New Media Team Focus Day

Today we had a meeting of our new media team (John Jones, Jaime Hendricks, Kevin Honeycutt, Chris Lock, Jerry Butler, Jake Fisher and myself) here at ESSDACK. We focused on Kevin Honeycutt and all that needs to be done to keep him up and running across the country doing his thing. His "thing" is presentations to schools and communities regarding Online Safety, Cyber-bullying and Bullying and Digital Learning. The guy is literally jetting back and forth across the US weekly, I don't know when he manages to sleep, much less put together new and exciting presentations all the time!

Today we pulled out specifically a couple of resources we want to get out and going,

1) a DVD titled - Raising Digital Kids

 

and
2) a book on bullying, titled Don't Stay Under the Couch, which features Starbuck the Cyber Safety Dog.

We also focused on building some apps for some of the presentations.....I don't know what that means, I don't have a smart phone - *glares at husband..... but my part is to produce the myriad of different graphics for the apps such as the splash image, header and app icon.

Jake Fisher, Kevin Honeycutt

John Jones, Jake Fisher, Kevin Honeycutt

Jaime Hendricks

Jake Fisher

John Jones, Jake Fisher, Kevin Honeycutt

Chris Lock

Chris Lock

Kevin Honeycutt

Jerry Butler

Drawing a Heart for your Valentine

Now it's no secret I have a friend, Kevin Honeycutt, that is a tremendously talented speaker. He does presentations on bullying, cyber-bullying, digital citizenship, and internet safety. But he is also a very talented artist. He has put together a series of dvd's, that just teach snippets of drawing techniques and most are tied to the standards in various subject areas. When I asked him to do a short little video on how to draw a heart to post here, he just laughed. He already had one. I really should explore the site a little more I guess. You should visit too, it's amazing, it is called Artsnacks, a network (from around the world!) of students, teachers, and just people interested in art. It's got videos of drawing, drawings from others and photographs. Now, since this has kids on it safety is important so you will have to join the network to view anything, but it's not hard. I know it's a pain, but by golly if I still had younger kids, I would want that extra comfort. So visit, and if you have kids, have them give it a whirl, not everything on the internet is mindless drivel. :)


Find more videos like this on Art Snacks

Bullying.........Recognizing the Agony

I have been posting some photos I have taken and projects I have worked on personally. Today I am posting a series of posters that I created for use with a presentation on bullying. Kevin Honeycutt, a specialist here at ESSDACK, travels around the country doing presentations about bullying, his presentations are customized to his audience, he has presented to elementary kids, secondary students, parents, community members and educators on all aspects of bullying. Bullying does not just happen in the neighborhood or on the playground it, like our society, has moved into the technology realm and cyber-bullying is running rampant not only among kids but even to adults. Sometimes kids, as well as the adults that are there to protect them just need a view visual reminders of what to do or how to recognize bullying behavior. So, with camera in hand we took some photos and came up with a series of classroom posters. These posters in the can ordered in the size of 24 x 36. The price is 15.00 each or 4 for $50.00.

I was noticing that even Dr. Phil had a show on the topic of bullying. Oprah did a show as well. It just seems extremely sad to me that we as humans choose to be so cruel to one another that it pushes some people to drastic measures just to escape the torment. If we could just learn to not take our insecurities and low self-image and rise above it instead of trying to pull others down by inflicting those ideas on others. When will we all learn to just play nice with one another?