COVID-19 definitely has impacted my life that past couple weeks. From my eating habits, to my daily schedule, it has caused change in my everyday activities. Some of the effects are more noticeable as others, however, The obvious impacts of COVID-19 occur at the surface. Before the epidemic, I was working at Crest View Care Center in Chadron as a Social Work Intern. Ever since March 13th, I have not been allowed in the facility. In fact, because I had traveled out of the state and traveled on airplanes, I have been required by the facility to do a two week self-quarantine before I can re-enter the facility. I am still unsure if I will be able to go back. Luckily, I have been able to work from home by making videos, researching activities, and providing any help I can for the activities director there at Crest View Care Center. I obviously have had lots of extra time as well, so I made a TikTok account! @bbarge5 Check it out! I am a very active person, so the self-quarantine has certainly tied me down. Traditionally, I am out and about, coming into contact with multiple people throughout my days. In the past 12 days, I have come within 6 feet of only two people, my parents. I am very grateful that they let me do my quarantine in their house, otherwise I would have been completely alone at my house in Chadron and might have lost my mind in the past 12 days. With only two more days to go, I am interested to see any more information that is out there about the virus. Is it safe for me to go out in the community after the quarantine? Am I in danger of having to do this again? Questions like these come in and out my brain as I look forward to “being set free.” As mentioned before, the virus has changed my eating habits, and for the better! I am snacking less on snacks because I do not have any! I am eating more salad because that is what there is to eat! I am eating at more regular times in the day because I have plenty of time to eat at those allotted times! All sarcasm aside, I have been eating more nutritious food and feeling healthier than before. COVID-19 has caused lots of worry for everybody. As a social work major, my concern has been on those that do not have a shelter where they can be 6 feet away from someone, as well as people who rely on certain projects for food. It must be a very difficult time period for anyone in those types of situations. Other than that, I wish for the best and am hopeful that this ordeal will soon be a thing of the past.
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When I first was checking out the different vlogs and podcasts, I thought to myself, “Okay I definitely like the vlogs better. They are shorter, generally funnier, and more entertaining.” However, as I continued my learning and listened to more of each, my preference switched over the podcasts. In the past, I have listened to a few podcasts here and there. Everybody says they are perfect for driving in the car or when you are working out, but for some reason, I cannot deny the helpfulness of a great music playlist. With this in mind, I asked myself, if I were to replace my music in the car, what would I replace it with: Vlogs or Podcasts? The answer came to me easily once that question was asked. It is in fact a podcast. In a vlog, most of the time, there is lots of personal detail that you cannot get from a simple blog post. The viewer can see the creator as a person, and understand their feelings, emotions, and thoughts on a deeper level. This is fine and dandy, but I have seen so many vlogs out there. Multiple people have tried it out, and many have succeeded. They are interesting, but vlogs are not what I am looking for when I am “bored” driving in the car. I want something that is going to get me really thinking. I want something that is going to tell me a story, draw me into that story, and keep me on the edge of my seat for almost an hour. As I was watching vlogs, I noticed that the information was great and it was neat to learn about what the creator was presenting in a short amount of time. Podcasts, on the other hand, provide a different sense of absorption if you will. The listener is taken to another world depending on the topic of the podcast. In a podcast story, for example, the reader is placed in the story and is able to see the characters, the plot, and the scenes first hand. Many of the vlogs I watched do not have that level of involvement for the consumer. Podcasts have been very helpful for many churches and other groups for members to stay involved and still learn information during the Corona craziness. Overall, both vlogs and podcasts can be effective modes of audio and visual blogging. I, personally, find vlogs and podcasts easier to actually learn from as opposed to a blog. In the age we live in, I am used to viewing or listening to information instead of reading it. A couple weeks ago, before the world got turned upside down because of the Corona Virus, I mentioned in a blog that I was going to incorporate chicken and turkey into my weekly diet. Well, full disclosure, that did not happen. Even though that did not happen and I did eat a few meals of fatty fried foods, I have still made some choices regarding my nutrition that I am very proud of. Interestingly enough, my normal diet and normal routine was thrown off this past week. I took a trip to Massachusetts, and I did not cook at all! However, that did not completely take away all health food and cooked meals from my diet. Before getting on the plane in Denver, I tried my hand at some sushi. This was the second time in my life I have ever eaten sushi, and I have to say it is not bad! Of course, it was not super real sushi that I could find by the coast in the summertime, but it definitely is not something I hate. While in MA, I ate everything from buffalo wings to cheeseburgers to corn beef. While those do not sound too incredibly healthy, I made sure to keep my intake of these items to a minimum. In the past, when I would see buffalo wings, I would go nuts and eat way too many. However, on this occasion, I feel I ate an amount that would not be too detrimental to the way my body felt. When I got back from MA is when I started making the bulk of the choices that I am proud of. Currently in a quarantine (day 5), I have had little options of what to eat, but have made do with what I have available. Everyday, I have had a small snack of pepperoni, cheese, and crackers between main meals. For my main meals, I have eaten a salad with a hamburger on the side, sloppy joes with vegetables, and a salad with pasta and sauce. I have even snacked on fruits like bananas, apples, and avocados. I am proud of the choices I have made since being in quarantine. I know that I did not eat super healthy on my trip to MA, but have “made up for it” in a way with the nutritious choices the last five days. I have been eating a salad per day for goodness sake… that’s crazy! Digital storytelling is a way of sharing information with consumers of information through both audio and visual mediums. I see it as similar to the five minute introductions you find at the beginning of documentaries or “Earth” shows. Imagine hearing these words while being taken through the visuals of the jungle, desert, and ocean: “Our world is so vast. From the exotic cats of the jungle, to the creepy crawly beasts of the desert, animals and their habitats never cease to amaze us. For this broadcast, we dove deep down near the ocean floor to find a sea animal so incredible you will not believe your eyes. Earth: our beautiful planet.” I can just imagine the images on the screen floating through the sky in an airplane. The airplane then dives through the clouds and starts to look down on the jungle, look down on the desert, and then swoops down right above the ocean. This is how I see digital storytelling. The creator wants to share a story or factual information, but wants assistance in the form of a visual picture. Combining these two things is smart. The main two ways that humans receive information is through hearing and seeing. We hear through our ears, and receive what would be auditory information. We see through our eyes, and receive what would be visual information. Digital storytelling in this format takes a stab at both of these ways of receiving information. No matter which medium a person prefers, in digital storytelling, they will obtain some type of info. I thought about trying my hand at making my own digital story. However, I would rather simply tell a story with my words instead of putting it together with a video. In my mind, that is easier and can effectively get my point across. Also, I am not very technologically advanced, so trying to put together a stream of photos or videos for a digital storytelling, quite honestly, scared me a bit. While I am not choosing to try it at this point, I presume that one of the daily creates will have me create a video of some sort. I plan to attack this self-made block in my learning at that time! Overall, digital storytelling can do a variety of things. It can make someone happy, sad, angry, etc. No matter what the feeling the creator is trying to evoke, this statement is always true: Digital storytelling is an effective form of sharing information. It is no secret that social media has encompassed the lives of almost all of the world. Social media has specifically grasped the younger generation. Those who are teenagers at this point in their lives have an understanding of technology and the way social media works. Not only are teenagers able to live on social media, they are also highly affected by it.
I focused on the article “Social Media and Teen Anxiety” from the Harvard School of Education website. The article attempted to help the reader understand the effect social media has on teens, anxiety, and even parents. First and foremost, the article advised that parents should not completely make a blanket statement and say that social media is bad. However, it hints that it can be a helpful thing if used properly. Social Media and Teen Anxiety - Click the link to see the article So, how is social media used improperly, causing teens more anxiety than they would have experienced otherwise? The article states there is a lot of pressure for teenagers, particularly female teenagers, to post positive things about themselves on social media. Other stressors include worrying about getting comments and likes on posts as well as worrying about other people posting mean or negative things about you. Parenting on these issues is very important as studies have shown a recent rise in harmful or suicidal thoughts in teenagers, no doubt partially if not fully due to social media. Parents must be patient, caring, and understanding of a teenager that is growing up in a completely different world than the parent did when they were younger. As previously mentioned, instead of taking the phone away completely to try to prevent the teenager from feeling this anxiety, time limits on apps and the phones seems to be the best intervention. This will help the teenagers still live their lives off of their phones, and understand that social media means very little in the grand scheme of things. Regardless of how a parent or a teenager handles the situation, teenagers are affected by social media. Yes, some are affected more than others, but nonetheless, pressure is there to be liked, look cool, or have lots of friends. It is important in this day in age to instill confidence and self worth in our young people so the problem of anxiety via social media can be limited and social media can be a more enjoyable experience for teenagers. This week I continued to make improvements in my nutrition due to my Independent Learning Plan. Through the knowledge that I am gaining, I am making progress by implementing that knowledge into my eating habits. This week, I ate zero greasy, awful, double cheeseburgers! So, again, this week was a good week. This week I focused on the benefits of eating fruit, and I focused on bananas. Multiple sources agree that bananas are a great source of vitamin C, are good for your skin, and have a great amount of potassium that my body needs. I always knew bananas were pretty good for me because they are a fruit, but I did not know that the manganese found in bananas is good for my skin! Knowing this information, I trekked over to Walmart and got myself a bundle of bananas. As I said, I did not make any rash decision to splurge on a double cheeseburger meal. However, I did resort to snacking more throughout the days on mini snicker bars, granola bars, and Stax potato chips. I think this snacking helped curb my craving for a big greasy, bacon filled meal. I always added a big glass of chocolate milk with these snacks to make it feel like a meal in a way. I tended to eat less of the snacks because I felt full after drinking the whole glass of milk. I think this also helped because I got good sources of proteins and fats from the milk and less of the poor sources from the candy and chips. For most of my meals, I ate white rice and ground beef. I chose this combination because it is very easy to make, and contains the correct amount of macro-nutrients that I am looking for in each meal. The rice contains plenty of carbohydrates, and the ground beef has a good proportion of protein and fat. I season the ground beef very well and it turns into a delicious meal that I can eat over and over. I feel a bit healthier this week to be honest. I added more running into my exercise routine, and because of that, rewarded myself with a strawberry banana smoothie with whipped cream from Just Love. I am making improvements, while keeping a healthy yet enjoyable balance in my diet! Next week, I hope to make something more complicated than my previous meals with turkey or chicken breast! Ds106 is a platform on the internet where people can go to and find ideas to form creative pieces. Creative pieces can be writings, drawings, videos, podcasts, memes, etc. Ds106 has cool and different ideas everyday to bring out the creativity in the people who work on the site. It has a few positives and negatives. First of all, the website was difficult for me to navigate. I thought that ds106 and the daily create were two separate entities. However, when I saw that the daily create was a portion of ds106, things started to make a bit more sense in my head. The home page ds106 is helpful as it explains what ds106 is and it has an easily accessible activity that its users had taken part in previously. The daily create has some options that one can use podcasts, videos, ect to be creative. If somebody were to really want to use these things, he would have to download additional apps to do so. In my opinion, it would be a lot easier to use if the ability to make these type of creations was included within the daily create website. On the plus side, I really like the overall idea of the daily create. I really like it because it gives the user prompts and ideas off of which to branch her creativity. Personally, I do not consider myself to be very creative, and these prompts are essential for me to think artsy and create something. I feel like I need a topic or a reason to create something, and the prompts are just the reason I will need. As of right now, I have not created anything quite yet. I am nervous about creating because while the examples shown on the website were simple and seemed doable, I have no experience with any art creator app or anything of the sort. I probably will resort to using writing as my creative piece to post on twitter or my blogs as the “creates” that we are asked to post there. I am also nervous about transporting what I create onto my blog so that everyone can see it. Pictured is my face that shows how unsure I am about all this. Similar to everything in this class, it will be a learning curve for me because I am not very technologically advanced. Overall, I am up for the challenge and hope that I am fully understanding the scope of the assignments and the 20 creates that we are supposed to make. This week, as I continued on my Independent Learning Project, I became more balanced. I say I became more balanced because I did not eat a single cheeseburger. Generally, I eat 3 or 4 of them a week. This week, however, I ate a good mixture of chicken, green salads, vegetables, fruits, and of course, sweets. Each day I ate a banana as a late breakfast. For lunch, I would make my usual scrambled eggs with a bagel on the side. On a couple of the days this week, I had some fruit snacks. I know what you may be thinking, “you were doing so good, Brent, why would you eat fruit snacks?” Well in my defense I get extremely hungry after lunch between the lunch break and the time that I get off work in the afternoon. Also, these fruit snacks are naturally flavored and absolutely zero artificial flavoring. All in all, I think these fruit snacks are an okay snack as long as I do not have four packages of them at one time. I also snacked a lot on this super yummy chip dip that my buddy makes. It is the best chip dip this side of the Mississippi. Eating a specific diet was hard over the weekend. Instead of being able to make my own food, I was at a social event where food was prepared for the group and that was what there was to eat. On Friday night, I had a bunch of turkey and ham sandwiches with Doritos chips. Sandwiches have a good mixture of macronutrients, but the sheer amount of sandwiches that I ate took me off track of my plan a bit. As I look at how to eat appropriately to be healthy, I understood, or understand now after the fact, that I ate too many sandwiches in one sitting. Saturday was easier because I was not as hungry. I had a balanced breakfast of one pancake and some scrambled eggs. Later that day, I ate a meal with chicken, mashed potatoes with no added salt or butter, with a green salad with baby carrots. I am telling you, that salad tasted delicious and it was even tastier because I knew how good it was for my body to be eating! It felt good that I made the choice to eat the salad. Immediately after eating that nutritious meal, I ate two brownies with a scoop of ice cream! I needed a bit of a reward for a pretty solid week of learning and applying my learning on health and nutrition. Balance in everything is beneficial. This week I cultivated my learning plan by adding some more pages to follow on twitter. Instead of mostly cooking pages, I looked at more pages that focus on health and nutrition as well.
After reading up on all the different ideas and posts in my personal learning network regarding my independent learning plan, I realized that I have had a poor diet in recent months. Not only have I been eating boat loads of cooked and red meats, I have been consuming much too much sugar. Soda pop, candy bars, etc. are items that especially have hindered me from having a remotely healthy diet. This week, none of that changed! I focused more on learning about how to eat healthy and what a healthy diet looks like as opposed to putting a healthy diet into place. While I did eat less cheeseburgers, and I saved myself some money by cooking 90 percent of my meals, I did not lay off the candy or soda. At this point, if I am learning about nutrition and can keep those things to a consumption moderation, I will be happy. One food group that I did eat more of this week is healthy fats. Each day while reading blogs and twitter posts, I read how important healthy fats can be for a diet. They can be found in avocados and nuts primarily. This week, with every lunch from Monday to Thursday, I ate a handful of almonds as “dessert”. I ran out of the salted ones, and will now turn to the can of unsalted almonds that I have in the cupboard. I know that I rely heavily on salt to season my food, so this will be good to attempt to lower my reliance on salt to enjoy my food. Overall, I am happy with what I learned and accomplished this week. For every lunch meal, I ate a very balanced dish of eggs, english muffins, and peanut butter. It was satisfying, filling, and easy to make. The worst part about cooking for every meal is having to wash so many dishes! Even though it takes a while to wash all the dishes, I do not mind it that much. I can put on some music and have a little dance party in the kitchen while getting the dishes clean! I look forward to improving my diet in the coming weeks. I do like to make sure I eat enough food because I do not want to lose weight. However, it is important to eat the right types of food so I do not gain the wrong type of weight. |
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March 2020
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