Kristina's EC&I 833 Learning

 My Journey in Distance and Online Learning      My experience with distance learning goes back to my high school years in the early to mid '90's.  I decided to take a few of my grade 10, 11, and 12 courses via correspondence instead of in-person in the classroom.  The choice of assignments to complete and the flexibility in time of completion is what drew me to taking courses via correspondence.  The classes were not online, rather the material was sent via Canada Post.  In university for both my undergrad degrees, I did not take any classes online, all were face-to-face in the classroom.      About 4 years ago I started using Seesaw in my classroom.  My purpose for using it was so that students could create a digital portfolio.  I am not a fan of the pizza box portfolio and found binders to be a bit cumbersome during the student-led conference so I wanted something that required very little storage space and more engaging for students to add their work to.  I cannot remember

Productivity: Multi-tasking vs Single-tasking I have never really liked the term multi-tasking.  I have never been able to do multiple things at one time successfully.  I often listen to audio books as I am cleaning, sometimes when I am planning, and mostly when I am cross-stitching but I often tune out the audio book and focus on the actual job that I am working on, causing me to miss large chunks of the story.  I can have multiple activities on the go, but I focus on each one at a time.  So basically, switching from one activity to the next and back again, but not really doing two or more things at once.  On the flip-side, single-tasking is hard for me to do too.  I often will have my phone near by when I am planning, writing a paper, or working on a project just so that I can take breaks.  I will go on social media, text people, and generally look up answers to random questions that pop into my mind. In the video for today's post, James Hamblin talks about how easy it is to get

Technology for Entertainment vs Technology for Education I read Neil Postman's  The Disappearance of Childhood for a course I took for my education degree about 12 years ago.  Other than reading that book and reading a few articles that either reference Postman or have been written by him, I have not really dug into his theories of education too deeply.  From what I gather in the quote for our blog responses this week: "...We know that "Sesame Street" encourages children to love school only if school is like "Sesame Street." Which is to say, we now know that "Sesame Street" undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents", is that using television programs for educational purposes may not have been something that he would have supported. I did read on http://neilpostman.org/ that his book Amusing Ourselves to Death  is "a screed against television and how it turns everything into banal entertainment - including education a

 This week I decided to play around on the Logo Interpreter and see how far I could get in the manual .  I made it as far as Exercise 11 and could likely have gone farther.  In general, I find that technology can be a frustration for me especially if it does not work the way: 1. I think it should, or 2. the way I want it to.  This particular activity had me over come some of that thinking.  If I was not successful the first time I tried an exercise, I tried again until I got it.  When I finally got the program correct and had the turtle do the right thing, I cheered like my favourite hockey team won the Stanley Cup (they didn't).  My biggest take away from this activity was not necessarily from the coding piece, but more about the persistence I needed to keep trying when I didn't get the program correct the first time.  I think an activity like this could be beneficial for school-aged children for a variety of reasons.  One, spacial thinking or visualization.  I found that I w