Jerome’s Site – “The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” Malcolm S. Forbes

TikTok Goes the Clock

October 17, 2024 / Jerome Schmeiser / 2 Comments

Hey there!

For my project this week I decided to step outside my comfort zone and try out TikTok! Yes TikTok, the app I have been blissfully ignoring these past 6 or however many years it has been around. I have been vaguely aware of how it works, but have never used it myself. I will admit, I have been heavily influenced by traditional forms of media to view TikTok as something bad that is destroying “the youth”, but I like to be an optimist, so I want to see what good I can find on TikTok.

So I signed up for an account and started inputting my interests so they could show me some content, I made about 15 choices and then got into it.

screen shot of TikTok categories I selected

I will say, it was pretty jarring to have videos instantly start playing for me when it took me to the home screen. I started swiping through some of the videos that had popped up for me, and I was like, ok, I guess these somewhat relate to the interests I chose. Maybe it is because I am a new user and the almighty algorithm hasn’t scoped me out yet. I hated that it was just a stream of videos with no real indication of what the content was going to be about. I realized I could swipe to the right and look at the authors page to get more context, so that was helpful.

I decided I had had enough of random swiping and wanted to try out their search feature… and oh boy. The boldly misogynistic pre-generated search results pained me and made me lose hope in this app and humanity at large.

Screen Shot of pre generated TikTok searches

But hey, at least they were willing to listen to feedback! Anywho, after that walk down uncomfortable lane, I went ahead and searched up Tower Gardens to see what they had to offer, and I have to say, there actually was a ton of content on the subject. I found a video by a smaller creator named Jenny.Grows that was about step in the process I am at with setting up my tower (filling the reservoir and transferring seedlings). She demonstrated the filling process, she didn’t speak, just played chilling music, but she had clear written instructions on the screen that I appreciated. For such a simple step in the process, I think this video worked perfectly. Did I love the platform that I found it on? No, but I am willing to keep an open mind about it!

Here is a TikTok video I made of me filling up the reservoir of my Tower Garden!

@jay273101

Edtc300 Learning project

♬ original sound – Jay

Cheers!

Jerome Schmeiser

A New Source

October 6, 2024 / Jerome Schmeiser / 0 Comments

Hello everyone,

So last week I left off with having my seedlings started for my Tower Garden, and they have been doing pretty…well not too great actually. This picture is after 2 weeks of growth.

Photo of seedlings growing on rock wool media

A lot of the seeds haven’t come up and many that have of pretty flimsy. But I am still optimistic I will have seedlings to move into my tower. But first I need a tower to put them in! So on to assembly time…

I wanted to check the instructions from the manufacture again, just too see since I knew I would need a new source after. Last week when I used the instruction video from the manufacture on seedling starting, I found it very quick and short on details. And wouldn’t you know it, the video breezed through the process again, except this time I thought the task was way more complicated. It might just be me, but I don’t find these” fast paced show you had its done with no voiced instructions just soothing elevator music” style of videos very helpful.

I set to work on the set up, but knew right away I need help with the instructions. So I found this awesome video on the True Garden YouTube channel that gave great visual cues to work off. The video’s author walks you through the setup in real time while talking you through the process. They had a lot of helpful tips that someone who has built a few of these units would find out, so I was happy to find this source before I got too far into assembly! Honestly, it wasn’t that difficult to get assembled once I got to have someone walk me through it.

And here we go! Set up and almost ready to grow! I managed to squeeze it into a corner in our living room and I think it looks pretty good, my cat Luna isn’t too sure about it though…

picture of a Garden Tower set up in a house

This week, I am going to get this thing filled up and ready to accept some seedlings. Also, I’m going to look into why my seedlings didn’t do so hot. Lots left to learn!

Jerome

Starting from the Source

October 1, 2024 / Jerome Schmeiser / 0 Comments

This week I was taking my first steps to getting my Tower Garden going! Now, the manufacturer recommends step one is getting your tower set up, but that is a pretty big job and I wanted to start with something smaller. So I decided to skip to step two and start getting my seedlings growing. I figured that since these seeds take a few weeks to mature enough to make into the tower, I was have time while waiting for them to mature to set up my tower. This, by the way, is the same order the previous owner of this Tower Garden tried, and they never got past the seed growing phase, so hopefully I can do a bit better!

So step one was getting some of the resources I needed. my new to me garden tower didn’t quite come with all the pieces. I needed to order some new rock wool growing media. There were some seeds for lettuces left from the pervious owner, but I ordered some new herbs as well. Since I wanted to start using manufacturer available online information, I went to the Tower Garden website’s resource page and they had a guide on what kind of seeds to grow that I went off of. It was pretty much just leafy greens and herbs, but I have seen other people online growing things not on this list like strawberries and tomatoes. But I thought I would stick to the leafy greens and herbs for now.

The website also had a link on growing seedlings that took me to a video on the Tower Garden Youtube Channel.

It was a helpful video, but super short and really breezed through the process. I had to watch it over a couple of times to get all the info I needed. I think a longer, for detailed video would have really helped here, but I was still able to get things started!

Picture of seedlings in rock well growing media

These are my seedlings after a week! I am not sure every one of them is going to sprout and/or survive, but I feel like they is enough going that I will have something to transfer to the tower.

Cheers!

Jerome Schmeiser

My Tech Life

September 28, 2024 / Jerome Schmeiser / 0 Comments

While considering my tech habits for this post, I noticed some patterns in my daily routine. I start my morning by rolling out of bed and quickly checking for any emails, or text messages. I usually put my phone on do not disturb mode at bedtime (10 o’clock most nights, woot woot), so I am usually curious if I missed anything important, but usually there isn’t! Then my kids get up and we are getting ready for our day. Usually one of them commandeers my phone to watch some Netflix or YouTube with breakfast. Then after dropping them off for daycare I usually sit down for some breakfast of my own, and I always take the opportunity to watch late night talk shows from the last night on YouTube. Colbert, Seth Meyers and the Daily Show usually. It is a part of my morning ritual, I actually get bummed out when they take time off and I don’t have a new show for me to watch. I think I might be addicted to the drama of the American news cycle hahaha (help me:)). YouTube in general is where I spend most of my time while on my phone. Its probably about 70% for entertainment purposes and 30% for educational related purposes.

From there, I usually start moving in to the productive part of my tech use. I use Google Calendar to organize my assignments and readings for classes, so I check that to plan out what I need to work on for the day. I also have an app called TimeTree on my phone that my family uses to put in events like appointments or when my wife is doing craft sales. These two things are how I navigate my day to day, and I like that both are shareable with other people, so they can see what I have on the go and add in events for themselves.

Then I am on my laptop most of the day using urcourses and working on assignments. This usually involves a lot of reading, and I almost always do those reading using the Read Aloud: A Text to Voice Reader plugin for Chrome on my laptop. I 100% not be able to do this degree without this tool. There has been so much reading to do since I started this degree, and I am at a very busy phase of life with 2 young kids (3 and 5), and managing many of our household affairs while my wife works as a teacher and running an at home sewing business to support us. I hook up my wireless headphones to my laptop and play my readings while I work around our house and yard. Sometimes I’m even sneaking in a reading while I’m cuddling one of my kids to bed.

I like to think I have found a good balance with tech in my life. I like to look the positive side of things, and tech invites a lot of awesomeness to our day to day. The biggest help getting to a good balance has was having kids. Having to regulate their tech use as a parent made me have to take a hard look at the way I use tech too, to make sure I wasn’t being a hypocrite.

Learning Project Introduction

September 23, 2024 / Jerome Schmeiser / 0 Comments

I wanted to use this learning project as an opportunity to expand a hobby of mine that I have been neglecting for a while. I love to garden and to grow. My first degree was in biology, and I grew up in a family that always had a large garden. I have had a love of nurturing and growing things from a young age. As I grew up and became a home owner of my own, I got a lot of enjoyment in cleaning up our yard, planting flower gardens, trees, and a vegetables garden every year. I’ve also filled out our house with a variety of house plants that I have been tending, some for years! This past year, I even set up a grow tent in my basement so I could have more room for repotted house plants and starting seedlings for the garden!

To encourage my passion, my awesome and lovely wife Alana (a teacher of ten years, and my inspiration to become an educator) found me an hydroponics grow tower. It was used, but never actually used, and Alana found it on Facebook market place. A husband had gotten it for their wife and it ended up sitting in a basement collecting dust for a while before they decided to sell it. Well, now I am in the same predicament where I have been letting this gift gather dust for the last 4 months!

Image displays a hydroponics tower from the Tower Garden company

So my mission, is to get this thing up and running and growing! Hopefully I’ll have some tasty produce to show for it! Step one will be getting some seedlings started, so I will be looking at information on how to use the growing medium that this system uses. Once I have the seeds started, I will have to figure out how to assemble and fill the tower. Then hopefully, I will be able to transplant the seedlings to the tower and grow from there!

I thought this would be a good fit for this project because this thing came with very little in terms of an owners/operators manual, so I am going to be navigating this journey using online resources. I have already check out the Tower Garden website, which has some helpful resources. There is a lot of instructional videos on YouTube too (some directly from the manufacture) I plan on using, especially for complicated stuff like the physically set up. There are also online communities I plan to use for this project too, like the enthusiasts over at Reddit on the the hydroponics subreddit.

I’m excite to get this working! I can’t wait to be able to pick free produce right in my living room!

Introducing Me!

September 23, 2024 / Jerome Schmeiser / 0 Comments

Hi there!

My name is Jerome Schmeiser. I am a BEAD student (After degree program) in my second semester at the University of Regina. I’ve never been someone who reads blogs, or had any ambition to start one, but I am excited to give it a try! Here’s a little more about me…

My first degree was in biology (also from the UofR), after which I spent 10 years working in labs as a quality assurance lab technician at a variety of places. The last position I held in that field was with the Saskatchewan Research Council, who unfortunately shut down the lab in Regina I was working at and moved their operations to Saskatoon at the end of 2022.

Looking for something different after that position ended, I applied for a position delivering coding and technology outreach with the Saskatchewan Science Centre. They had received funding from the Federal Government through the CanCode program, and were looking to provide outreach throughout the entire province of Saskatchewan. Myself and a partner were sent around the province to take over class rooms for an hour and get the students interested in tech and coding with fun, free to use programs, or tech we brought and provided. It was a fun job, and I got to see lots of Saskatchewan and a variety of schools/classrooms. But it was also very hard being away from my young family for days at a time. So I eventually decided to return to school to pursue my Ed degree, where you can find me today!

I gained some really great experience through that position with the Science Centre though, and some great resources for making tech fun. Some of the websites we used were really easy to get into, especially for kids since it lets them code using blockcoding!

If you’ve never heard of blockcoding, it is coding that is partly done for the user already, with important pieces of code already typed out and fitted into colour blocks. These blocks can then be fitted together like puzzle pieces for the user to make a functioning program out of! It takes all the hard work of having proper syntax out of coding, and makes it waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy more fun and approachable than traditional Java or Python coding. I would recommend using Makecode Arcade as a great free resource made by Microsoft to teach coding. You can make a variety of GameBoy style games on this site. My partner and I used to run a class through a lesson and have them get a functioning game in under an hour using this site.

A screenshot of an example of blockcoding programming.

Anyways, I am really excite for this course and for the opportunity to learn how to keep using tech in the classroom in a positive, uplifting way!

Jerome's Site