Category: EDTC 300

How Have I Contributed to the Learning of Others

Over the course of this class we as students were expected to interact with each other and benefit each others learning. We could do this through commenting on other peoples blog posts, communicating in our class discord, or just finding ways to help each other over the course of the semester. For me the main way I found myself helping others was through blog comments and class discussions in our class.

I know this may not be the best way of helping with others learning, but I genuinely found our in class discussions to be some of the best help I could offer and receive. This was a way that i felt that us as classmates could really benefit from what each other had to say. I also found it very helpful for my own learning to hear what my classmates had to say on the things we were learning in class.

I also found the blog comments very helpful as well. I know for me that leaving a comment on someone else’s blog was very rewarding for me as it allowed me to connect with my classmates and appreciate what they had to say. I also found it great when I would receive comments as it gave me a sense of satisfaction knowing that someone read what I wrote and enjoyed what they read.

And finally I showed that I contributed to the learning of others by doing well and getting in the top three of the quiz we did on the class in our last class.

Knitting Journey: The Finale

Over the course of this semester I tried to learn how to knit a semester. Spoiler alert, I did not knit a sweater. It is not that i was unsuccessful in learning how to knit, but that i just didn’t give myself the time to actually complete the sweater. This is not to say that I gave up on the project as I fully intend to finish it I have just learned that I am an incredibly slow knitter, which I should’ve seen coming as I am also quite a slow crocheter.

I do have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of resources there was online for knitting. The act of finding the resources to learn to knit was actually incredibly easy and I very quickly found easy videos to follow. I did find that because I already knew how to crochet there was skills from that that I could apply to knitting and the whole learning process became quite easy.

I am very proud of what I was able to do and learn just by using YouTube videos. So, although I did not complete my sweater I would say that I did successfully learn to knit and that I will continue to knit in the future, which is exactly what I wanted to get out of this project.

I found that this project allowed me to open my eyes on just how useful the internet is on education and how the internet can be a very useful tool in the learning process. We are definitely in an age where the internet is unavoidable, but at the same time it can be used in many aspects of our everyday life that make our lives easier.

Kitting Journey: Knitting is not just for Old People

Although I crochet before I began to knit I had a very narrow view of knitting and who was knitting. I had just put myself in a small circle of the fiber craft community and neglected everything else. It wasn’t until I started to develop an interest in knitting that I realized knitting had just as big, if not bigger, of a community as crochet. From my small knowledge of knitting and what I have seen online it just looked like a small community generally of older women, but as soon as I continued to search online I found a wide variety of knitting content and a lot of it by young people. Also what was being knit was not what I was expecting. I always knew knit to only be clothing, sweaters, socks, some shirts, and not much else, but once I started looking I found many amazing things being created. One of the biggest thing that fascinated me was the different styles of knitting and the use of different type of yarns. I never knew that you could even knit this type of stuff at all.

  

While looking at knitting on Pinterest I was able to find some incredible cool pieces of clothing that were all made be ways of knitting. Truthful, I had no idea that styles of clothing could even be made like this. Finding out that this is something that can be done by knitting was incredibly interesting. It allowed me to gain a higher appreciation for the craft and really want to start learning  how to do it even more.

Without this project I probably would have never gave knitting a serious try and I wouldn’t have been able to see knitting as more that just a tradition craft and something that can express so much individuality and creatively.

We Are Giving Too Much of Ourselves to the Internet

We are living in a world where privacy is not a guarantee anymore. Technology has made it so that our actions will live on forever. Yes, everyone always says that once it is on the internet you can never get it off, but truly this can be a hard concept to grasp. Also, since this has been told to us so many times it is hard to listen anymore. Of course we know this to be true, that the internet lives on, but now social media and technology has become a sort of gathering ground  for us to express ourselves and share the meaningful and exciting moments in our life. It can be very easy to get caught up in sharing your life with your friends, but now no matter what you do you are not just sharing things with your friends, but all of the internet and whoever is willing put in the work to find it.

We now have to pick and choose what we put online cause what we put out there can easily come back to bite us. Although this can feel limiting and down right annoying there are upsides to being careful online. By only putting select things on the internet there comes a sense of safety and security as what we have posted cannot be used against us in the future. As much as it sucks we are now in a place where our online profiles are the first thing people look at when they want to get to know you, so what you put out there should be what you want people to know about you. It’s obviously not ideal that we may have to hide some of ourselves from our online profiles, but by doing so we are able to gain some of our privacy back. Keeping specific things off the internet is quite beneficial as it allows you to be able to share stuff with just those you are very close with and then you also do not have the option of stuff from your past coming back to haunt you in the professional world.

As future educators I feel that it is important that we work to make sure we are teaching kids that they don’t need their whole lives on the internet and it is good to keep stuff for themselves as it allows them to keep their privacy and also not have to deal with the persecution from the world. It will be a challenge to get the think before you post notion across to them in a way they will listen, but it is worth taking the time to make them understand. Especially for me as I plan to go work in secondary education, so I will be teaching kids who have their whole life online, so it might be extra difficult to get them to stray away from old habits of posting everything online and keeping some stuff to themselves.

It’s Time to Learn the Language of Digital Literacy

In our world today one of the greatest assets to have is to have a fluency in digital literacy. As the world gets more and more digital it is very important to be able to differentiate what we are constantly looking at. We are bombarded with information at every step of our day and we can very quickly get deceived if we are not careful. it is digital literacy that allows us to confidently be online without fear of begin deceived and tricked by what we see online.

There is no way to get fake news and manipulation off the internet so it is important that instead we arm ourselves with the knowledge of how to fight it off. That is what digital literacy is, it is the set of skills that allow us to differentiate what we see online as truth or as lies. The lies are often not there for fun, but are there to purposely deceive us and trick us and more than not we are successfully fooled. According to an article by datasociety Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online there are many high influence groups of people that are using our societies lack of digital literacy against us. This includes politicians, news sources, online influencers, and many more. These groups use our own beliefs or opinions to effectively get us to believe whatever they want. In the article It’s Easier To Call A Fact A Fact by NPR it delves into the issue of us using our own bias to pick and choose what we believe online. It is as simple as, if we want to believe it we will. And now since we are now a very digital world it is part of our job as future educators to make sure we teach our students about digital literacy.

For me I will (hopefully) become a high school teacher and will be teaching students at an age where the internet is becoming huge parts of them and their personalities, as it did for me and others around that age. It is extremely important then to make sure they know the safe way to be online. The falsities that they will be exposed to online can range from an influencer telling them to by a product, to political posts that aim to shape their values for them, or even to online challenges that can have serious consequences. As someone who was just recently in high school I saw how harmful misinformation online can be to a developing mind and I see how important it is for us future educators to teach these kids how to not fall into traps. The way we go about teaching digital literacy is also very important since kids, especially, high school kids often ignore or neglect what we are trying to teach them. The EdCan website has put out a How do we teach students to identify fake news? factsheet that helps teachers find ways to teach this while being engaging. Kids won’t listen to the same thing over and over again so it is up to us to find new ways to connect to them and get them to listen. Hopefully they will be beginning to get taught at a younger age so there is less harm to kids on the internet.

Knitting Journey: Motivation is Hard to Come By

Knitting can be quite a tedious task, especially when you are not used to doing it. Over the past couple weeks I have drastically slowed down on my knitting and am finding it mighty chore to do. This is not the best thing as I am trying to complete a sweater before the end of this course, so now I have a lot of catching up to in order to finish. Yes it is possible to finish, but I have decided that it is okay if I don’t as long as I genuinely gave it a chance and tried. This is by no means me trying to give up or quit, but I want to give myself a little slack on this one thing so I can focus on more important things (like the blog posts). I’m still working my way through it and am really proud of my progress. As long as when I am done with this project I feel like I have learned and improved I feel like this will be a success, its not the completion of the sweater that matters, but the process of learning the skill that matters.

This is where I am currently, which I know isn’t a lot of a difference from before, but I see the progress and that is what is important. It has also been great to explore the knitting community on places like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube. I have found awesome content creators and am even in a knitting and crochet group and Facebook. I’ve discovered that fiber arts is an amazing community of people.

Knitting Journey: There are Knitting Apps!

So for this week I know we were supposed to find a new app or tool we’ve never used to document our learning project. For me this was a terrifying though as I felt most of these apps and tools were pushing towards videomaking (my worst nightmare) then I stumbled on an app called knitandnote and this is an app specially made for knitters. This app may not document my knitting in the way you’d want it to but it documents the process for me.

In this app you get to organize all the projects you want to do or are doing, find patterns and creators, and have you yarn and tool stash all in one place. It allows you to see what you are working on and your progress on it as well as keep track of what yarn and needles you have to make the projects you want. I have found it extremely helpful, in the little time I used it, in allowing me to look at where I am on my project just on my phone.

This is the projects  page of the app that shows a bunch of information. It has the title of the project and details including, needle size, gauge, start date, who it’s for, size, yarn type and how much you use or will use. As well, it has a feature for a row counter which allows you to input how many rows  you are in and for what parts of the project. For example, my row counter is currently for the body of the sweater and i am 29 rows into it. So after each knitting session or as I’m going along i can add how ever many rows I’ve knitted so i can easily keep track of my progress. This is also especially helpful for if you have to put a project down for awhile as all the information you need is right there so you can jump back in without confusion. There is also a feature where is you are using one of the hundreds of patters on the app you can attach it to our project so you know what pattern you are following for the project.

Speaking of patterns this is library page where all the patters you can use are located. there are so many and you can search through different categories and types of projects. you can also go to specific designers who make patterns for this app. this app also has blog posts so you can read articles about knitting or peoples stories about knitting

The final feature I’m going to talk about is the stash and tools page where you can log all the supplies you have. This is so neat as now you don’t need to dig through all the yarn you have to find what you need to start a project and it keeps it logged for you in on place. It also has feature that will help you take a pattern and make it work for you if the pattern doesn’t work for you as it is.

This type of app was completely new to me and I have fallen in love with it. I am very excited to keep working with it. Also, this type of online organizer and community could be beneficial in a class room setting where its teacher resources and for student work and assignments. Essentially it a one stop shop for organizing and finding projects that make it very easy to keep track of your work.

 

I would be a totally different person without the internet

Since I am someone who grew up with the internet I honestly couldn’t imagine my life without it. But don’t get me wrong there are still days where I feel so tired of it that i think about giving it up. I mean how heathy in Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat or Facebook anyway. Yes i do think about this and then I freak out and don’t do anything about it as I realize that my whole life and personality is based on having access to all these things. Who would I become if I couldn’t scroll for hours on TikTok watching edits or if I couldn’t snap my friends everyday or watch shows for hours on streaming services. Do I think this is healthy, no , but its key aspects of my life that I am scared to change. I mean even Spotify, music is my life how could I get rid of that. Yes i have my CDs but that’s not the same as listening to my playlist that is over 100 hours long and has every song I like, and some that I  kind of don’t, on it.

With this last class it really made me realize just how dependent I am on the internet and how much it has changed. Almost everything do in a day is directly influenced by my life on the internet and what I do on my phone. I don’t even like to drive without my music. I also cannot ignore how much I’ve learned from the internet, I mean right now I’m learning to knit which would’ve never happened without the internet.

Now we have schools filled of students who also rely on the internet and now have to figure out the best and safest ways to incorporate the internet into the classroom as these kids almost need it in there life to get work done. I mean almost every class someone has now the teacher uses a projector to teach rather that just writing on a board and use classroom sites to add all their teaching slides or note for the students to access. I mean this is not necessary a bad thing as it allows students to connect to their work much easier and allows them to gain a better grasp on the work as it is all in a place that they can access at any time. But with the internet being such a vast and uncontrolled space the question arises on how do we have so many young kids use the internet in a safe way that doesn’t harm them.

Although there are many upsides to internet use in the classroom there are some things that shouldn’t be replaced, like handwriting notes or assignments as it makes the students use their own mind to work rather then having resources online do the work for them. There is fine line between too much and just right amount of internet use in the classroom and it is our job as future educators to do our best to find that line and have our students work the best they can.

Knitting Journey: The Art of Starting Over

So i made a boo-boo. I was really getting into my sweater when I realized I was making a huge mistake. I was forgetting to add a  row of just knit Stitches between my increase rows, which would make it increase too fast and them it would get all floppy instead of a nice gradual increase that lays nice. Unfortunately I didn’t realize right away so I was getting quite far into it and at that point there was no fixing it. I ended up having to take all my work apart and start over. Yes this is no the best case scenario, but now going back I am really paying more attention and am becoming more consistent. So, yes bad start, but now my sweater will be better than it would’ve been. I really cannot be that upset as I know it is for the better, not only will me sweater look better but this gives me more practice to make my knitting better.

On a good note, the hand cramps are GONE! I have been knitting enough that my hands no longer hurt when I’m working and now I can work way faster. It is becoming extremely fun and i love doing it. There really isn’t anything better that slowly seeing my work come together. Since this is a top-down sweater that means that I am beginning the work at the neck and working my way down the body then going back and doing the arms.

This here is where my work is currently since having to start over. So I am currently working on the ribbing for the collar. All this consists of knitting one stitch then purling one stitch. This sweater honestly works really fast as it is just involves those two stiches for the entirety and for the body you switch to just knit stitches so its even faster than the collar.

Something I have come to love is watching people on Youtube knit or crochet while I work. Some of my favorite people to watch are it’s erin b., Jenna Phipps, and Anna Kallajian. These are some creators that I have found that I love. Also these creators have great informational videos about yarn crafts and even will have patterns on their page which makes it super easy to try new projects. They are honestly very comforting to watch and by watching them they make me want to be more productive on what I’m working on.

Now lets hope that I do not make anymore major errors and I can smoothly get this sweater done!