Hey readers,

I have compiled some of my comments from various points in the semester (I could not find a lot of them, and it was difficult to remember which blog posts I had commented on, but alas, I did find a few to share). There is also a contribution from the EDTC 300 Community Discord server shared in the document.

Here it is.

Aside from what I have shared, and other comments on my peers’ blogs that I just could not find, most of the other contributions that I made to learning were more so done in-class, through consistent contributions in both breakout rooms and class discussions.

Thanks for reading,

Darian

Hey readers,

No blog post today! Instead, here is a video summarizing my learning in EDTC 300.

I hope you enjoy!

Hey readers,

For this week’s assigned blog post, we have been assigned to try out an AI tool that was discussed in last week’s class. I checked out a few of them, but the one I enjoyed the most was an AI app called Speechify.

It took me a while to figure out how to get extensions working on my web browser, as I am not super familiar with them, but I managed to get Speechify to work and had it read out a google document for me! My first impression of it was that it is indeed kind of creepy for AI to be able to generate the voices of random people throughout the world.

It’s like a dream come true to hear people like Mr. Beast or Snoop Dogg reading my writing!!

Just kidding.

But all jokes aside, having features like this is a fun novelty… and having options like this could also improve student engagement with the app. I personally hate the robotic Microsoft text-to-speech voices, so I could definitely see myself using this program in instances where I am too busy to read but want to listen to a more human-like voice… Does that make sense? I generally struggle to engage when it’s Microsoft Mary reading a chapter of my textbook to me.

And that’s where I see the usefulness of this app in contexts of education. It’s a fairly simple app that can be usefully applied to pretty much any grade-level, and could be used to help elementary students who may struggle with their reading or high school students who just don’t enjoy reading, all the way up to post-secondary students who may just be trying to multi-task. I also think for students who are visually impaired, having a more human-like voice reading to them is a lot more engaging than the previously mentioned Microsoft text-to-speech voices.

Another nice thing about Speechify is the customizable speed of the text-to-speech. You can slow it down or speed it up to whatever speed is most conducive to your learning.

As an English minor, I admit that I am kind of biased against the use of AI, and am overall worried about its uses in the context of education. With tools like Speechify, I find that my stance on AI kind of softens, as it serves a purpose of providing further accessibility to students who may struggle with reading.

Hey readers,

With the assigned topic of digital literacy for today’s post, I am reminded of last week’s activity in class where we spotted the troll. Prior to this activity, I was under the assumption that my digital literacy skills were good. In trying to “spot the trolls”, I performed very poorly and got nearly every guess wrong, which was an eye-opening experience. It is a fun activity to try on your own.

While I’m not on the internet as much as when I was as a teenager, the fact that I am going to be in a classroom teaching about digital literacy means that I still need to prioritize learning digital literacy for myself. For this week’s post, I spent a lot of time looking at resources aimed at improving digital literacy, and teaching digital literacy for this blog post, and am going to relate some of these to how they could be applied in secondary education.

Looking at the NTCE’s Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age Article, this article was incredibly interesting. It breaks down a definition of digital literacy into a lens that makes it applicable to curriculum. It makes a criteria of what successful participants in global society must be able to do (seen in the list below)

I found this criteria similar to outcomes; further down the website these outcomes are further broken down with “indicating” questions that help to answer whether these outcomes have been achieved or not. This is a really useful site, and as an educator I think it provides us with a good framework to better know the levels of digital literacy that exist within our classrooms.

We live in a highly sensationalized, and highly politicized world. With people on the internet more and more every day, we constantly see news. Identifying whether news is real or fake has become nearly impossible for the untrained eye, and I find this frustrating as a social studies teacher in training, who will have to navigate through all of the manipulation that takes place in the digital world. Knowing how to spot media manipulation is something that is becoming extremely important in this context. I spent time checking out the Data Society Article, which discussed this topic in depth. It provides the reader with ways that we can spot fake news/media manipulation which I find to be extremely relevant within a context of secondary social studies.

There is a lot to know behind why trolls exist online, what trolls are trying to achieve, and how to spot trolls and manipulators online. It is kind of overwhelming, but luckily in the digital world, there are near-infinite resources out there. The NTCE article was kind of my favourite resource that I looked at, as I enjoyed that it was looked at very specifically through a lens of curriculum/education that can be easily related to my practice as an educator.

Hello readers!

So, this week, I became a game developer!

We were assigned to try out some coding softwares which are designed to spark the interests of kids who may have passion for video games/coding/computer science. I chose to try out one called Hour of Code.

As a brief preface, I would like to note that I have very limited experience in writing code. I took Computer Science 20 six or seven years ago, and I sucked at writing code! In that class we used a program called Python to write code, and maybe it was just me, but I was not good at writing code and as a result I have always avoided activities relating to computer science ever since.

Hour of Code features many different “games” which the users choose from a library of options. The user is able to practice writing code for the game which they choose, essentially creating the game for themselves, customizing it, and then being able to share it for their friends to play. This ability to create and share creations with friends really reminded me of the SAMR Model which we discussed earlier in the course. Apps like Hour of Code are redefining the ways in which disciplines like computer science and coding are able to be taught and learned.

I spent an hour or so playing around with Hour of Code, and decided to make a Flappy Bird game, since it seemed simple enough. Below are some screenshots to illustrate the kinds of things that I was doing on Hour of Code.

Looking at the image above (for whatever reason the resolution has gone downhill, so my apologies), you can see that this is a much more simplistic piece of code than the creation that I finished with on the image below. I really enjoyed how the app eases the user into coding, and familiarizes you with some of the language. I feel like if I had access to software like this as a kid who loved to play video games, I would’ve probably seen coding as a much less daunting task when I tried it in high school.

The image above is the final piece of code that I designed. I chose to make a Flappy Santa game, since it’s almost Christmas time! If you would like to try it, here it is.

As always, thank you for reading! I hope you are all doing well as we enter this last stretch of this semester.