Voice to Text Task 3

References

Does Language Shape the Way We Think? Task 2

Figure 1

A Typical Hundred Chart

Figure 2

A Bottom-Up Hundred Chart

What’s In Your Bag? Task 1

Welcome! I’m so excited to be starting this journey into ETEC 540 with you. My name is Natalie Keizer, and I live in northern BC where I teach grades one and two. This is my ninth MET course.

I’ve taken a picture of the contents of my daily backpack, which moves between sitting by my desk at home and by my desk at school

What is your daily need for the items in your bag?

Items in this bag can be categorized into two groups, things I use every day and things I carry just in case I need them.

Things that come out of the bag every day:

  1. Macbook and charger (missing from photo) – I use this every day in teaching; starting in the morning, student attendance is sent to the office electronically.  Throughout the day, student learning is enhanced with images and videos facilitated by using my Macbook.  Lesson planning and resources are found and stored here as well.
  2. iPad and Apple Pencil – I also use these every day.  I take notes and present lessons with my iPad.
  3. UFLI Manual – University of Flordia Literacy Institute.  This resource is used daily to deliver research-based systematic phonics instruction to my students. I pack it back and forth between home and school for planning and prepping purposes.  I wish there was a digital version of the manual, as it is relatively bulky.
  4. Daily Canadian Math Worksheets – This work gets completed and checked daily.  Students are learning to review the previous day’s work and learn from any errors they made.

Things that I carry in case I need them:

  1. Advil – I teach grades one and two; I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.
  2. Halls Relief Cherry Flavour Lozenges – Teachers never know when they will lose their voice, feel a coughing fit coming on, or start coming down with the inevitable cold and flu.
  3. External Hard Drive – I keep a backup of all my resources. Better safe than sorry.
  4. Rechargeable Hand Warmers – Teaching in northern BC, we go outside for recess and lunch as long as it is not colder than -20°C, so I need a way to stay warm. Missing from my bag are my toque, mitts and snow pants, which I keep at school.
  5. Equate Ultra Soft Lens Wipes – Although I have glasses, I wear my contacts at school. I keep these in my bag for my students who have glasses.

*There is also the drawing that a student gave me the other day, which is an outlier and doesn’t really fit into either of these categories.

How might these items be considered “texts” and what do they say about you, the places you inhabit, the cultures with which you engage, and/or the activities you take up?

Many of the items in my bag can be considered “text.”  The UFLI manual is literally text but also creates future readers by helping them create meaning out of the weird symbols that we call graphemes, written symbols that represent a sound. Text is only possible because we have readers; someone needs to interpret it to give it meaning. The students’ work and the drawing from the student show how text develops through the years and how students progress as they interact with text.  If you were to compare student work from September to January, you would see how students become more confident with text after repeated exposure.  The items in my bag speak to my role as an educator.  Anyone who explored my MacBook or iPad would see my dedication to teaching young students and facilitating their engagement with text.

Thinking about the title of the course, what are the “text technologies” in your bag, if any? What do these items say about how you engage with language and communication?

My Macbook and iPad are two key “text technologies” in my bag. They not only allow me to view the text of others to get ideas about teaching, but they also allow me to create my own text in the form of lesson plans, notes, TTOC plans, emails to colleagues and parents, and more.  In my view, these tools have significantly improved my language and communication skills.

Text technologies like Grammarly and ChatGPT, accessed on the devices in my bag, have been particularly helpful in refining the messages I want to communicate. Applications such as email and Seesaw have revolutionized how I communicate with parents. When I reflect on my own elementary school experience, my parents had very little contact with my teachers. In contrast, today, if a student is going to be absent, parents can email me directly, and I can quickly send them the work their child will miss. I also maintain a class website and send out a weekly newsletter using Canvas to keep parents informed about what’s happening in class.

While some educators argue that this level of communication blurs the work-life boundary and leads to expectations of constant availability, I strive to keep communication with parents open. I believe it’s important to be as helpful as possible, especially when parents are actively invested in their child’s learning.

The lack of notebooks or writing utensils also shows my reliance on digital technologies for text communication.  I was in a meeting the other day, and someone asked,  You didn’t bring a pencil?” almost in shock, and they were ready to provide me with paper and pencil. I had to explain that I would write it all down on my iPad.

What do the items in your bag say about the literacies you have?

The items in my bag show that I have strong digital and technical literacy skills and also point toward strong educational literacy.  I use the devices in my bag to facilitate my teaching and foster communication and engagement with students and their families.

How does the narrative of the (private) contents of your bag compare with the narrative produced by the image you have of yourself or the image you outwardly project?

I think the contents of my bag align well with the image I project outwardly. The other teachers at my school tease me for always being the go-to person when they have technology issues.  Last month, there was a security scare at the school, and when the principal was telling everyone at a meeting, she mentioned the VPN and then said, “I don’t know what that is.”  I piped up and told them, and they jokingly rolled their eyes and said, “Of course, Natalie knows that.”

I also pride myself on being prepared and organized; I think the items in my bag reflect that.  Although thinking about it more, maybe I should add a notebook and pen, just in case someone else needs it.

What would this same bag have looked like, say, 15 or 25 years ago?

Fifteen years ago, my bag would have looked very different.  At that time, I was not teaching and had three children under the age of five.  My bag would have been filled with diapers, formula, changes of clothes, wipes and snacks.

Twenty-five years ago, I was in the final year of my education degree at Acadia University. My bag would have contained a much heavier laptop—a bulky IBM Thinkpad. I would also have had an ethernet cable and a telephone cable to connect to the internet. In addition, there would have been binders, pens, and textbooks.

How do you imagine an archeologist aiming to understand this temporal period might view the contents of your bag many years in the future?

This is a tricky question because how an archaeologist views the contents of my bag would depend mainly on what the future holds. Have communication needs led to the development of tools so advanced that our current technologies have become obsolete? Would the laptop and tablet still be operational, or would all that text be lost forever?

Another question is whether we are still reading text in the same way. With the rapid advancement of AI and potential changes in literacy practices, it’s hard to know for sure. If reading remains the same, the student work and the UFLI manual would offer some insight into how we taught our youth. However, it would only provide part of the picture, as instructional methods vary widely from one classroom to the next.