Embedded Files
Linking Assignment
Linking Assignment
Please find my reflections and connections to my MET colleagues here!
Upon reading Tanya's Task 1 entry... I decided that we have a lot in common, based on the contents of her bag and her reasoning behind each one. Tanya and I both teach upper intermediate, both juggle wearing many hats at any given time, and both sport a clean, simplistic looking bag on the outside, but understand the chaos of it's inside!
I appreciate Tanya's perspective on the "necessities" of September - school keys, starbucks cards and Advil. I had similar items relating to building access, caffeine and headache remedies. Other important items she touches on include her wallet, cell phone and chapstick... which I feel you can find in most people's bags these days. More unique items include a dog collar, notebook, scissors and a pencil case. This is where I feel that Tanya and I differ a bit. She claims that her bag "reflects a variety of written, printed and digital text"... she takes her MET notes in her wire-bound notebook, highlighting key ideas as she goes along. She then ensures her notes are readily available when she's working on coursework on her computer. I know Tanya's routine and system all too well.
During my undergrad years, I relied heavily on my notebooks of thoughts, using multiple colours of pens for underlining, highlighting and doodling visuals during in person lectures and online seminars. I would place myself exactly in Tanya's shoes.. about 4 years ago. This forced me to be a bit nostalgic and reflect on my own journey: I enjoyed my colourful notes. They made sense to me. I am a visual learner. I like graphs, data, and organization. I liked being able to pull my notebook out of my bag without any issues (dead battery, inconvenience, etc.) This seems like it was a simpler time in my life. Yet, it felt cluttered. My bag is already pure chaos, without having the pencil case and notebooks added to the list. I feel like I'm much more organized now, in my digital world. Using my MacBook, iPhone and iPad to store my thoughts, memories, report cards, files, and other important documents has allowed me to be more organized, more intentional and more reflective (as both a human and a teacher). My entire life syncs across my devices using iCloud and Google Apps for Education.
Tanya appears to have a great balance of how she engages in language and communication. She uses her phone for texting, emailing, work related business with her Etsy store, and engaging on social media. However, she appears to appreciate the value of her "Five Star wire-bound notebook" when it comes to engaging with her own learning. Although she's taking her Masters in Educational Technology, she still uses text forms that she's comfortable with, and I commend her for that. I would be curious to know how much technology she uses in the classroom, not for her students, but for herself. How does she organize her teacher self? Does she have filing cabinets and binders full of units, ideas and assignments? Does she rely on her teacher laptop to store these documents? Does she utilize the cloud?
I think the shift from text to tech in my life came from a shift in teaching practices and pedagogy. Three years ago, I began collaboratively planning, teaching and assessing with a partner teacher. In order to ensure we were on the same page, we had to make the jump to become more digital in our documents, dayplans, assessment practices, etc. We needed to share our ideas, resources and life's work, in order for our partnership to be successful. I have never looked back. Technology has just become a part of who I am. Although, I do miss my colourful pens and doodles some days....
Thanks for taking me for a ride down memory lane, Tanya!
While reading Victoria's blog entry on Voice-to-Text... I found myself nodding along in obvious agreement. Right from the first sentence where she states she struggles with telling stories on a whim! I thought it was brilliant that she decided to read the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" as her story for this task. I also felt that my voice-to-text story was riddled with mistakes because of lack of punctuation and grammar, however, I appreciated that Victoria told the story in raw format - without saying the word "period" or "comma" once. I felt this really captured the essence of the struggle of voice-to-text, whether it's being used by a student for educational purposes, or by someone dictating a grocery list to their spouse via text message. I find it messes with the flow of my sentence or story if I have to say the words "period" or "comma". I'm curious to know what program Victoria used for her voice-to-text story?
Victoria states, "Oral storytelling can offer so much that written storytelling may not always convey. Good oral stories are told with dramatic voice that engages the listener, smooth flow with appropriate pauses to build suspense, and allows the listener to visualize in ways that written stories don’t always allow, especially if there are pictures already present alongside the written stories." I really connected with her thoughts here. Not only does it honour the tradition of storytelling, but I connected with it on a personal level. In my own voice-to-text task, I told a story about my wedding that I've told a crazy amount of times. Probably more than 30. Each time I tell the story, the listener is captivated by suspense. I can tell that they are completely engaged in how my story is going to play out. When I was telling the story over voice-to-text, this was not the case. I felt the suspense was lost, therefore the story didn't have as much of an impact.
I also found myself nodding while reading Victoria's personal opinion on voice-to-text with having a background in Special Education. I also have several students in my class who use this feature on Google Docs, to record their thoughts. These are students with great ideas and minimal written output, and unfortunately, most of the time these students struggle with reading as much as they struggle with writing and therefore lack the necessary skills to edit their output. Victoria mentions (regarding her students), "When they could, the same issues would occur that I mentioned above – there would be no punctuation, words were missing or misheard, and then the student would have to spend a substantial amount of time (often with one-to-one support) fixing these “mistakes”. YES. These are my exact thoughts and struggles with this technology. It's so beneficial, yet so hindering at the same time.
Thanks, Victoria for your thoughts and insights!
Upon first glance, I wasn't sure what exactly a chicken had to do with the task! I'm so glad I dived into Angela's Twine Story!
The Twine Task was one that I instantly found entertaining. I am still pondering how I will incorporate it into my Writer's Workshop with my Grade 5/6's - they would LOVE to create a choose your own adventure story such as this. Angela inspired me even further as she took this task to an entirely new level. While most of our cohort used it as a platform to tell a fictional story (perhaps based around true events), Angela used it in a journal-esque sort of way.
She tells the story of a chicken named "Noodles" who adventures around the continent with her family. Each link and passage connects to a photo of Noodles in different settings - from various British Columbia locations to Hogwarts at Universal Studios! Each photo tells it's own story, some photos starring her kids, or herself, and some showing strangers that her family has met along the way... ALL featuring Noodles the chicken. What a fun way to keep track of memories. I found myself clicking through ALL of the different passages because I wanted to see every photo and adventure that Noodles has embarked on. This made me think about the importance of graphics in text that we "read". Had Angela told the story of Noodles, without the photos, I don't believe that it would have had the same impact on the reader. When left to the reader's imagination, the story wouldn't have been as captivating (or real). The fact that Noodles is a real (fake) chicken (which is not how I pictured it at all, by the way), is what makes this Twine Story so powerful.
I also made a personal connection to Noodles. In 2017, my husband and I spent the summer travelling in Europe. One of the bus driver's we met, had a small pig that she took with her on her journeys to take photos for her grand daughter. She had asked my husband and I to take the pig and get a photo of it with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as she wasn't going to be entering the facility herself. We of course, obliged, thinking it was kind of odd, but also kind of special. About a week later, we found a small toy cow in a store. We laughed at the memory of that pig, and thought about how we should use the cow for the same purpose and start sending the cow photos home to our families (we live on a farm, so it would be funny). Turns out, the adventures of "Shadow the Cow" were extremely well received, to the point that our parents really didn't care if we were in the photos ourselves anymore. I have not thought much about that cow since our return from Europe, until I met Noodles. I found a couple of Shadow's adventures and posted them below.
It's amazing how different forms of text (photos, etc.) can bring a new dynamic of communication and story-telling!
Shadow at the Giant's Causeway in Ireland
Shadow in Corfu, Greece
Honestly, I think I looked at the majority of our cohorts Emoji Stories.... All I wanted was to figure ONE OUT. Just one. But alas, here we are... I don't think I figured ANY out. My lack of success got me thinking, here I thought I was so brilliant with mine... "Oh this is so easy", I said to myself as I published my story on this site. Then I showed my husband, who had LITERALLY just watched this show with me before I created it, and he couldn't get it. Did other people think that their stories were "so easy" as well? I am here to tell you people, that they were NOT "so easy", and neither was mine.
Enter... Eva's reflection on the Emoji Story. It wasn't so much her story that I connected to, although I was desperate to have a successful guess in this linking assignment somewhere. In fact, I really have no idea what her movie is. It looks something like the Wizard of Oz, but she indicates that it's not a blockbuster movie and is sort of "cult" like... which has me even more perplexed. No, what I connected with was the fact that she reflected on the process of creating the Emoji Story, which I didn't find on many other blogs in my travels. Most people, like myself, just posted the story... and might have said "good luck" or some other witty banter. Eva described the process as "more time consuming and head-scratching than it expected" which gave me a chuckle.
Eva also discusses the meaning of the emojis, and how each emoji can mean different things. This made me think about how I change my text messages depending on who I'm chatting with. Your audience plays a large part in how you communicate the way you do. When I'm texting with my mom, I have to be very specific. I can't use emojis to describe my feelings, answer her questions, or heaven forbid, use them without any supporting text at all. She gets very frustrated and tells me that she "doesn't know what I'm trying to say". If I were to send the exact same emojis to a good friend, instead of my mom, they would understand the meaning of my message, perhaps even more so than if I would have just given a simple answer in text form. In her reflection, Eva says, "How would the reader know which way you meant the emoji to be interpreted… as a feeling, an action, or a part of a sound combination. This became really clear when I realized that I was using one emoji in two different ways in different parts of the story. That must be quite confusing to the ‘reader’." It's interesting how we perceive text and code such as emojis. It seems so easy to understand when it's someone you chat with in that format all of the time.
After some investigation and google searching, my educated guess would be that Eva's emoji story is about "Labyrinth", a 1986 movie starring David Bowie. The only reason I was able to sleuth around the web for my answer was because she indicated that the main character had his own emoji (David Bowie), which is serious #goals.
I really enjoyed Evan's rendition of our Task 1: What's in Your Bag assignment. I found that I struggled with this assignment as I am not as creative when I don't have time to think, therefore I do better with written text than I do auditory assignments or presentations. As I explored Evan's blog, I found that she was extremely creative during her auditory task 7, as well as other modes that we've explored (Twine Task, etc.) She described the items in her bag in an "I Spy" format, describing each one and leaving the listener to guess what it is.
It was interesting to read that Evan felt that her audio recording did not have the same impact on her viewer/listener as the photo and description did. I went to her Task 1 to check out the visual of her bag, and I agree with her that if I hadn't been able to see the actual contents of the bag itself, I might not have understood her "I-Spy" riddles as easily. Evan states, "As an audio platform with a creative element, I do not think there is the same initial effect as Brown’s photography project. According to the New London group, voice is more individual and personal. However, for the confinements of this task I might have to disagree. In my experience as a teacher, many students are visual learners and prefer to learn this way. This is true for myself and is why I found Brown’s original photo project so interesting." This made me think about the power of "what benefits one, benefits all" in the classroom. Many of our students are in fact visual learners, myself included, but I also know I have a few kiddos who doodle all day long and look like they're not engaged whatsoever, but are really soaking up every last word that's being said. It's hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes when you know how you learn best (visually, etc.) As an educator, it's so important to take all learning types into account when delivering lesson content or instructions, allowing as many students to access your material as possible!
Thanks for sharing your creative juices, Evan!
I actually chose Ben as one of the colleagues that I analyzed for Task 9 (as I didn't have my own data for this assignment). His name caught my attention because he was one of 4 people who were in groups of two, as opposed to the larger groups of 4 or 5. Both Ben and his colour community partner, Evan, made their song selections while being culturally responsive. "Songs like "El Cascabel" and "Flowing Streams" are significant because they are international and hopefully remove some of the North American/European bias that could have dominated this track list", Ben states. Evan said something similar, "My goal for my list was to try and eliminate my own cultural biases and omit Western or personal subjectivity as much as I could." This underlaying goal is likely responsible for Ben and Evan's match up in the algorithm.
I connected with Ben's Task 9 entry, as I had a few of the same thoughts. He was able to put my thinking into words, to which I found myself nodding along as I read this entry. In my own Task 9, I touched on the idea that our entire cohort was not being represented and connected it to the current election happening in Canada. Ben takes it a bit further by discussing how his voice is "quieter" in this musical poll because of his preferences and that he's in the minority of the larger group with who he shares those preferences with. This sentence really struck me: "This leads me to think about how people can be grouped together for political purposes based on their voting habits"... YES, Ben! That's the direction that my mind was wandering too. There could have been MANY reasons why he chose the song selections that he did, but at the end of the day, his selections were put into an algorithm and the data became quantitative. He continues to provide an example of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 Election. Ben states, "There can be thousands of reasons why people vote either Democrat or Republican, but at the end of the day if you voted for Trump in 2016 you are automatically labeled one way, while if you voted Clinton you are labeled another. This is even more concerning as there are people collecting data to provide heavily biased news. If you click a pro-Trump article, you are instantly suggested many more articles with the same bias. This is dangerous for our democracy."
Ben ends Task 9 with this mic drop: "All of this makes me think that these connections, particularly as they are concerned with the web, can dangerously oversimplify who we are as people. This information can be used and exploited by political or economic actors." BEN, HAVE YOU WATCHED "THE GREAT HACK" (on Netflix)?! Because you should.
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