TLDR:

My emoji story shares the plot of a tv series I watched while at home during the pandemic. In my opinion the title of the show is very easy to guess which is why I started with the title. The title provides insight into the plot of the story which makes it easier to read. I don’t often watch tv or movies so for me this was a difficult task to consider the plot of the show. I actually had to search episode recaps to make sure I got the order of the story correct; it has been a few months since I watched it. While writing my emoji story I wanted to use emojis to represent words like for (④) however I found that it clouded the story and make it more difficult to understand. That is what lead me to using emoji for the main ideas. When searching for emojis I found there was either multiple options such as money or no options at all (such as an emoji to represent jail). This forced me to try and think outside the box to consider how to get the main idea across. I chose to use apple emoji’s because that is what I am more familiar with and I would be able to search for them with greater ease than other services. There could be other emoji’s out there that aren’t apple that may have made it easier.

I selected this show because some of the emoji’s used are not very common in tv shows which would make it easier on the reader, such as . Some challenges that I faced was with the main character. The main character has multiple names that are used interchangeably. This was a challenge because it may cause the reader confusion that I used and to represent the same person. In my mind, I understand, but you tell me, was this confusing in my story?

Finally, any opinions on…

This week I spend many hours learning how to make a digital game using Twine. I throughly enjoyed the triumphs and challenges of developing this game that features the digestive system.

When I began creating this game I was under the impression this would take an hour tops, but I was wrong! As I learned more about Twine I wanted to add more and more features to the game. I quickly found myself hours into development and needing to wrap up. I enjoyed learning something new that was completely out of my comfort zone. I felt a healthy learning experience that I often put my students into. I am looking forward to spending time developing this game further in the summer as I hope to give it to my students when we learn about the digestive system. I got the idea for the game from a student assignment. When we learn the structures, functions, chemical and mechanical digestion students create a project. One of the options for students is to write a creative story from the perspective of a piece of food being eaten. This gave me the idea to provide students with an experience of going through the digestive system and learning along the way.

I hope you enjoy, The Digestive System. 

Great thanks for Adam Hammond for the tutorials!

Images are retrieved from Servier

Servier Medical Art by Servier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Hammond, A. (n.d). A total beginning’s guide to twine 2.1. Retrieved from http://www.adamhammond.com/twineguide/

Part 1: Manual Script

Writing by hand is not something I do normally. I would say the purpose I have for writing by hand would be giving feedback to students on paper assignments and making notes on a whiteboard/post its. The past few months of teaching online has drastically reduced the amount of handwriting I do and has limited to the post it notes for reminders. I spend ~90% of my time typing to communicate or make notes for myself. The lack of practice I have with handwriting make this task very difficult for me. A quarter way through my reflection I found my hand starting to cramp, a sense of “oh no, I have a long way to go” came over me.

The part that I found easy about this task was writing 500 words. I had to google how many pages 500 words was and it told me 8 minutes it about the length of time it takes to write and is around one page. At first, I thought I would struggle with writing for that length of time but the words just flowed out of me. What I found challenging about this task was my lack of stamina. Like I mentioned, my hand got sore pretty quickly and I have to give me hand a break before I was able to type this reflection.

Another challenge I faced was with editing. I had this weird sensation to “go back” and “delete” what I had written. I am so used to being able to back space that my brain automatically went in that direction. When I made my first mistake I paused and had to think about what to do. I few techniques I used was to not edit it, re-write over it and edit after. For this reflection I chose to use a pen, which limited my ability to make edits. It didn’t even occur to me that a pencil could be an option as a writing utensil. Since I handwrite so rarely I felt out of practice in terms of preparation. I had to get a pad of paper out of my closet that hadn’t been touched in months!

The most significant difference between writing by hand and a mechanized form of writing such as typing is my ability to edit my work and thinking about spelling. Spelling is something I have never felt strong at and I continue to work on. When I was writing by hand I found myself thinking about my spelling more than I would when I type and that resulted in fewer spelling errors I believe. Often when I type I get my ideas out and then I go back and make corrections as needed. I prefer typing because I find my fingers work quicker than my hand and I am able to get my ideas on the page quicker. This task reminded me of a podcast I listened to about Graphology (Ward, 2019). This podcast with Sylvia Kessler discusses handwriting and she shares how handwriting is a skill that you need to practice if you want to be good at it. Totally worth a listen! I have always felt like my handwriting is kind of sloppy however I haven’t done anything about it to make it smoother.

Overall, I enjoyed writing for 8 minutes as a time to reflect on my experience with teaching remotely, it was a relaxing and very meditative experience for me.

Part 2: Potato Stamps

I loved having an excuse to do something creative with potato’s, even for a short period of time. At first, I thought this activity would be easy, and the task itself is an easy thing to accomplish but when I really got into it I realized that it was much more difficult than I had expected. The most challenging part was the printing onto the paper. As soon as I removed the stamp to see the result I wanted to “undo” it so I could improve it, but that isn’t an option, so I just had to go with it. When trying to print a second time as similar as possible was an even greater challenge due to the paint, pressure and angle of the stamp.

Creating the stamps was a long process as I made a mistake with the letter E by doing it backwards. I did not think about reversing the stamp so it would read left to right on the page when printed. In total it took me 20 minutes to make the stamps and print onto the page. It is crazy to think how long it would take to print a sentence or a paragraph if two words took 10 minutes to print on the page.

The letters that I used were T-E-A-C-H. This word forced me to think about how to print the E and the C so they were correct on the page, but I did not have to worry about capital T, A or H. If I chose to use lower case letters, I think it would have been more challenging to reproduce. While reproducing, the imperfections of the stamps were made visible. Initially when I made the stamp it looked consistent across, however when I pressed the stamp with paint, I noticed that my stamp was not level which caused sections of the letter to not imprint.

The mechanization of writing was a very lengthy process compared to writing by hand as I did in the first part of this task. What I find interesting is that when I completed the handwritten piece I felt as though typing was so much easier, but when I had to print out the letters myself, I preferred writing by hand. The printing press has greatly developed to allow for computers to type and printers to print, to which I am very thankful!

While I created my potato stamps I created a time-lapse that can be seen here: Potato Stamp Time-Lapse

Reference

Ward, A. (July 19, 2019). Graphology (handwriting/forgery) with Sylvia Kessler. Retrieved from https://www.alieward.com/ologies/graphology

Road Trip to California

I’m going to be telling a story about a road trip that my boyfriend and I took my boyfriend’s name is Dave and we took a trip to California two years ago we spent 14 days on the road and this is the story of how it started so we live in Winnipeg Manitoba we packed up our SUV with all of the gear that we’d need to take a road trip down to California and back we spent the trip camping 95% of the time I would say so we have our tent or cooler are sleeping gear now we need to Camp so I am someone who’s very prepared and fortunately my boyfriend likes just do things very spur-of-the-moment make things work together by Jacqueline causes some frustration which we learn to workout while we’re on this trip we left around midnight session we are time to leave at the beginning of roach for my opinion. What’s the border of the American Border about 2 a.m. We drove through a few States taking turns going back in a fall day it was amazing to stop off there so we travelled around Yellowstone National Park looking at the Salt Springs we saw some Buffalo before we had our first camp set up our tent is attached to the back I see you be so we sat at 10 to talk to her SUV and we take out everything from the SUV and we sleep inside the car with my older gear there so we’ve spent our first night there and second day weeks for the rest of Yellowstone National Park looking at the hot springs and the geysers there which are absolutely incredible I definitely suggest taking a look at the beautiful colours of the hot springs and the height in which the geysers go up into the sky is unbelievable after we’re finished going on Yellowstone we continued our road trip towards California so we drove through Wyoming and Nevada tell early the next day we arrived in California where we went to Yosemite National Park has two kids that live in the Prairies is quite amazing. The mountains and driving through the mountains of Yosemite to travel around Yosemite National Park for the day we headed out of the park until he found somewhere to camp. Dinah’s we decide we were just going to start driving we find somewhere to sleep at a campground somewhere so we didn’t plan ahead in terms of our Campground bookings to find somewhere just outside of Yosemite National Park Suite packed up in the night and next day was my favourite day we visited Sequoia National Park the whole purpose of this trip was to see the sequoia trees as I am absolutely in love with these trees so there we saw at General and General Grant General Sherman is the largest river by volume in the world and General Grant is a third largest tree in the world to exploit Sequoia National absolute dream come true for me after we are finished out in the woods we travel to Santa Monica to see the ocean which way is my boyfriend Dave’s favourite part was seeing at the ocean exploring the Santa Monica Pier going around on the scooters that they have which was super fun and checking out the beaches there and we started making our way at the house so heading up to Northern California going through Colorado not Colorado. Org i’m Oregon and then into Washington we are heading up to Vancouver where my boyfriend is originally from and he has some family there so we drove from California all the way up to California where we spent a few days visiting with his family in California Rosary in Vancouver once we’re finished in Vancouver we made the 24 hours back to Manitoba so we like to drive long stretches in quick about the time so we take turns going at back and forth driving through the night until we made it back to Winnipeg Manitoba and back to central Canada manitoba I hope you enjoyed my story

Reflection

You know how some people don’t like to hear themselves talk…I kind of felt that way when I read myself speaking. It was a bizarre experience as I don’t often use a voice-to-text app, especially for 5 minutes at a time. Overall, I enjoyed testing out speachnotes and exploring the text after sharing my story.

How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?

The first thing I noticed about this oral story transcription is the lack of punctuation. The text does not include periods, commas, apostrophes, or exclamation marks. The lack of punctuation makes it very difficult to read as the entire text has only one start and one end. At one point there was a period that was added in the middle of my “sentence”, I am not sure how it got there, it must have thought I said “period” which I did not intentionally say. Secondly, the lack of grammar in this text makes it difficult to effectively communicate the thoughts and message. What stood out to me was the singular vs. plural forms of nouns that were mistaken. Although the noun was the same, the context of the text was confusing as it changed endings. This text lacked capitalization for the most part as there was no periods to break up sentences. The only capitalization that was used was for some places, but not all.

What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?

This text makes me laugh trying to remember what I was even saying in my story to figure out what is “wrong” with it. When reading I can tell that it isn’t right because it does not make sense at some parts, however for the most part I think it got a lot right. The main issues with the text me some words were replaced. At one point I wanted the word “which” but instead it says “Jacqueline”. Other times it split up one word into two, such as when I wanted it to say “weird” but instead it says “we are”. Many times, a word would be replaced that sounded very similar, for example “exploit” instead of “explore”. These small changes do make a big difference in the story, especially when it comes to exploring Yosemite National Park and exploiting it.

I was surprised to see that this text got many of the locations correct and included capitalization for the most part, other than “manitoba” at the end. I think the text got the main idea right, overall the main idea of this story is the road trip my boyfriend and I took to California from Winnipeg and the places we visited along the way. I would say a rough estimate of 80% of the words are correct which allows for the main ideas and thoughts to be expressed some-what effectively.

What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?

The most common mistake in this text is replacing words that sound similar but were not intended. Another common mistake was replacing words that were not similar at all. For example, at one point I was trying to describe visiting Sequoia National Park to see the trees and the text says “General Grant is the largest river by volume” instead of “tree.” This one-word replacement changes the story completely and is confusing to the reader. Now, it is completely possible that I just accidentally said river instead of tree, however we will never know because that is one of the downsides of oral storytelling, there is no record to know what was said.

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“General Sherman is the largest river by volume in the world and General Grant is a third largest tree in the world”

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What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?

If this story had been scripted, I believe the reader would have been able to get a clearer more efficient message. Reading this text makes me feel like my thoughts were a little all over the place and were not as linear as they could have been. I was focused on sharing a story that took 5 minutes. In the beginning I felt like I was including more detail, but as time went on began to share the story more quickly as time moved quicker than I had anticipated. A script would have resulted in a shorter message that included the key points that a reader would need to make to get the main message across. Without a script I found myself adding ideas that may not be relevant, such as the personality of myself compared to my boyfriend. This did not come up in my story as I thought it would throughout so the message at the beginning was not necessary.

In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling? 

My oral story was made visible with this speech-to-text website that allowed me to visualize how my story was told. I noticed that my oral story was not as precise as a written version of this story would have been. In my oral story I tended to include details that were not relevant to the story or were confusing for the “listener”. Written story telling allows the writer to carefully craft the message that they would like to share and ensure accuracy (Gnanadesikan, 2011). The beauty of oral storytelling is that the story may be different each time and therefore unique as the message will be different than when it is first said and will rely on the memory of the storyteller to keep accuracy.  With oral storytelling, if someone does not know the story, then they cannot hear it. For example, if someone wanted to hear a story, and they asked everyone they knew to share the story, but no one did, then the story would not be heard. Whereas with written storytelling, the story could be searched in a book, or now online (Aboud, 2014). My oral story did not reach a large audience, in fact, no one heard my story, therefore no one would be able to share if. If I did share it with an audience, it would take longer to travel and reach a smaller audience. My oral story is now written and posted online for a larger audience to “hear” (Gnanadesikan, 2011).

References

Aboud, Abe. (2014, September 8). Walter Ong – oral cultures and early writing [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/uvF30zFImuo

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internetLinks to an external site. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).

 

What is in my bag? This is a really great question! These days I hardly ever use my purse as leaving the house is a very rare occasion. When I do leave the house I often leave my bag in the car as the only thing I truly need is my cell phone to which I use to pay for items and my car keys to physically get from point A to point B. Since my last day of teaching at school, March 20^th, I have only left the house to get groceries or purchase items for small house projects that I do to help pass the time. Picking up my purse to examine the items inside was an exciting event and some items were a true mystery until I got started.

Items

Number	Description
1	Kate Spade purse
2	Keys for my classroom
3	Car and house key
4	Apple iPhone with pink case
5	Ray Ban sunglasses in case
6	Kate Spade pink wallet
7	Sway water bottle
8	Container of Lysol wipes
9	She has her mother’s laugh by Carl Zimmer
10	Writing utensils – pen, marker, highlighter
11	Buxom Lip Gloss
12	Hair scrunchie
13	Protein bar
14	Hand lotion
15	Sage Peppermint headache roller
16	Lipstick – pink
17	Hair clip
18	Bath and Body Works hand sanitizer
19	Kleenex tissues

Discussion

During the current pandemic to do not have a daily need for most of these items. The only item in my purse that I use daily is my cell phone, however its home isn’t in my purse as it is used throughout the day. For a moment I am going to pretend that I leave the house on a daily basis and go to work. The essentials items I would require throughout a regular day would be my purse, to carry my items, my car keys to get myself from point A to point B, my classroom keys, and my wallet encase I needed to make a purchase. Listing my essential items in my purse really puts into perspective how much “stuff” I have that isn’t used daily. There are items in my purse that are “just in case” items such as hand lotion, peppermint oil, protein bar, hair scrunchie, hand sanitizer, tissue, sunglasses and a water bottle. These items have a purpose when I require them but are not used daily through out a regular day. However, right now is not a regular day, therefore I have added an item that is now essential when I leave the house, a container of Lysol wipes. When I do leave the house, especially in the early days of Covid I would wipe does items that were purchased at the store and brought into house, just in case.

The items in my purse begin to tell the story of who I am based on what I carry with me. These objects provide meaning to the “reader” about the places I live, culture and activities I like to do. My car keys would say I live in a place that requires a vehicle to get around. Living on the outskirts of Winnipeg makes travelling without a car very difficult and many of my family members live outside of the city. Items that provide insight into my personal values include the book, a content heavy book about DNA by Carl Zimmer, and name brand items I purchase including the Kate Spade purse and Apple cell phone case. She has her mother’s laugh tells the reader of this images that I enjoy reading and biology. Those who know me, know that I am a biology teacher and I love to read content related books. This book was actual referred to me by my general practitioner at my last visit. It is a great recommendation!

The “text technologies” I keep in my bag when I leave the house is my cell phone. My cell phone is a communication tool that I use daily. My cell phone says that I, like millions of people in this world that own a cell phone. The fact that there are more cell phones in this World than people on this planet is mind blowing! (Turner, 2020) I use my cell phone for both professional and pleasure. I engage with professional language when using my cell phone for work such as sending emails, using apps to communicate with students and communicate with a professional learning network on social media. While working at home I find I use my personal device for work more often that I used to. I am able to engage professionally with colleagues and students at any time. This is both a pro and a con. It is great that I can support student whenever they need help, however I spend more time on my personal device and working later into the evenings that pre-pandemic. Not only do I use my cell phone to communicate professional but also socially. Communicating socially with others includes informal language that changes overtime. My students keep me up to date with the cool lingo that is popular in our community and online. Thanks kiddos!

The items in my purse gives the reader insight into my ability to read and write. Literacies are more than just reading and writing, as demonstrated with my book selecting. I have foundational literacy as I read text in my book that I carry around with me and writing utensils that I use. A memorable quote from this book is from Carl Zimmer, he says “Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.” My bag tells people that I have digital literacy as I engage with people online using my cell phone. I could argue that the container of Lysol wipes would illustrate a news literacy to recognize the current pandemic that has shaken our world with an ability to evaluate the information provided by the news in order to make decisions on how to move forward with my personal decisions.

“Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.”
― Carl Zimmer

When I decided to share the contents of my purse online, I was initially very excited. There hasn’t been a lot going on these past few weeks and an excuse to do anything brought me joy. However, as I write this post, I find the vulnerability of sharing this image of my bag. The items in my bag may give some people the impression that I am “high maintenance” with my designer purse, ray-ban sunglasses, name brand products. Despite the vulnerability I felt it was important for me to share a personal insight into my life with my classmates in the hopes that it may built personal connections with my peers. Looking at an image of myself that I outwardly project I would not consider myself to be “high maintenance.” Although I enjoy buying “nice things” that are more expensive than a non-name brand version I prefer to share myself in a more natural light. I wonder, what do people think I look like when they see my purse compared to my actual self. In my mind, I like to think the image of myself that I outwardly project is my pure happiness of being among the trees, but I don’t think my personal bag matches this image.

This task has allowed me to dive deep into the contents of my pursue and explore how it connects to who I am and the text technologies within it. I am looking forward to sharing more in ETEC 540 and developing my story as a writer in Text Technologies.

Until next time!