The topic of digital literacy and determining whether or not something is fake news got me thinking back to my internship. I interned in a grade 4 classroom. During my time at the school, I planned a cross-curricular research project that connected English language arts and science. I think that it is easy to make a curricular connection between these subjects and digital literacy as science is a very inquiry based subject and ELA develops students’ abilities to conduct research, comprehend what they have read, and distinguish fact from fiction. As part of this project students were required to use one printed and one online resource. We had a discussion…
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ASL’s Connections with Coding
My other blog post this week focused on coding and its applications in the classroom. This got me thinking about American Sign Language and how it relates to coding. I was particularly interested because I have mentioned in my other posts ASL is its very own language separate from English yet, many coding languages are in written English. Some people who use ASL as their first language do not read English nor should they be required to considering that it is not their first language. This got me interested in what technology is out there for programmers that use ASL. In my search I was not able to find anything…
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Coding and its Applications in the Classroom
I started learning to code when I started working with a program called EYES (Educating Youth in Engineering and Science) a couple of years ago. Prior to this experience I had thought of coding as either binary (1’s and 0’s) or written code like python. I also typically envisioned coding as they depict in the movies where the person doing the coding is wearing a hoodie in a dark basement and typing a mile a minute just to get past the firewall that is supposedly impossible to get through, but somehow, they do it in a matter of minutes. I have since learned that coding does not have to be a…
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ASL Keeps Getting More Interesting!
I started this project with a few resources in mind that I wanted to test out. This week was the first time where I was feeling stumped as to what resources I was going to use. Thank goodness for the internet! I found a website that lists and describes six resources to learn American Sign Language. As I was reading, I became interested in the ASL University, however as I continued to read, I realized that it may be a little too advanced for where I am at in my learning. Instead, I decided to try Start ASL because it teaches more of the basics in vocabulary and grammar. The…
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ASL Nursery Rhymes
Last week I felt like I made some tremendous strides towards my goal of learning enough American Sign Language to be able to have an introductory conversation with someone. This week I decided I would have a little fun and try to learn a nursery rhyme in ASL. I thought that this would be a fun way to engage a class in learning because I could make learning a song a tactile activity. This was an enlightening experience in my lack of understanding for ASL. I planned to utilize YouTube again this week because I felt it should be as easy as searching for ASL nursery rhymes. I tried this…
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Digital Citizenship
I do not remember there being a lot of discussion around digital citizenship throughout my education. In fact, I do not recall hearing that term until I was in university. I grew up in a small town so I got to be a part of technology beginning to be implemented into our schools. I started my primary education with a computer lab which was later dismantled to be turned into another classroom. This marked the switch to laptops. Even though we had laptops we often did not use them in class. Looking back, it seems like my teachers were unsure how to incorporate this technology beyond having us type a…