“So long, Farewell” – Post #11
How is it the end of the semester already?!?
It feels very surreal that I am at the very end of the very last semester of University. I am not even sure where this semester went! I work full-time as an assistant director at the daycare in the town I live in and for the better part of this semester I was also coaching Sr. Basketball. With school and basketball being over now… I am not sure what I will do with all my free time! It will definitely give me more time to learn ASL and dust off my guitar. The other idea I had for this learning project was to learn children’s songs to play for my little buddies at daycare! So, now I will use ASL to sing some and other my guitar! It’s going to be great. And I will also jump into spring cleaning!! – So much room for activities now!!
A summary of my ASL Learning Project blog posts:
Teaching myself ASL – Introduction to how I came to want to learn ASL.
ASL Bloom – a quick blog post about an app called ASL Bloom. Looking back this blog doesn’t have a lot of information in it and was glad for feedback how to amp up the posts in the future.
ASL via YouTube – Focused on one creator on YouTube and learned not to talk while signing. I added a video of the signs I knew at this point.
iMovie: Simple & Easy – This week I posted a video tutorial of how to use my fav app so far called Lingvano. This was a huge learning curve and the amount of hours I put into a 2min video was craziness. Dreading this post held back blogging progress for far too long because when I am afraid I will fail at something, I ignore it and then suffer later.
ASL ILU – Post #5 – I found a really cool website for this post on skill sharing where I found an instructor who laughs like Blippi. I learned the most valuable tips and tricks from him! His channel’s logo has the sign for I love you, which is why the title says “ILU”
More Able Lingo ASL – Post #6 – I knew I needed more from Michael, the MoreAbleLingo instructor. I was not disappointed. And I will continue to watch Michael’s videos even after this class is done.
Children’s Songs – Post #7 – I wanted to show off my new found ASL skills at work with the kiddos and they responded so well! The songs are pretty easy to learn and helps retain vocab words!!
A free ASL course online – Post #8 – Startasl.com is an amazing resource to learn from! It is set up similar to a university course so it has a familiar style for learning with outcomes, exams and lots of other fun features. The first course is free for an unlimited amount of time so you can take your time to decide if you want to subscribe to more!
Learn ASL app – Post #9 – This post was about an app that I thought I liked at first and then found that it was maybe not the best but if using it for beginning learners in the classroom, it might be quite useful!
TikTok made me do it – Post #10 – I stumbled upon my last post idea by accident as I was procrastinating farther but since my safari search history is primarily ASL sites lately, videos started popping up like crazy and I found that this is actually a platform that could be quite useful to my learning journey!
What this project taught me:
- Learning ASL – I could not have anticipated all the things I learned about ASL. I was unaware that the dead and hard of hearing people have a rich community of people proud to be in it. I just assumed they were people who spoke a different language in our community. I learned lots of different tips and tricks for how to speak with your hands, body and face!! And the most mind blowing one, that in retrospect is pretty obvious, you do not watch the people you are speaking to’s hands… you maintain eye contact!! Who knew?!?
- Organization – I have learned as well that if I had made some personal learning goals for myself I might have had a more pointed learning experience. I was more so focused on what resources I would be able to find because I did not assume I would have such ease with this part of the experience. There are a LOT of online resources that are rich with learning materials for all levels of learning! Who knew?!
- Blogging – I also learned how to make my blogs more aesthetically pleasing and that they are not scary! Formatting was a bit of a learning curve that is an ongoing process but I really am enjoying the process now. Knowing what info to hyperlink was daunting as I can blab on forever but enriching my posts with relevant hyperlinks took me a bit to understand.
- My age – Another odd thing I have learned was how stuck on how old I am, i seem to be! I never knew how often I related things to how old I am. I do not do this just while blogging but have caught myself doing so in real life as well! This is something I am going to have to start journaling or meditating on to see what the issue there is!
- Finally – I am not sure if I will continue to blog about my learning but I may. I have found that this is something I enjoy and now that I am not terrified to fail at it, it is a way to keep me accountable! And I have learned that I have little to no digital footprint and this is a great way to show skills and knowledge that might be relevant to future endeavours in my field!