Zoe Armstrong – MET

Al Carmichael – What’s in the bag? (Task #1) 

Al and I both have a coaching perspective. I discussed (more briefly) in my Task 1 that in having a volleyball line up card in my bag, it shows that I am physically literate enough to teach physical skills to others. Al went into more detail about the coaching items in his bag as he had many more than I did however, each of the items listed resonated with me. Most specifically the pile of marking that he takes with him for out of town tournaments as he says, we are “not paid to be a coach,” but we are paid to teach and with teaching, comes marking!

Al shared that he typically doesn’t bring a bag around with him. This is where we differ. When teaching and coaching, I have a minimum of 3 bags going. For some reason, I can’t seem to figure out how to go with less. What I really appreciated about how Al approached this activity was that he really leaned into his identity as a coach. He says, “you will find me in the gymnasium a lot, and I’m clearly a coach.” These words ring true to me as well. I got into teaching because I knew I could coach. The relationships built in the gymnasium are some of my favorite. The connections created through sport allow for a different set of skills to be acquired than in the classroom. In a sense sport can be thought of as a text technology where we often rely on oral teachings. Al describes that the technologies, though more traditional, in his bag, create a narrative about him that he is proud of. I too am proud of my identity as a coach. It brings me great joy to share the love of movement, activity and sport with young people.

Lastly, on my Task 1 activity, some of the feedback I received was that I should dive deeper into a single, more specific aspect or perspective rather than brushing across multiple. Al did a great job at leaning into this assignment from the coaching perspective. Though he is evidently also a teacher and student, among many other hats he wears I’m sure, it really gave me a good sense of how much he values the coaching part of teaching. As a younger teacher I am always wanting to have my foot in every pond. Leaning into coaching, leaning into assessment, leaning into inclusion, etc. My takeaway from Al is that it’s okay to dive deeper into one pond as we can’t be experts at everything. A school community needs individuals who specialize in all areas to create a whole school environment.

Jade Lee – Voice to Text (Task #3)

Jade chose to use Speechnotes for this task and I chose to use Google Docs’ speech-to-text function. Both of us had problems. Certain words weren’t picked up properly. Perhaps it was a pronunciation issue, perhaps as Jade mentioned, it was more an issue of connection with the microphones on the devices we chose. Though we both encountered problems, we shared that we wanted to present the original copy of what we had created as it was a more realistic result of what a student using this type of accommodation might produce.

One of the biggest differences I noted between my product and Jade’s was that hers had punctuation. I had never heard of Speechnotes but after checking out the website, one of the first things mentioned, is how to add punctuation to your notes. This is a helpful reminder as the function on Google Docs comes with no built-in explanation, leading to my one, very aggressive, run-on sentence. The seamless ability to add in punctuation afforded Jade the grammatical correctness of capital letters and proper punctuation though she felt as though some of the message was lost when the technology was unable to pick up some of the words she was speaking. Using Google Docs speech-to-text in comparison, I didn’t feel my message was lost however the reader would have had to decipher the end of a sentence on there own, perhaps when a new idea was brought up.

Another point that Jade discussed during this task that there was an opportunity to reflect on what difficulties students using these adaptations might encounter. The educational world often pushes for students who struggle with written work to try these speech to text functions but from what we have encountered through this task, the products created from these tools need heavy review, not only for punctuation and grammar but for overall understanding as well.

Emily MacDougall – Potato Printing (Task #4)

Emily and I both chose to pursue the potato printing activity for this task and it sounds like we had a very similar journey. Emily also did not realize that one would need to carve their letters the opposite direction in order to achieve the desired outcome. Luckily, she did realize this prior to the actual stamping of each of the letters, I on the otherhand did not! Emily had pretty easy letters to adjust and she even mentioned she felt lucky to have not selected a word with more difficult letters that could not be reversed, for example a G. Of course, my word, bagel, was a little trickier! I noted that Melissa Santo also began by carving the letters without thinking they would need to be reversed. Luckily she was able to save it before it got to the printing step. It brought me some peace that so many of us made the same mistake in attempting this almost foreign technology.

Emily and I  chose to describe our potato printing journey in similar ways, providing the viewer with both pictures and a description of our process. Emily used more description alongside each of her photos as though she was reflecting on the process with each one. It created a little but more flow within the story of the task. I broke mine up into a reflection section and a photo section which continues to communicate the message but perhaps in a more chunked fashion. Both ways I can see being appealing to different types of viewers.

We chose to create our prints in different ways. Emily used one potato per letter where as I created my entire word on a single potato. Both, I believe, have their advantages and disadvantages. In using a different potato for each letter, I would imagine the additional space allowed for the letters to be bigger and perhaps less risk for error. This style would likely be more similar to setting up a letter press, in that you’d need to select and place each individual letter. On the other hand having all the letters on a single potato means the spacing between letters remains consistent and you need not worry that one print will look drastically different than the other. It seems though we completed the assignment in a different way, we were both able to reflect and appreciate the invention of the printing press and where we have come to today in regards to print.

Jordon Lovig – Manual Scripts (Task #4)

Jordon’s reflection for the the manual scripts actually triggered more of a connection to my task 3 reflection which was thee voice-to-text task. Jordon’s reflection made me think of a spectrum:

When doing speech-to-text, especially the way it was intended for task 3 (unscripted and more casual), it was so easy for me to just speak my mind, not really worrying about what was coming out. Jordon’s reflection on creating his hand written text, he describes it to be a place where he creates less formal works such as poems or letters. Both of us however can agree that when typing, it often produces a more edited, revised and formal piece of text. Jordon describes writing by hand to be a place to work through thoughts which I agree with and would argue that speaking those thoughts also acts as a nice place to reflect and work through things.

As Jordon mentions, one of the privileges of writing by hand is that the writer is tasked with making corrections on the fly. In a sense, it continues to sit in a different place on the spectrum than speaking and typing as both those methods of creation typically involve editing the piece after or in the case of oral sharing, sometimes not at all. The challenge Jordon brings up about hand fatigue speaks to me as I choose to take notes on my iPad by hand. When I am really getting into it, I often find my hand tires from writing things down and it needs a little break. This is probably a challenge I should think about more for my students when asking them to complete an assignment by hand.

Tamara Jabbour – An Emoji Story (Task #6)

Tamara and I approached this task similarly. We both decided to start with the title as it is either habit or seemed like the most natural approach to us. As I was reading my colleagues attempts on this task, I found it so interesting that almost all of us were very committed to hoping that we could describe our narratives in a way that would allow the viewer to guess them correctly. Though this was not at all part of our mark, we were all fairly committed to ensuring the visual could be interpreted accurately versus just using what emojis made the most sense to us in describing the film/show/book. Both Tamara and I did not selectively choose our movies based on how easy they would be to describe, something we both wish we would have done.

It was really interesting to see the way Tamara leaned heavily into the Bolter (2001) reading from week 6. As someone who did not reference Bolter in this task, I appreciated the ways she was able to use direct quotes within her own personal reflection. They were integrated seamlessly into her own words and supported her thoughts and observations. Providing so many references gave her reflection a more academic tone which varied from mine which was more familiar as I also chose to lean into my experience as a teacher.

Tamara is also one of the few students in our section who chose to use Google Sites as opposed to the UBC Blog (WordPress). I thought the navigation on her Google Site was a lot easier and more user-friendly compared to exploring my colleagues entries on WordPress. That being said, the Google Site is navigated more like a website where as the blog has the chronological feature that makes it more “blog-like.” Initially, I had created a Google Site to present my ETEC 540 assignments but then soon realized the commenting feature on WordPress was much easier to find and use. For the purpose of connecting with classmates, I decided to try out WordPress though it was less familiar and less user-friendly for me. Tamara included a Padlet as a way for classmates to make comments which I thought was a creative way to get around the lack of commenting function. Both sites prove to serve the purpose of this course in different ways.

Simin Rupa – Golden Record Curation Quiz Data (Task #9)

Simin’s experienced for this task differed quite a bit from my own. For most of this task, I was overwhelmed. I wasn’t sure where to start or what conclusions I could really draw from the data. Simin on the other hand was able to provide a really fantastic commentary on the nodes and edges present in the images. She was able to discuss the aspect of communities, something that I stayed away from for my lack of understanding.

Quantitative data was something that came up for both Simin and I. We were both decided that the graphs represented only quantitative data and there was no real way to decipher the why behind the choices we had made for songs using only the data. Simin and I were both able to agree that to some extent, null choices were present in the data through a lack of selection. For Simin, in not matching her desired criteria, a song would be omitted. Again, we can not assume nor understand through the data, the reason why our fellow classmates also did not select certain songs but quantitatively there is some evidence present.

My favorite part of Simin’s task here however was the metaphor she used to compare the graphs of data to a city, she describes the way we travel into a city to seek connection just as the songs that were selected more often appeared within the center of the graph as they were more connected to our classmates through their selection. As someone who struggled with interpreting and finding a lot of meaning in this data, the city analogy made a lot of sense to me and allowed me the affordance of reflecting further on this task through a different lens.