Hello all! Greetings from Vancouver!

Hi everyone! My name is Kim and this is my second MET course so far. I am an elementary teacher in the Vancouver School District. As a technology teacher, I see the intertwining concepts of text and technology on a daily basis. These ideas, indeed seem to be amplified with new and modern technologies being introduced into the classroom. At this point, our school has recognized these changing landscapes and we are redirecting our vision toward a more collaborative, cross-curricular and potentially, a multi-grade system. With the hopes of integrating the technology piece into all aspects of our students’ learning, I look forward to learning more about how educators can better navigate around it all!

For my image, I have taken a screen shot of a block coding program called “Scratch.” As mentioned in our module, the words “text” and “technology” share the common theme of “creation” or “generation.” I see the programming language as a new and burgeoning form of creation. Storytelling, game creation, and web design for example, require students to use “grammatically correct sentences” or lines of code in order to clearly communicate their creation to their “readers”.

Like the way oral cultures greeted writing with skepticism, the language of coding can potentially face the same reticence from text cultures. From my perspective, however, I believe that this door between the two worlds has been cracked open for years already and our younger students are on the verge of entering.