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 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.

        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...

            This post is partially the result of me realizing that I have not yet written about my final journey with the footnotes which has been a slightly frustrating but ultimately victorious venture; however, this post is also partially the result of me procrastinating writing up my reflection on my final project.   [ 1 ]             A long time ago, aka two months ago, I thought it would be a great idea to write all my unnecessary yet (in my opinion) generally entertaining thoughts in a foot note so that the body of my post would not become an unreadable mess. However, I can’t just transfer over the footnotes that I made in Microsoft Word to Blogger because, as my professor explained, what Microsoft does behind the scenes to get footnotes to work has to be done manually and explicitly by me first in Blogger. I began to write of this phenomenon here , and even though ...

Hello, I am once again blogging about my foray into the world of data and data visualization. This time, however, I will mostly be discussing the work I am doing rather than committing half of my post to a bit of a rant about a particularly biased set of data I found on Kaggle. If you haven’t read and that post and are now curious, here it is . 

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! 

This is just a short post to both share some new information I found.   EDIT AS OF 9/30 3:38 PM: I went through various trial and errors trying to get the linked articles’ advice to work, but I wasn’t successful. I eventually asked my professor for help and he linked me to this article which you should probably use if you are having similar problems with footnotes that I was. I am tempted to just delete this post but I figured it’s good evidence of working through a technological issue.

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