Welcome back to our YouTube channel. My name is Julie Grumbaugh. I'm Mary Keurig's executive assistant and I help her in filing unique and complex legal immigration applications. For today's video, we're going to be talking about photos in spells of sponsorship applications. So similarly to reference letters, it's not actually mandatory in spells of sponsorship applications that you provide photos. If you have been living together, you have married for the two years. It is your first marriage and if you have children. To meet those four criteria, you're not required to submit photos. However, similarly to the reference letters in every single one of our spells of sponsorship applications, we always provide photos. We feel that it is really helpful for the application. It just shows additional proof of the relationship. So we always find this helpful. And again, it's just a little piece to a large rigorous process that we follow, a rigorous procedure that we follow at our office that is really helpful to submitting a complete and full application. With regards to the photos themselves, you'll see that in the IRCC document checklist that they suggest that if you are providing this as additional documentation that you only need to provide 20 photos. At our office, we always provide between 20 and up to 50 photos. We really find it's helpful for the officer to be able to see that you documented your relationship from beginning up until now for however many years that you've known each other. And it's really nice to be able to see the progression of that relationship. With regards to the actual content of the photos, it can really be anything. It can be the spouses at holiday events, just daily outings with family, with friends. It can be selfies. It can be professional pictures. It can be from weddings.  There's photo evidence and it's really important that the photos that we include in our applications, we like to have them printed on paper. So not actual photo paper, but just on regular white paper and usually have two to four photos on each piece of paper. This is much easier for the officer to look through as opposed to having to look through physical photo paper, having to flip through that being able to just flip through a piece of paper being able to see two to four pictures at once. Makes it a lot easier and anything that can make the process easier and simpler for the officer is always a benefit. We also suggest to always print using colored paper. It just makes the qualities of the photo look better. And it is really, really important that next to each photo you include the date that the photo was taken and a small description on what's happening, who's in the photo. Because again, this is much easier for the officer to be able to associate the name, the date, the event. And it's important that these names, dates and events match with what is being written in our legal submission letter, what is in the forms and what is also in the other documentation that we are submitting with the application. So if you have any questions with regards to photos for spouses sponsorship applications or just the general application process in general. If you have any questions with regards to photos for spouses sponsorship applications or just the process in general, we would be more than happy to help you with the process. So please feel free to contact our office for more information and we'll be happy to help you. Thank you for watching and we'll see you next time.


Good afternoon or good morning depending on where you're listening My name is Kyle Zumbar and I'm here to talk to you about authentic voices Which is a project that I set up a few years back And I really don't want to say too much before I start because I want my students to speak for themselves So I hope you'll enjoy this first call I'm nice as a clay. I used to fly all the time. Now I talk out to talk to nobody Now I use to think that life is, life isn't for, life is for everybody. I reach my goal Now as I'm coming up at like the sun My journey has just begun I hope you enjoyed listening to that as much as I do every time So proud of the student and proud that we have a place where she can share her beautiful poetry and her voice reading it To give you some quick background, my name is Kyle Zumbar. I'm a technology integration specialist in northern virginia Just outside of washington dc And I have the awesome job of getting to work with teachers to use more technology in their classrooms One of my passions is literacy and authentic literacy And so a number of teachers and I got together and read the book the digital writing workshop by trey hex And we were really inspired by the points he makes in this book about how to take the writing process and do and go digital with it And incorporate all those important digital literacy skills We've joined his name and participated there and brainstormed ideas and talked a lot about what we wanted to do In addition to that inspiration I also credit teachers teaching teachers a weekly podcast that I subscribe to that I love listening to that Talks a lot about a really powerful place called youth voices another website where students can upload their work To the world get comments get feedback and I became quite a lurker on youth voices And I was really interested in this The teachers I worked with were much more comfortable with a site that I kind of managed and controlled So we went ahead and set up our own wiki spaces and called it authentic voices The number of reasons why we went with wiki spaces One was that it was free And so we really wanted something that we knew we could maintain Second you can create student accounts without student email addresses, which was really important to us We have a number of students that didn't have email or didn't have school appropriate email And so we wanted that feature I also thought that authentic voices would work well with the idea of bringing in audio and The students work and to that end that's worked out really well It's been really easy for the students to get used to entering their work and really easy for them to upload their audio files Speaking of auto files. We use the free download Audacity as how we had that as the manner which students recorded themselves audacity If you don't already know it is a free program that Allows you to record your voice have multiple tracks going and do lots of editing And if you first look at it sometimes interface is intimidating But I found that the students very quickly found the record and the playback and the stop buttons And got comfortable with having different tracks and deleting them and starting them where they needed to And you can export these files as wave or mp3. So it worked great for us I want to stop and tell the story of the first student who actually Put something up on wiki spaces The teacher sent him to me and he said oh, I think um, d'andre is ready to record today So I told him about the project and he was pretty excited And um, he got some headphones on and he started to read his poem to record it And he stopped and he looked at me and he said can I change the poem? And I said, yeah And he went back and he changed a few things that he realized didn't sound right once he started reading So then he then he recorded again Still found some stuff that what didn't quite say the things the way he wanted to went back and revised again And if you're an english language arts teacher out there listening I know that you you know the value of this that it's so hard to get students to revise And in this case where he was listening to his own voice And he knew that it was something that was going to be published. He really got into the revision in a way that he hadn't previously Um, so this led to our first how-how with this with this project Which is that revising uh recording leads to revising And we saw time and time again with a student that you know said a piece was done But then when it came time to actually revive record it and publish it started to go back and Make more corrections and seem to really revise in a more authentic way So if you're thinking of doing any kind of project where the students are working on a piece and they um You want them to do more revision? I really encourage you to think about ways to have them record themselves and play it back Whether it's on their cell phones. It's using audacity Something that feels authentic to them besides just reading it quietly to themselves So I want you to hear um de andre's piece and so uh, here he is So I think you'll agree that all his revisions were worth it I've been lucky enough in this project to work with a fabulous english language arts teacher And most of the writing credit absolutely goes to her This next piece was an assignment where she had them create a metaphor and um This girl really was having a tough time with her life at this point And I love that she could get that out through this metaphor go back and read it on the website There's also a few essays there. Um, it's a personal narrative by a student who had his first running with the law Very powerful to read and to listen to his voice as he reads it We were able to do a few digital stories too. We had some middle schoolers post their digital stories up on Authentic voices and it was great that the kids could see their work published and watch each other's and give each other feedback In general the students love the project. They're really excited to post their work on authentic voices a few occasionally are pretty shy or hesitant and We make sure they get a private place to record Many students write down the website. They want to share it with friends or a family They post it on their own facebook or um, sometimes their parents post it In fact, I had one student who was really struggling with her mom at that point in her life But when she shared the poem with her mom, her mom was thrilled and posted it on her facebook and sure enough the next day We'd had 50 fresh hits. Um, mostly from this proud mama This next piece is written by a student who said to me he'd never thought of himself as an author before this I just love that piece. I'm that student's an english language learner And so I love that he had a chance to practice his Spoken word as well as his written word with this project We've had hits on the website from all over the world, which is really exciting. We've gotten 48 states I haven't figured out which two are missing yet. Um, and from countries around the world So it's been great for students to see that it really empowers them and allows themselves to see themselves as authors I tweet all the time and students have posted new work and try to get more hits from them But I'm especially looking for a collaborating classroom someone that will Also enroll their students in the wiki and will post their student's work So one place I've reached out for that is through the global classroom project that michael graffin and div ranger established Last year So I got to be a part of their founding document their manifesto And really looking for many ways to connect classrooms around the world But really hoping that authentic voices could find a collaborating school this way We had lots of fault starts lots of people that replied and Said they were interested and were checking out the page and joined the wiki as a teacher But as of yet we haven't had any hits on the project itself itself Which is to really have students writing on common themes, whether it's family or change or You know some of the other pieces that you've seen us write about already just names, you know sharing about different names I did have a friend who was teaching an adult esl class And so as a class they logged on and read some of the pieces and composed a response together So you can see here what one of the classrooms wrote back about one of the poems about a kid's birthday party More excitingly was that at one point. Finally a school in new york I set up accounts for their students and they got on one day and they started replying to our students work It was so exciting. I was getting flooded with emails from wiki spaces that someone had updated And this is a really a moving exchange between The girl who wrote the poem I played at the very beginning changes and a student in new york Where she really talks about how she connects with the message of the poem that she's been through changes And she's made some bad choices and our student wrote back and and shared with some more advice for her So I just this experience has really shown us that Authentic audiences help writers bloom In an effort to recreate more of the magic that happened with that new york classroom I decided that one thing I could do is be more specific in one theme that other classrooms could write about and could contribute to authentic voices So the english language arts teacher and I decided that family was a great topic that all teens around the world can relate to She had her students write essays about family interdependence And then we recorded those and posted those on authentic voices And the hope was that being more specific and being really targeted in a date and all of the rest of that that we would get Some classrooms out there that would also want to write about family interdependence or other themes about family And so we posted our work and here's one that you can listen to yourself They show each other how to handle problems and they support each other when help is needed They show each other how to set goals and make care for one another One time my family depended on me was when my stepmother went to the doctor and I needed to take care of the kids that she babysat The day before I babysat my stepmother asked me if I wanted to and if I had time I said yes the next morning I went to her house and waited for all the kids to get there My stepmother's appointment wasn't until 10 a.m So as I took the elementary kids to wait for the school bus My stepmother stayed inside with the younger kids that do not go to school yet So, um, we put our thoughts out there and we waited and we waited and we waited and no other classrooms did end up participating In that project and so that was another challenge that um, I met and I'm trying to work on So as I move forward, I'm continuing to think about how to be specific So that people get right away with the projects about and they know how to participate and that I'm clear with the teacher About what they need to do on their end and maybe what support they might need I think we'll also move to a blog format instead of the wiki spaces. I think people are more familiar with it They get have to comment and so forth But I'll definitely keep trying and keep experimenting with teachers so that the student voices can be here heard A couple other projects that I'd like to mention that are out there that I think are really worth checking out Um, one is quad blogging. It's quad blogging.net And you can also follow at deputy mitchell if you want to know more But basically four classrooms pair sort of partner up and take turns responding to each other's blogs This is a great way to have a built-in audience Where you know that your kids work is going to get read and your kids get the experience of reading work from another classroom Similarly, um, the writers club has started up Which is um, a lot like youth voices and what we're trying to get Accomplished with authentic voices You can see there that they've got participation from around the world with different classrooms Contributing and sharing their writing. So I think that's a really exciting project And I'm hoping I can get some teachers involved with that this year On our in my school division where I work they did purchase edgy blogs this year for teachers So that's been great. I've worked with a couple teachers already that have set up those blogs and are getting their students writing out there Here's one example and she and another English language arts teacher are partnering So they know their kids at least will have the other classrooms that are responding I have another teacher that i'm working with that is hoping to do some podcasting So i'm excited so that she'll have that audio piece on her blog as well Until then I will keep presenting and keep sharing and collaborating getting more ideas from people I just really believe that when students have the chance to publish to the world and to record themselves The writing transforms and it stops becoming an exercise that they're turning into the teacher Or is going to end up in the waste basket in a few years, but instead is something that they're contributing to the The wider work that's out there or as ellen november would say the learning legacy So I hope this listening to this gave you some ideas about how you might want to get your student voices out there I think It's so valuable to have that recorded piece and I hope this got you excited about thinking about that and not just having kids put text out there And I would really encourage you if you haven't already the the world is so flat now You know just jump on twitter and and find partners global classroom projects A great way to meet up with other teachers and just even launch your own projects through there And i'm also really open to feedback and ideas So I'd love if you connected with me through twitter or through the through my little baby blog that I've started Or through authentic voices because I'd love more ideas about how you might want to collaborate or How you think those two sites can be improved Thank you so much for letting me participate in kato online conference this year. It's been an honor and


Okay. Hi everybody. I want to make a quick video to answer two questions that I get all the time. One of which is how do I create a splash screen on my game? Second of which is how do I create an end screen or a game over type screen? And I'm going to answer that today kind of in general, show you some specific examples. So what I have here is I have a kind of skeleton starter program. I'll put a link to that down below that you can download and you can kind of follow along. Now we're not going to be filling everything in today just enough to show how you would divide your program up so that you can do those things. So just basic kind of structure of the program that I've been following. Some of these things you have to do. Some of these things are kind of optional, but you want to start out and import your modules first. I don't know how many of these will actually need today, but those are the ones I imported. Now if you're on PyCharm or one of those other certain IDEs, you might get an error. Because module imported but never used, which is kind of obvious because in this case I've imported math, but I haven't actually used it down here anywhere. I have imported random, but I haven't used it. You can either just ignore that or if it's causing problems with your particular editor, just go ahead and hashtag that out, comment it out until you actually need it. Yeah, so that's kind of an important point. So the next thing you want to think about is if you're going to be using classes in your program, you probably want to put them next. Again, it's the order is somewhat flexible, but not always.  Don't know what that means, don't worry. Then I usually create my functions, then define my constants, and you might have put your constants up here again. No hard and fast rules, except certain things have to come before some others. Then you want to set up your screen or set up your game. In this case, I'm using the turtle module and I'm creating a little window, and I'll show you what that looks like in a second. I'm going to be using a pen, and it's actually a turtle object to do the graphics in this game. I actually don't really need this today, but I'll use it a little bit to give you an idea of one option. Then I usually put the keyboard bindings here. This is where you say, all right, if I push the A, do this, if I push B, do that. Then finally is the main game loop, and how this works. This is similar in structure to, say, Pygame, if you use Pygame, where you flip the screen over. What we're going to do here is, everything that's drawn with the pen, we clear it, we run all the game code, so you don't really see that yet. Once you're done with all the game code for that iteration of the loop, then you update the screen. This is what gives us the fast graphics and animation. I'm just going to go ahead and run this. I'm not going to see much, but I'm going to hit function F5. I'm using Genie, which is a free and open source text editor, which I do recommend. I quite enjoy it. I'm going to hit function F5, and all I have here is a blank screen. Now, again, this is not the only way that you can do this, but this way, this is pretty easy. Again, I focus on beginners, I think with my students in mind. What could they understand? What I want to do is I'm going to use the idea of a game state. When I start the game, what state is it in? I'm going to go ahead and create a variable here, and we'll call that game state. Let's call that splash, because what we're going to do in the beginning is we're going to show the splash screen. In my game code down here, I'm going to use that variable, game state, to control what's happening. I'm going to go ahead and type if game state equals splash. What I'm going to do is I'm going to say win.bgpick.jif. What I've done actually, this is one simple way to do this, is I've created three different images. In the Python turtle module, they have to be GIFs. Can't just rename them, you have to use a program to convert them. I used GIMP, for example, because they started out as PNGs. I made them with Google Slides. My splash screen looks like this, called game state demo by Tokyo EdTech, it's my Twitter handle, and it says press S to begin. Once I go to that, I'm going to go to my main background, and I just have wizard quest, not very original, but I'm going to have a background, and then I also have a game over GIF. These are the same size as my window, which is set to 800 by 600. I'm going to go ahead and run my game, and now this is what I have. This is my splash screen. It's going to sit there on the splash until game state changes. That makes sense. We have to put some code in here so we can actually press S to begin. What I have to do is create a function, and I'm going to call it start game. When that happens, we're going to change the game state to, I'm just running, you can call whatever you want. I should just call game, it makes a little more sense, you can call whatever you want. If you haven't seen my local versus global variables video, and you don't understand what that means, watch that now, but since I'm changing game state inside of a function, I need to use global. Again, watch the video, everything is explained very, very clearly. This isn't really good programming practice, but the only alternative is to use classes and again, a lot of people aren't up to speed on classes, so I'm going to skip that for now. What I have to do is create a keyboard binding, so win.listen. This is a particular command of the turtle module. If you're ever curious about the turtle module, there are turtle documents you can use to find these things out. Then what I'm going to do is win.onKeyPress. When I press the key, I'm going to call the function, start game, and start game, and the key is going to be S. Notice that's a lowercase S, not a capital S. Let's go ahead and run that, and we're not going to see too much difference here, I think. I'm going to go ahead and hit S, nothing happened, which is what I expected. That's because I didn't change the background pick. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to say, if game state equals game, so let's say we're playing the game, win.bgpick, what did I call it, main.gif, I think. Let's go ahead and run that, test it, see if it works. I'm going to go ahead and press S, and now we have our game. This is where you would have all, I'm going to put L if, because you can't have them both. This is where you would have all of your game code. This is where you would update the player, this is where you would move enemies, this is where you would shoot missiles, whatever your game is. This is where all of the game code that we've done in other tutorials would go. Let's say at some point your player dies and you want to show the game over screen. What I would do is L if game state equals, whatever you want to call it, it's right up to you, it says a win.bgpick, what do I call it, game over.gif, so we have to figure out how to get that to happen. Let's just go ahead and just say, let's just set the game state to game, test this, let's just test it to game over, let's go ahead and say that, run it and see what the game over screen looks like. Game over, press S, that says press S to begin. What we could do at this point is, let's think about that. In this case, we're starting over. What you might have to do in that case is, in here somewhere, this is where you might say reset the game. This would be, for example, set the score, it says zero, move the player back to the starting position. All those things that are set at the beginning of the game need to be reset. It's probably actually a good idea to do this in here anyway. Again, there are other ways to do it, but this is kind of simple and straightforward to understand. Again, something to think about is, again, if you're not familiar with global and local variables, again, it's not usually a good idea to use global variables, but for beginners, it seems to be a little bit easier for them to understand, so that is a way to do it. Essentially what you're doing is your main game loop has different sections. Let's say, in this case of wizards, let's say I wanted to add a screen where I'm leveling up, I'm buying armor for my character. I could have something like, if game state equals, what would it be, armory. Then you say win.bgpick, I haven't actually made this picture, armory.gif, and then there would be code in here that deals with what happens while you're in the armory, or there could be a screen where you're a map screen or a combat screen, those sorts of things. This way you can more easily divide up your code by keeping track of the game state, or again, you can call whatever you want, but game state pretty covers it pretty well. Just one other thing I wanted to show you is, if you don't want to use an image, a pre-drawn image for whatever reason, you could use the turtle write module and say, so pen dot write, I'll say pen dot go to, I think it's already there, but zero dot zero, pen dot write, and I can never remember the format for this, that's why I pre-loaded this, and I'm just going to go ahead and copy this, and this is the turtle module documentation, so I'm just going to put that into there, and so R exists to be like, you know, you have died, died, whatever you want to put there, put center, and aerial is fine, but I want to make this a really big font, so I'm going to run that, and our game is already set to go to game over, and we had an error, great, pen I have two dots, hopefully you guys caught that before I did, and you have died. Now it's flashing because of, I have this win dot update thing here, so you might have to write some code to get around that, but anyway, that's the general idea of how to do a splash screen, so I'm just going to get that back to where it was. Again, this is a question I get all the time, and I've never really addressed it, so here I am addressing it, hopefully that will help give you an idea of how to divide your code up a little bit better, and how to deal with different stages of your game. So good luck to you, I hope this helps, more than it hurts, so thanks for tuning in, keep on watching, and subscribe for updates, take care.