Carys Moffatt

ePortfolio and Blog

Month: January 2025

Do Re Mi, A B C!

January 24, 2025 / / 4 Comments

Anyone else know that song that goes ‘do, re, mi, A, B, C, 1 2 3?’ Well, that’s all I could think of this week as I was learning the ASL alphabet. I must have learned the ASL alphabet forever ago because some of the signs came naturally and I could guess most of them as I worked through an online video to help me learn sections with quizzes at the end.

Photo of sign for 'P' in ASL.Some of the signs were a bit more difficult to learn, and were admittedly the ones that I was never able to learn all those years ago when I tried to learn the alphabet for fun. But this video I watched really helped me with the differences on the letters, like how you put your thumb between your ring and pinky finger for ‘M’ because it has three points for the bottom of the letter, and how you move your thumb in by one to have two points for the letter ‘N.’ It even helped me learn ‘P,’ which I’d always found most difficult, but is really only an upside-sown ‘K.’

A photo of the sign for 'G.'

This week I also tried expanding my online sources by looking through apps on my phone. That’s when I came across ASL Bloom, a free app with in-app purchases to help you learn ASL. In the app some of the first lessons you’ll see are the alphabet, holidays, numbers, and family basics. There are almost forty different categories to learn signs for free, and you have the option to pay for flashcards and quizzes. I clicked on the alphabet category and got to working on all the signs. I noticed that one of the signs, ‘G,’ was different from any other video or picture I had come across. In sign language, many people have different ways of doing certain signs. I did some research on ASL variation and found out that there are a few main reasons why there is variation, including how ASL signs evolve over time, regional variation (like slang or the different ways to say ‘to’),  and international influence from other sign languages. With my ‘G’ sign, both ways are correct, and it is up to the user (myself, or other people) to decide which we want to use.

Learning the alphabet was a lot of fun, and my dorm-mates often make fun of me for going through the alphabet really fast during conversations. With the alphabet, any beginner can communicate by spelling out words before learning the specific sign for them. Now that I can do the ASL alphabet, I’ve decided to expand my knowledge to numbers. See you all next week for my progress!

Technology: Good or Bad?

January 24, 2025 / / 4 Comments

Technology has been incorporated into all of our daily lives. I myself reach for my phone as soon as I wake up and close my laptop right before I fall asleep.  Even in the school setting, it’s almost impossible to go to post-secondary school without a laptop or tablet. So how do we justify using our devices throughout our day? I read an article about how technology influences our lives and found that most of the categories connected to myself and the people around me.

There are many positive aspects to technology. We use it for school, work, communication, personal wellness, and entertainment. I use technology mostly for school and entertainment. When I’m pursuing my studies, I use Microsoft Word to type out my papers and assignments, and use my laptop to scroll through our school website to check in with my classes. I also have three online classes this year, two of them requiring Zoom meetings to attend class. Sometimes I find it difficult to keep up with my daily tasks, so I use apps to help me stay organized. The one app that helps me stay on track is Me+. Me+ is an app that helps you schedule your day and reminds you when you should be completing your tasks. I downloaded the app in my senior year to help me balance school, work, and my extra-curricular activities. Now, I mostly use it to organize what homework I have and how long I should be spending on it.

A picture of my average weekly screentime at 8 hours.

Even though technology can be used for wellness and entertainment, it can also be a huge distraction, especially when trying to study for classes or when facing deadlines. I find myself getting distracted by TikTok and Snapchat. Mindlessly scrolling for hours lowers attention spans and has people becoming addicted to scrolling. I asked many of my friends and neighbors if they watched movies or television shows anymore and most of them said that they can’t pay attention to one thing long enough and they’ll often scroll on their phone while watching a show. It’s especially noticeable in children nowadays. They get into preschool and elementary school and are more distracted and reluctant to learn if there isn’t a screen involved.

An image of my Me+ app and one of my daily checklists.

I often find myself struggling to balance my social and professional lives through technology. It’s so easy to have multiple tabs open, and go from writing an essay due the next day to putting on a YouTube video or movie. How I try to balance it is through planning my next day the night before. In my Me+ app, I’ll write out all the tasks that need to be done and give them time intervals. Then, when I’m working on them, if I reach a milestone (like finishing a paragraph in an essay) I’ll take a small break to play one of my mini-games on my phone or scroll through one of my social media’s for a few minutes, before going back to being productive. As technology advances, people’s attention spans get shorter, and more people become addicted. I’ve started to combat my own addiction by taking these small breaks in between productivity in order to actually get work done without procrastinating. I’ll even do something productive when I go between apps. If I want to switch from TikTok to Snapchat, I’ll tidy my room first, then if I want to play one of my games, I’ll clean my bathroom, and the cycle continues until I’ve achieved all my tasks for the day. Technology can be good and bad, it’s just up to us to decide how we’ll let it influence us.

Learning a New Skill: ASL

January 18, 2025 / / 4 Comments

When I found out I got to learn a new skill as a project for this class I was stoked! So many possibilities came to mind; learning to paint, relearning sheet music for my flute, or even learning how to speak another language. Well, I did choose to learn another language, but not one that I can speak.

I decided to do American Sign Language (ASL) for my learning project. I always thought that sign language would be super fun to learn. Even when I was younger, the idea of knowing something like ASL, that majority of people don’t understand, seemed really cool and mysterious. As I got into high-school, and started to integrate myself into the teaching and assisting world, I figured out just how useful it could be.

I started to get interested in Inclusive work at around 16 years-old. I started doing Inclusive summer camps working with around thirty children, and also enrolled in my high-school’s Functionally Integrated Program (FIP), where I worked with teens in my school with learning and physical disabilities. One of the teens in FIP used his own form of ‘sign language’ to communicate, often doing his own random signs. So, he often worked on learning actual ASL. With the few times I worked on his spreadsheets with him, I started learning some of the alphabet, but mostly just the letters of my own name; C-A-R-Y-S.

Now that I’m pursing a career working with children, in a field where I will likely come across many Inclusive students, I decided that learning ASL won’t only be a fun project for me, but also a very useful skill for the future children who come into my classroom who only know how to communicate  through ASL. As I go through this journey, I plan to teach myself as I would a child to a new language, starting with the alphabet, then numbers, greetings, days of the week, and so on until I can get to forming full sentences and hopefully becoming even partially fluent in the language. As I was deciding to pursue this topic, I watched a few videos that could help me on the first few things I would be learning, and am already looking at apps on my phone to help me along the way. I am so exited to learn this new skill and share my progress with all of you!

All about Carys!

January 17, 2025 / / 2 Comments

Hello! My name is Carys and I am a first year education student going in for Elementary Education. I’m from Weyburn, Saskatchewan and have a background in Inclusive childcare as well as coaching cheerleading for 2-12 year-olds! I am not very experienced with educational technology – this is my first tech class I’ve participated in!

Image of woman making a blog in a coffee shop.

I have never blogged before so coming in I was nervous on how I would go about blogging in general. Would it feel tedious? Would I remember to go in and do it every week? Would I figure out how to navigate my website? I very quickly cast my doubts aside when I looked at the EDTC300 chat on Discord! Even before we started creating our blogs, just reading everyone’s introduction posts and helping each other out with questions in class really reassured me that even if I come across a problem, I can go to my classmates and get help from them!

It even inspired me to look through articles and videos on how to be a good blogger. I mostly focused on how to keep up a blog schedule as going in, this will likely be my biggest struggle on keeping up with my work and not falling behind. One goal I’m going to focus on is making and completing a task list. This is as simple as going into my notes app and writing all the things I have to do and categorizing them by when they have to be done. Already, it has helped me get a few days ahead in some of my classes and personal daily tasks.

I am so excited to embark on this journey with all of you!

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