Click here for What’s In My Bag ASMR

I’ve decided to demonstrate what is in my bag using a relatively new concept – ASMR. ASMR initially stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. ASMR began from a forum discussion in 2007 and gained popularity from 2010 till the present day which has become a global sensation. In 2010, Jennifer Allen, a participant in an online forum, proposed that the phenomenon be named “autonomous sensory meridian response” (Keiles, 2019). Allen chose the words intending or assuming them to have the following specific meanings:

• Autonomous – spontaneous, self-governing, with or without control
• Sensory – about the senses or sensation
• Meridian – signifying a peak, climax, or point of highest development
• Response – referring to an experience triggered by something external or internal

I’ve picked two ASMR videos created by two YouTubers that had used items in my bag and merged their videos into one video file. I tried to create my own ASMR video, but without proper equipment it was unusable. At the beginning of the video, the first YouTuber flipped the pages gently and wrote in the notebook. She also typed on a keyboard halfway through the video. Near the end, the second YouTuber wrote on a whiteboard using a whiteboard marker, creating a distinctive screeching sound and erased everything at the end of the video. I’ve selected ASMR as a different medium to represent the items in my bag because the sounds in the video are all relatable to global listeners as “what is appropriate for all in the context of the ever more critical factors of local diversity and global connectedness” (The New London Group, p. 61). Similar to listening to a podcast where listeners submerge in the detailed story or information spoken to them through various devices. ASMR is primarily done through videos and as a listening file as well. The main difference is that ASMR is more for a calming and soothing effect. Listeners can select sounds and activities that make them feel comfortable for them to relax or able to work along with the sound as a new form of white noise. Instead of creating a video about what is in my bag, I think this is a nice change for listeners to hear familiar sounds done in a soothing way that might inflict some positive memories while they are working.

To make it easier for readers to figure out the title of the piece, I’ve purposely selected a movie that gives a distinct clue about the film: a rat emoji. First, I’ve identified that it is a film using a camera and a film roll emoji, then using the rat emoji as a keyword, or key image, readers should easily relate to the movie Ratatouille even if they have not seen the movie before. I think it is safe to make this assumption because there are not that many films about a rat. Given the fact that the emoji story contained repetitive use of the chef emoji, it is safe to say that this is a film about a rat that wants to be a chef, thus concluding that it is Ratatouille. I began creating an emoji storyline from the title just because it is the simplest way to go for this particular movie. I’ve also selected this movie because of the iconic rat and chef combination.

I thought this task was particularly interesting because many of my students that are novice readers tend to become more selective in what they want to read. Some who are already tired of the regular picture books, but are not ready or strong enough to read a full-text novel, have now begun to show interest in graphic novels. Graphic novels have gain popularity because it offers many benefits to struggling readers or even strong readers that are not interested in reading. As Kress mentioned that, “the fact that these occur as constellations—medium of book with mode of writing and now medium of screen with mode of image—means that the effect has been experienced in an amplified form” (2005). Relating his notion that the medium of books with modes of writing to now with mode of images is creating a different sense of experience for readers that struggle to understand what they’re reading based on text alone. Emerging learners that are learning to identify elements of a story based on the text and punctuations like question marks, exclamation marks, italic fonts, etc., struggled to understand the meaning and expressions of the story from text alone. With the enhanced element of added visuals beside texts, the students could make the connections of what is happening in the story by looking at the drawing of the expression on characters’ faces or observing the background setting more closely to infer what is happening in the story. With the quick evolution of computational text like magazines and books around the world, “What is happening is a readjustment of the ratio between text and image in the various forms of print” (Bolter, 2001, p.48), making the reading experience more transparent and easier for readers to relate and understand what the author is trying to convey. 

As Kress pointed out in one section of the reading that the outdated textbooks were heavily text-focused. With modern teaching practices, we focus more on bringing the students out to experience hands-on learning experience because we learned that including various senses and experiences into learning, on top of all the required reading, greatly help student’s understanding of the material. So, to answer Kress’ question, “And can I say that depiction is a better means of dealing with much in the world than writing or speech could be?” (Kress, 2005), yes, I have to agree that a well-balanced text and image, especially emojis that people of all ages could easily understand, helps all learners to better understand what is presented to them.

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

Kress (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22.

I’ve decided to create a Twine activity based on my experiences working at a private school for students with learning disabilities. Check out my twine on What to do if your student refuses to write.

I have to admit that my Twine was not created as smoothly as I’d like it to be. I wanted to bring in my experiences working with young children who have difficulties expressing themselves and I realized that may not be the right topic for a Twine activity, but I think it has a strong tie to this week’s focus.

A couple of years ago when I first started teaching, one of my first jobs was working in a private school for students with learning disabilities. Not all of the students at that school were diagnosed with learning disabilities. Some students were either suspected and are undergoing assessments, some students were in between schools due to behaviour issues, and some were there because of safety or family issues. What I quickly learned was that writing and sharing thoughts and connections were a huge problem among these students. Aside from the obvious challenges such as some students with visible physical mobility issues that required full-time one-on-one support, or some students with lower capabilities and were unable to speak or express themselves cohesively. The students that were able to hold a pencil but unwilling to write usually shared some common traits. They have reasons leading to the refusal of expressing themselves through the traditional paper and pencil method, we just needed to understand why and how to proceed with the learning without pencils.

The great thing about private schools is that it caps the total amount of students in a class and almost every student is able to have their own educational assistant. This way, learning can be modified to meet each student’s needs.

Meanwhile, with the advancement of technology, these young learners could learn to express themselves through different venue and media. As Bolter noted, “In using these facilities, the writer is thinking and writing in terms of verbal units or topics, whose meaning transcends their constitu­ent word” (2001, p.29). By allowing these students to express themselves using iPads, voice-to-text tools, and various mediums to express themselves, they were able to create wonderful presentations and stories that were previously unheard of by parents and caretakers. They were given the opportunity to speak on their behalf and to express themselves freely because they were no longer restricted to using a pencil. Leaving the traditional learning method behind, “we can rethink information beyond material constraints” (Wesch, 2008) and allow for more room for ways of expression to making connections.

I had a wonderful year of great opportunities to learn from these students and these experiences were unforgettable. I do think we can apply these learning methods to our mainstream classrooms; however, the lack of funding for public schools dampers opportunity of many who are unable to afford to experience various technologies for creative expression. Some schools were fortunate enough to receive funding for the year but do not guarantee the students will be able to continue using those technology year after year.

References

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.

Wesch, M. (2008, October 12). Information R/evolution [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM&feature=emb_logo

Handwritten entry:

I cannot remember how many years it has been since I’ve written this much in a single day. I believe I’ve relied on typing ever since graduating from high school. I have always typed, rather than handwriting, through my undergrad years and various work environments because it was much faster, more convenient, and a required skill. I found this task to be quite challenging because I can’t help but feel a bit ashamed to have such messy printing. I know that I am a hypocrite since I teach grade 1/2s and have always emphasized and encouraged my students to print neatly, and often corrected and commented on their printing. Even more of a hypocrite when I’ve asked my students NOT to cross out misspelt words and have a good habit of using an eraser, whereas I am just crossing out my mistakes here, thus contradicting myself.

A 500 words passage is not a lot when we type it out, but handwriting 500 words passage was more work than I remember. I had to take multiple breaks in between to shake my hand and relax my grip before continuing. I feel that I owe my students an apology as I often ask them to “elaborate more” or “add more details in your writing,” etc. Now I am reminded just how much work it takes to print a full page of writing.

Listening to Harris describe the amount of work it took to hand-drawn customed prints, I can’t imagine the amount of time it took to produce one good quality scribes between year 400 – 1400 (Harris, 2018). The amount of patience and no room for errors compared to my messy scribbles with crossed-out spelling mistakes. My handwriting is no match to the skilful transcribers back in the day as different era requires different skillsets.

Different era requires different mediums to meet the needs of the production at the time. Even with the development of the printed press, it was still timeconsuming labour to produce quality prints. As Innis pointed out that in 1538, France was able to print at the speed of 20-200 leaves per hour. This later progressed to the development of printing 250-1000 copies an hour between 1814-1853 and reaching 12, 000 copies per hour (Innis, 2007). This process is difficult to fathom as nowadays we rely on a button to print, not knowing that printing press came a long way from individual carved letters organized to form a word, to now done digitally.

Even though I admire the beauty and process of printmaking, I still prefer typing on a keyboard. Printmaking and handwriting are both time consuming and allowing minimal room for errors. The only time I will be handwriting is when I need to demonstrate my work on a whiteboard for teaching purposes.

References

Harris, B. (HOST). (2018, February 5). The Printed Book: Opening the Floodgates of Knowledge [Audio podcast episode]. How It Began: A History of The Modern World. Retrieved from https://howitbegan.com/episodes/the-printed-book/

Innis, H. (2007) Empire and Communications. Toronto: Dundurn Press.

My 5 minute, unscripted speech to text:

So I have to talk for 5 minutes this is going to be very difficult if I have to think about what to talk about I might explain what I am doing with my grace one and two students in school I’m so for the past 2 weeks we are learning about different family structures family adoption foster care moving into where we are learning now of culture and Heritage and I found a really interesting and relating to last week’s video is that well for children to understand the concept friends their class we’re all from different part of the world is too hard for them to comprehend so I put together a world map where I can put their name on the location on the map and they can see a visually of how far those countries are from Canada and then we moved into you know we noticed that there is a high percentage of students. Their grandparents were from mainland China Taiwan Hong Kong and Macau so the main language there are Chinese and Mandarin speakers so we ended up moving to comparing English to Mandarin which we also talked about masculine and feminine so in English you know what an object or person is by how we see it for example he or the car you know what usually use more masculine word to describe it where as a mandarin Deo he she it it’s all the same. Tell the difference is when you write it down that you can see from the character that what is masculine what is feminine and we actually have words for when it’s animal or non-human and yeah that was really interesting and also we were counting numbers when I’m teaching math and Western countries we count from one sound from one hand starting a 1/2 the other hand Pinky and we reach 10 how every many Asian countries they have very specific finger gesture for the number six or seven or nine depends and some places only need one hand to count from 1 to 10 so we thought that was very interesting. Everyone else in the class and looking back in my own background while I was originally from Taiwan and both my parents be caca which is one of the top three languages spoken on in Taiwan and even within the hakka language they are too mean. And my mother speaks the oceanic which sounded more like she’s singing and she told me that Fisherman’s used to sing a higher pitch to convey what they need where is my dad’s folk the mainland Africa assertive and masculine because you don’t need to raise your voice over the water and the wind so yeah that’s quite interesting so I shared that with my class they thought it was very interesting because most of them are born in Canada and they learn English and when they speak with their family at home they try to learn their family language but they speak quite little and this is also a growing concern for families everywhere that there go to the movie theatre

My two cents about speech to text based on what was recorded:

Reading back on my speech, I noticed that it is very informal compared to written English. When I write, I try my best to write following the English grammar rules. Depending on the purpose and the target audience, I can choose to write more formally or write casually for fun. Looking back at my speech, I can tell that verbal English tend to be less formal with more fillers with words like, “um, so, and,” etc. I’ve gone back and turned the part of speech that was recorded incorrectly to the colour red to make it easier to see how many mistakes recorded. It is easy to see the common mistakes made repeatedly. Words like “um, and, however, whereas” were almost all recorded incorrectly. I think these words are incorrect and replaced with another vocabulary that is used more commonly in the area of similar-sounding speech.

If this speech is scripted and prepped ahead of time, the number of fillers would minimize making this speech-to-text more successful in its translation. When we prepare our own script and being able to read as we go, we will be able to read more fluently and with clearer enunciation. This is what makes oral storytelling such an incredible skill. Storytellers need to have a good memory of what they need to convey and with proper sequence, by memory, while being able to do so full of emotions to convince the audience. Reading monotone to a computer is just not the same experience as reading a book to another person.

If I am to introduce what is in my everyday bag, it would be quite boring. I keep my everyday bag to only carrying minimal items, so if I have to show it, it would only be a set of keys, a cellphone, and a wallet. Instead, I’ve put together a group of daily items that I use on hours on end every day since I am currently working from home. I shall call this “What’s in my office bag?” instead.

The items shown in the picture are things I use to teach online, and all of them connect with text or technology, or both. I am currently teaching grades 1/2 online, so I am constantly thinking of ways to keep my students engaged. Learning online is already out of the ordinary for young children, so I try my best to motivate and keep them involved as much as possible. The main item in the picture is the laptop. The laptop is my connection and communication to the outside community. It also functions as my online classroom, my teaching material, and many more. I spend an enormous amount of time on my laptop each day to prepare materials for my class. I would create my own activities, worksheets, and spend many hours looking over students’ work. Using my laptop, I can grade my students’ work while giving them constructive feedback where necessary. During our video sessions, we “see” and interact with each other. At the same time, we communicate, share read aloud, and “play” games together. Unfortunately, my work doesn’t end right at 3 pm. This brings me to my next item.

My cellphone is my communication and research tool. My cellphone serves the purpose of both leisure and working tool. I use it to scroll and communicate through my own social media platforms. I also use it to search for teaching inspirations and responding to parent emails and troubleshooting for parents late at night. Work aside, my cellphone is also a documentation tool. I take lots of pictures of interesting things spotted during my nature walks that inspires future lessons. The two cats in the picture are my cats who are also great writing inspiration for my students. By the way, the orange cat is named Chewy and the black and white cat is named Bob. Together, they are Chew-Bob-Cats … get it?

One of the non-technological tools is the pink llama notebook. This notebook is to keep track of what students say during class. It could be notes of what they are interested in, what they wonder, the proposals for future learning and activities they’d like to do. This notebook also serves the purpose of date stamping and documenting what we’ve done up to this point. 

Another non-technological tool is whiteboard and markers. These are the tools I use in class when I teach literacy and math. I use various marker colours to enhance the learning experience, as younger children need more colourful visuals. Text is not limited to just alphabetical words. I often draw images and symbols on this whiteboard to help students understand the material better. 

Final two items are glasses and earbuds. During this pandemic, my partner and I have to learn to co-exist alongside two cats while working in a small apartment. Earbuds are essential when comes to minimizing noise when we’re working simultaneously. This little tool saves my partner’s sanity by not having to hear children yell on occasion when he’s getting his work done. The reading glasses serve as another essential tool for me to be able to function properly when I need to use my laptop and cellphone. The glasses allow me to read and write!

Looking back 15-25 years ago, this “Office Bag” would be a giant, bulky bag! The computers back then were big and heavy. Cellphones, on the other hand, were actually smaller than today. If an archaeologist digs up this bag in the near future, there is no doubt in mind that these were office items.

This “Office Bag” does not intrude my privacy, but it may be saving you from boredom. I spend many hours over the week, Monday-Sunday, using the items in the picture. Aside from these great technological inventions, there is really nothing much to show other than my cats! Anyways, this is my “What’s in my office bag?” post.