I have to say, Im super excited to be back to teaching again! Here we are in the “remote” Fall semester of 2020. I feel lucky and grateful to be teaching simultaneously between 4 colleges here in NYC. I have a particular love for teaching CT101 at York College though.. CT is short for Communications Technology, and the course is called “Digital Storytelling”. (I know, the name of the course says it all!) It has quite a bit of history and I will share more on its origins soon. I love this class because it can literally help everyone. There is something here for all.. I say and mean everyone because lets face it, “we all” spend a lot of time using the Internet. We can all benefit from learning new digital tools, techniques, applications of self expression and participating in a cross CUNY community here on the commons. CT101 puts an emphasis on working with and publishing content to a class wordpress based blog whilst experimenting with what the potentials of a blog post can be. This blog post (in general) and the content below is shared from my first example and our first class assignment this semester. 

What is making you happy on the Internet?

So here we are, officially jumping into CT101 this second week. We have a ton of great stuff to cover, learn, share, create, apply, rinse and repeat this semester! Assignment #1 asks you to share; What is making you happy on the Internet?  You can find the link to that assignment here – <– Thats right, we can do cool things like hyperlink text and verbiage.. We can make an image or an animated GIF like the one above -also a “clickable thing” that redirects to another page or place on the Internet. That IDEA in and or itself makes me very happy! So in essence, the creative and practical functionality of the Internet as a whole makes me really happy. Lets dig a bit deeper..

The GIF above is taken from my profile on GIPHY. (go ahead and click on the image of the hyperlinked word to find my “stock” of animated GIFS. You can use them and embed them almost anywhere on the web. Thats the beauty of GIPHY.com – its a search engine for animated GIFs and animated Stickers, like I said, its Internet culture and Internet culture makes me happy!

I love to make animated GIFS! And guess what, you are going to learn how to make them in our class! I love GIFs and I feel that they are a huge part of Internet culture. Come on now, we all love animated GIFS! I made all of the GIFs in this blog post. These are just a few of the many of thousands that I have made (did I say thousands? Yikes, its true, I cant stop!) I blame Professor Michael B. Smith for this as he got me into GIFs and making them! Be sure to check out his blog here.

September is Deaf Awareness Month, that makes me happy!  It gives me an opportunity to use the Internet as a platform to share information about Deaf culture and to help people get a better insight and understanding of what it is like to be deaf and hard of hearing. Im deaf and hard of hearing, could you tell from our first meeting? Ill bet you couldn’t! Ill share some stories with you this week in class. (Im full of surprises!)

OK, so those are a few things that are making me happy on the Internet as well as a few ways that I use the Internet.

PS – Did you notice the formatting for this blog post? Notice how my images are the same size and how everything has been aligned to the left? This is intentional and it helps the viewer/reader easily absorb the content. You too will learn how to apply a similar format, though it may see a bit tricky to manage at first, you will easily get the hang of it!