An Educational Technology Journal--Or Is It?

  This post will be the seventh in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the six 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 fifth in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the four 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.

            Two weeks ago, my class began an exploration of the wild frontier of raw datasets with the goal of ultimately finding ways to visually represent said data.   [ 1 ] I wrote about my experiences (read: battles) here and here . The second week gave us a specific tool to use, DataWrapper which was introduced to us by Dr. Tom Liam Lynch , as well as an added goal of processing the data in some way prior to said visualization. What this means is that my professor wanted us to (virtually) get our hands dirty and manipulate the raw data into new formats that helped give the data meaning. To further clarify, I don’t mean that we altered the data in any unethical way, just that any comparisons or functions completed using the data (e.g. percent changes, comparing data from one chart with data in another chart) would be done by us and not the original collector/creator of the dataset. Unbeknownst to me, I had already done ...

For our latest project we have to find a data set, explore the data set, pose and answer questions based on that data, create a visualization of said data, and finally post about the experience. Currently, I have yet to even find a dataset let alone do all the other tasks. The problem arises from a difficulty in finding data that involves a topic I care about, appears reliable, is updated enough where I feel that the data is still relevant, and is accessible enough to my humanities centered brain that I can formulate questions about it. Why are you writing a post then, I hear some of you ask, well read on and find out!

          Thank you to all of my ever so patient loyal readers who have waited with bated breath for the second part of my experience with educational subreddits narrative!   [ 1 ] As I stated in part 1 , I had planned on using this second week to focus on two larger subreddits, r/teaching and r/Teachers as well as a small discipline specific subreddit, r/ELAteachers.

         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! 

         Last week we were tasked to begin looking into educators’ use of social media platforms; Bret Staudt Willet, a Ph.D candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University, kicked off our assignment with a easily digestible and engaging presentation on his work in relation to this very topic. In preparation for Willet’s presentation we read an article that he co-wrote on identifying learning spaces within a teacher-focused Twitter hashtag. I was certainly surprised to learn how Twitter was repurposed as a community for educators. I was even more surprised, however, when Willet told my class that he has since started researching educators on the social media platform, Reddit . 

         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! 

          As much as I appreciate the various benefits technology has given us, whether that’s allowing people living on opposite sides of the country to communicate or provide greater accessibility for people with disabilities, I vastly prefer in-person interactions especially when it comes to learning. 

  Anything Else

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.

C ollaboration, Annotation, Feedback

  Dealing with Data and Data Visualization

Connected Learning

  I am breaking up my self-assessment into seven parts corresponding to the seven suggested categories; I will start by listing the category in bold and, following in my classmate, Brooke’s 1 , footsteps, I will list the suggested skills and whether I think this is a strength or a weakness. I’ll try my best to not make this too dry for all those involved.