For this assignment, I decided to redesign the assignment by firstly, arranging the items in the order in which I pack them when going to work each day. This was important for me because it gives more context into what I find essential and why I pack the items in the way that I do.

Secondly, I decided to play a sort of word association game but, in this case, more of an item or picture association. I showed what each item in my bag reminds me of, particularly in the context of what I would imagine someone who had any given item to look like.

The New London Group (1996) discuss particularly how multi-modal meaning has become and with this assignment and the item association I did, help to ascribe more meaning to the products I carry with me to work each day. This task and thinking of redesigning it made me think about the many ways, as educators, we have to be flexible in our delivery of content and instruction, “the process of shaping emergent meaning involves re-presentation and recontextualization” (New London Group, 1996, p. 75). For many learners in classrooms, the traditional way of instruction is not suitable. In my classroom in particular, I try to incorporate a variety of teaching methods in terms of delivering instruction (digital presentations by me, reading, researching, etc.) as well as multiple modes of assessment to gauge student learning. If as educators, we are expecting students to be prepared for an ever-changing world, we must start in the classroom, by allowing them the ability to learn in a variety of different formats and contexts.

References

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review 66 (1), 60-92.

• Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas, or a combination of all of them?

For my Emoji story, I chose a novel that some of my students are reading for novel study this term in my classroom. This is a middle grade novel and it is one I used for novel study for the first time last year because I really enjoyed it. I found the process of completing the emoji story a bit challenging because there were some words that did not have an emoji for them. I decided to stick only to my iPhone’s emoji keyboard as that is the one I use the most and wanted to be authentic in this process but I found this challenging when trying to complete certain parts. I think I stuck to the basics of the plot of the book as opposed to any specifics because it became very difficult to find images that worked.

• Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?

I started with the title of the book as that made the most logical sense to me but I was surprised that I needed two emojis as the title of the book is one word and I thought there would be an emoji for that word but there was not in my iPhone emoji catalogue. Kress argues that, “unlike words, depictions are full of meaning; they are always specific… on the one hand there is a finite stock of words — vague, general, nearly empty of meaning; on the other hand there is an infinitely large potential of depictions — precise, specific, and full of meaning (2005, p. 15-16). Although there is an infinite potential for depictions (or emoji’s in this case), I was limited to the depictions available in my iPhone which made the process increasingly difficult.

• Did you choose the work based on how easy it would be to visualize?

Initially, I had chosen a book because I do not have much time for watching television or movies right now and I also thought that a middle-grade novel, written in verse, would be a bit easier for me to summarize using emoji’s but, I was quickly proven wrong. I also feel that I may have “cheated” or taken an easy way when I utilized the checkmark emoji, the x emoji, and the equal emoji to drive my story. There are many benefits to images in story, Bolter states that, “The use of images for cultural communication is nothing new. Even before the invention of the printing press, the Middle Ages had developed a sophisticated iconography that served in the place of words for a largely illiterate audience” (2001, p. 54). The difference between many Middle Ages cultures and today is that there is no set of rules or norms when it comes to the use of these types of images or emojis. Emojis are up for interpretation; what I view as important and how my brain chose to showcase a therapist in my emoji book summary may be different for another.

 

References

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

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

For this specific task, I chose to do Option 1 as I have found that in my daily life, I do not physically write as much anymore. I do write a daily sentence reflection on my day everyday and I do physically write out the things we are doing in my day plan as a teacher but other than that, everything has been digitized for me. Even my planner message and daily schedule are digitized and on projected display for students as they walk in to my classroom. Just the other day, I asked students to do their good copy of a poster project printed and not typed and some were aghast that I was asking this so I have been noticing the lack of printing in my own life and my class’s life as well.

I decided to reflect on a day this past week in my life that I felt a bit overwhelmed and thought it would be a good practice to write out my feelings. Below is my stream of consciousness and thoughts.

Do you normally write by hand or type? Did you find this task difficult or easy? Explain.

As mentioned above, their are a few times a day where I write by hand but most often I type everything of real significance and importance. Especially in a program like MET, everything is completed online so I rarely have an opportunity to write by hand and in an effort to reduce paper waste, going digital has also been helpful in that effort.

I actually found that I enjoyed writing my reflection/diary entry but I think it was because it was also a type of cathartic experience as I did have a difficult day and I found that writing physically helped to clear my mind. I will say that writing by hand consistently would probably frustrate me because I do not like how my printing becomes worse once I write for longer.

What did you do when you made a mistake or wanted to change your writing? How did you edit your work? Did you choice of media play a part in how you edited your work?

When I made a mistake or wanted to change my writing, I decided to embrace it. I crossed out a couple of words on the page and some letters I was able to change if it was a minor mistake. I was writing with my favourite uni-ball gel pen and my writing experience was very smooth and enjoyable but that meant I could not erase any work and would need to cross out or use a white-out for corrections.

What do you feel is the most significant difference between writing by hand and using mechanized forms of writing? Which do you prefer and why?

I would say that I prefer writing on a computer. I am grateful for the neatness and organization of it all but there are certain times when I need to write by hand for my own personal idiosyncrasies. I did this more in in-person university classes because when I take notes by hand I find I memorize the information better than if typing it on a computer so I would often leave my laptop at home for classes but now, in teaching, and trying to reduce unnecessary waste, I limit my time writing by hand.