An Educational Technology Journal--Or Is It?

  This post will be the eighth—and final!—in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the seven others you can find them by clicking on the three vertical lines in the left-hand corner of your screen, and then clicking the page entitled Field Experience Reflections, or you can just click this link . In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

  In my first post about my final project, which you can read here , I lament the difficulty of condensing everything I learned into one blog post and that difficulty has followed me into this week’s post. I also remark that part of why I think I’m having trouble writing was because I wasn’t sure how to make it a reflection post and not a “this is what I did post.” While there’s a certain truth to that for this week as well, I am finding that the difficulty arises primarily due to the fact that I have a paltry week to wrap up this project. For those of you who did not read the first post, or just need a refresher, my final project involves me learning, or attempting to learn, two programming languages, R and Python, and contemplating how, if at all, I might use this in my future classroom. 

  This post will be the sixth in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the five others you can find them by clicking on the three vertical lines in the left-hand corner of your screen, and then clicking the page entitled Field Experience Reflections, or you can just click this link . In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

 This post will be the fourth in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the three others you can find them by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the left-hand corner of your screen and then clicking the page entitled “Field Experience Reflections,” or you can just click this link . In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

          This post will be the third in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the two others you can find them by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the left-hand corner of your screen and then clicking on the page entitled “Field Experience Reflections,” or you can just click this link . In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment. EDIT AS OF 12/8/2020: Thanks to my professor, I have realized that I mention a picture of a cirrus cloud, but never actually put in the picture! My apologies and that mistake has now been fixed.

         For those of you following this blog, then you (probably) know that last night I posted my first of many field experience reflections, which you can read here . In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  due to the pandemic, I have not been able to complete any in person and/or synchronous observation hours. In place of that, my professor has kindly allowed me, and anyone else in the class, to use the presentations of various guests as field experience. I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in the presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

        On this dark and stormy day, I will attempt to somehow condense what I learned during the first week of working on my final project into a blog post. I am, perhaps, making a mountain out of a mole hill here, but the part of my brain that is normally in charge of writing is giving me the blue screen of death so, you know, I’m not that off base.   [ 1 ] Part of why I am having a hard time writing this post, I think, is because I’m not sure how to make this post into a reflection rather than a mere “this is how I did the thing” post. However, I’ve been putting off writing this for longer than I should have—apologies to my professor—so I’m just going to write and hope for the best. With that being said, please read on to find out exactly what this mysterious final project is entails.             My final project for this course focuses on something that I have always thought I would lea...

         Over the last three or so weeks my classmates have created, edited, tested, and perfected a series of learning activities centered around the four computational thinking (CT) concepts: abstraction, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and pattern recognition. You can find the post detailing the fraught journey I went through to create my own activities here . Part of the process included giving feedback to, and then testing out a.k.a. playtesting, our classmates’ creations. For a variety of reasons, I have given feedback to everyone but have yet to playtest and post about any of them. The lucky winner   [ 1 ] of my extended purview and review is a learning activity that focuses on algorithmic thinking by Monique! 

         At the start of this computational thinking (CT) learning activity assignment, I’ll admit that I thought four for each concept   [ 1 ] was a bit overkill. At the time, I felt like I could hardly come up with one activity let alone four for each concept with the additional caveat that two are plugged and two are unplugged. Now that the process is over,   [ 2 ] while I can’t say I enjoyed the assignment, I do think it forced me to better understand each concept. The following summarization of how I completed the assignment will be short and sweet because, unlike Turtle Blocks, there isn’t an easy way to either show my progress or explain it since a lot was done in my head or internet research which isn’t easy to screen shot. When I first embarked on this harrowing journey, I thought I could go at it by myself, with perhaps a few questions   [ 3 ] sent my professor’s way. Alas, after some indefinite time of brainstorming with ...

Imagine, there I was trying to think of a less complex activity that taught students about the computational thinking skill of abstraction (a longer, in-depth post about that process soon to follow), when I stumbled upon a really awesome game! 

  Whew boy, this will be either be a ridiculously long post or I’ll split it up into different posts because I did a lot (or at least it felt like I did!) and I took plenty of screenshots. Whether or not I’ll be kind to my readers by not making them go through scrolling hell to read of my Turtle Blocks exploits really depends on how much energy I have left in me. EDIT AS OF 9/28 AT 9 PM: I am sorry my loyal readers, my energy is failing thereby forcing you to endure the perpetual scrolling.

          Getting feedback from others helps me learn in ways I never could have by myself because the feedback provides me with different perspectives which then enables me to look at the assignment/problem from a new view. 

Computational Thinking             Just to let you, the reader, know, this is going to be a short post. Even though I have long been interested in computational thinking and computer science writ large, I have not actually researched or learned anything about said topics.