

The fire now reached the trees

 It was a wild beast let free

Grey smoke billowed up to the sky

The fire that ate the forest

Campers couldn’t escape the wild flames

Sirens soon sounded on dirt roads

People evacuated their homes

The fire that ate the forest

Old oaks fell to their knees

Trees were consumed by flames

The heat was a blacksmith’s forge

The fire that ate the forest

Rescue men were left helpless

The fire covered the forest

Everyone did not escape

The fire that ate the forest

The fire burned bright in the sky

Smoke blocked the stars at night

Flames seemed to laugh evilly

The fire that ate the forest

The fire burned on still

Feasting on what ever it touched

Held back only from a river

The fire that ate the forest

The fire slowly reseeded

Rescue workers were gaining ground

Blessed rain started to fall

The fire that ate the forest

The roars finally abated

Land was left scorched

Flames had licked every tree clean

The fire that ate the forest

New grass began to grow

Trees again grew tall

Animals began to return

The fire that gave life

Yeah for Alexander, accomplished trombone player! Yeah for Sarah, Ustream webcaster!

Technorati Tags:
okc, oklahoma, school, ustream, classen, classensas, trombone, band

I am first going to show you how I get about $100 of the first check. You can see that in this picture my dad had something producing money then stopped. It then picked back up when my sisters video started producing money but my dad put ads on it after the peak and so did produce as much money as it could have. So after her video lost popularity its revenue was brought back down to about $1 and decreasing  then I am almost positive I added ads to my videos in March of 2010 because that is where the money starts to pick up slowly at first and then more as I add adds to my other videos until I had put four videos up with ads. Now, if you add all of my dad’s previous money it adds to $13.42. While if you add my sister’s money before my videos started making money she earns $15.61 and if I give her one dollor per month after that it all adds to $23.61 and that is what she earned for the first check. If you add both of those numbers together it comes to $37.03 and if you subtract that to the original $114.04 we find that I earned approximately $77.01 from the first check. Wow. That is a lot of extra money I picked-up just from the first check.

Now To prove that almost all of the next $106.58 is mine. First I will give my sister her one dollar a month for her now less-popular video. The next check came five months latter so she earns another five dollars which brings her total up to $28.61 in all. Now all the rest of the money should be mine, but if that seems a lot i will show you what makes it true. Now, if you look here than you will see that the income became high for Oct. Nov. and Dec. then drops back down a bit. When you look at the number of views from my videos producing revenue you will see that the most views i have ever gotten were in Oct. Nov. and Dec. then they dropped back down a little bit. This may also be explained by more people are watching my videos so they are getting recommended to other people when they finnish a video like it. I hope this makes it some what clear why I earned more in the last months. You can also see then drop in the las two months better from other videos but I did not want to use up more

space in this post and because this is the video that is producing most of the money. that also leaves me with $178.59 in total in both of the checks. If you are also wondering what I am going to do with this money, I am most likely  to save $100 then buy some legos with some of the other stuff. That is how I found a bunch of unknown youtube money.