This week I experimented a little with coding! I knew a bit about what coding was, but can safely say that I’ve never had even the slightest experience with it so I was initially a little nervous going into this week. I hopped onto Code.org and looked for something that peaked my interest in their Hour of Code tutorial sections that is meant for beginners. There were tons of activities that I could tell were geared towards younger children, which I think is a great way to get them interested in learning about code. There was also a ton of different age and grade ranges! I selected one that featured a turtle named Tracy that was geared towards grades 6 and up.

The tutorial began with a short engaging video that told me a bit about what coding was. The speaker talked about code as a ‘language’ which I thought was a great analogy for students (and myself) to understand. I could tell this one was geared for a slightly older audience as the speaker mentions how Tracy moves along a Y axis and an X axis, which is a concept that would maybe be a bit too confusing for elementary aged students. The speaker says that we need to communicate with Tracy in a language that she understands, so adding capital letters or forgetting the parentheses around the numbers means that Tracy doesn’t understand what we are saying. Before I knew it I was trying to spell out the first letter in my name!

This was a bit of a tedious process, and also required me to use a lot of brain power to figure out which way I wanted Tracy to turn, as well as how far I wanted her to move! Luckily the program was super simple to use, and it would stop wherever my last command was, making it easier for me to see where I had left Tracy and where I wanted her to go next.

After 19 commands, Tracy finally drew an A. Next was block letters! This was even more tedious and took me 35 commands to get a proper form, and by the end my fingers were a little sore. Still, it was relatively straightforward and was pretty fun too!

The very last step was to fill in the my letter with a colour. Thankfully I had copied my code from before, so all I had to do was paste it and add the appropriate commands. I hit a road block though when I couldn’t figure out how to make the space in the letter not be coloured in. There wasn’t a tutorial on how to do so, and even though I’m sure I could have figured it out after awhile, I eventually gave up!

Still, I really enjoyed learning a bit about code, and doing it in this way was easy, fun and engaging. Code.org would be an amazing resource for anyone teaching code in the classroom! I think learning about code could be a really valuable thing for a lot of students. It’s something I never really learned about it, but I have a few friends who now do it as a profession. Learning about code would definitely appeal to certain types of students and could open up a new passion for them that they didn’t even consider as a possibility. I also think its great for students to gain a deeper level of understanding about how technology works as technology is something that is used around them every day and will be a huge part of their future.

This week I had a task to do some cyber sleuthing on a fellow classmate. Despite the fact that I’m sure everyone and their mother has googled someone at least once in their life, it felt a bit uncomfortable to be sleuthing someone who knew that’s what I was doing. Writing out what I did to try and sleuth feels even more uncomfortable! 

I started off my little experiment by googling my classmate’s name Caitlin Kendall. Nearly every single hit had something to do with Caitlyn and Kendall Jenner, so it was a bit of a bust. Just doing a cursory search, I couldn’t find Caitlin on Instagram, however I decided to take it to the next level. My goal was to find a mutual friend with Caitlin to see if I could search their Instagram followers to find Caitlin’s page. I find Instagram’s whole user interface a little frustrating to navigate, especially for sleuthing purposes, so I hopped on over to Facebook. I found Caitlin relatively easy on Facebook, but we didn’t have many mutual friends so I thought that might be the end of it. However, I noticed that Caitlin did have some friends who I then had a mutual friend with. I searched a few different people on Instagram, generally looking for people with less common names so that they might be easier to find, but many of them had private pages, meaning I couldn’t search through their followers or people they were following. Eventually I was able to find someone with a public Instagram page, and I was finally able to track down Caitlin’s Instagram, however she had it set to private so that was as far as it went in that regard. Still, the whole thing took me less than ten minutes from start to finish, and trust me when I say I felt like a total creep afterwards! 

The things I found out about Caitlin were mainly from her Blog and her Twitter (both of which I already had access too from our class), and a bit of info from Facebook. Her Facebook was mostly locked down, or maybe like me she just doesn’t post a ton on there. I found out Caitlin grew up in Carrot River SK, which she describes as a very small town (a quick Google search tells me Carrot River has only 1,000 residents!). From her Facebook I could see that she was previously employed as a Lifeguard at a pool near Carrot River. However now Caitlin lives in Regina and she recently graduated with her Bachelor of Arts with a major in Sociology and minors in Religious Studies and Indigenous Studies from the U of R. Caitlin did have some older posts on Facebook that I could see, and although there was nothing incriminating, I know what it feels like to have some of those older posts still lingering about. Overall I felt as though Caitlin had a more private social media presence, something I certainly don’t think is a bad thing! Her Twitter is active in creating a great digital identity for her, especially in regards to teaching and education! I certainly feel as though I would get along well with Caitlin and would trust her if I was in a position to hire her. 

One of things that stood out to me this week is the idea of having multiple online identities. To some, this may feel disingenuous, but for others, it makes sense. This article by Nicole Lee makes some great points in why it can be a great thing to have multiple online identities. “…multiple online identity phenomenon is indicative of how multifaceted human beings are. To have us each be confined to just a single account, or a single all-in-one persona, is confining.” It was a little eye opening to consider how many identities I have in my face to face life, so why does having multiple identities online feel as though I’m presenting a charade? My professional life itself is multifaceted. The way I interact and share with students in a class is different than how I chat with my colleagues. Never mind how drastically different those persona’s are when comparing my personal life to a professional setting. So it’s interesting to reflect on my social media presence on various social media platforms and how they differ in the same ways as my personal life. I decided to do a bit of cyber sleuthing on myself and found some old Pinterest pages, an old LinkedIn account, and even my Twitter from highschool that I was able to access and make private. I also came to the realization that our digital identity is not something that is out of our control. I can create the digital identity I would like to present to others. Controlling my digital identity and image does not necessarily make me disingenuous, but it is important to recognize that social media is only a fraction of peoples lives, and usually only what they want others to see.

I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a bit of time in a few different classrooms looking in from a professional standpoint rather than that of a student, and one thing I’ve learnt is that tough conversations are had nearly every day in the classroom. Sometimes they are uncomfortable, emotional, and eye-opening for all parties involved. Sometimes nothing changes at all. Still, they are always worth having. 

Times like these are tough for teachers. I’ve been watching and listening to the teachers in my personal life open up about the struggles they are encountering in how to talk about uncomfortable topics with their students. George Floyd’s death and the protests around it have now been highly politicized and have quickly turned polarizing. It is tough when there are feelings of restriction in what is appropriate to talk about. There will always be parents and members of the community who don’t agree with what children are taught and how they are taught it. So with that said, I do feel that every educator has a responsibility to model active citizenship and anti-oppressive education, whether it is in a physical space or an online space.

Writing this post itself has been an uncomfortable test. Personally, I find it challenging to try and define someone’s role when I have not worn those shoes myself. However, when we are silent in the face of injustice, we are complicit. If teachers are not talking about anti-oppressive education in an open and unbiased (as unbiased as possible, although we all know we carry bias’) way, then many students may never hear another viewpoint than what they were raised with. Teachers should encourage students to educate themselves so that they can think critically and make their own choices. I strongly believe that it is not a teachers job to tell a student what to think, but rather to teach them how to think.

It is understandable that some teachers do not want to talk about social justice issues online. What if the community becomes upset? What if their employer does not feel the same way? What if they say the wrong thing? These are all valid concerns. On the other hand, other damage can come from an educator staying silent. Others may be more afraid to speak out. Minority students and families could feel as though they are not supported or welcomed. Others may not be challenged in their thinking. I think it is up to educators to inform and educate, otherwise, whose job is it?