W
ell it has been a very interesting week with classes moving on line due to the covid-19 crisis. With all the changes of classwork, having my own kids home with me it has been another challenging week getting practice time on the ukulele in. I’ve made a little bit of progress however being able to strum without using the song playing at the same time as a guide. I find this actually helps a bit as I can slow down the tempo to what is comfortable for me rather than struggling to keep up with the song on the YouTube video. Though I am still a little shaky playing the quicker middle section, it is getting a little easier. For this final week I just need to finish memorizing the lyrics and put all the pieces together to play and sing at the same time! I can’t believe the end of term is so close now, it sure has flown by!
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Well this has been an interesting week to say the least. With the ever evolving covid-19 crisis taking place around the world right now, UVic shifted from face to face classes to online instruction this week. So for our Tech class, our entire cohort participated in the lesson through a Zoom call. This was my first time using Zoom, and though I was skeptical at first about how 32 students and an instructor could all be on one video call, it actually worked really well! It was very easy to join the call as Rich had emailed everyone a link. A couple features that I liked about the Zoom program were that you could change how you viewed everyone on the call. When I first joined the call, whoever was speaking would show up on the main part of the screen, and then 3 or 4 other people would show along the side in a smaller frame. Everyone else would be out of view and only connected through audio. However, there was an option you could click on that showed everyone who was on the call in thumbnail size frames so that you could see everyone all at once. This was nice as it connected everyone together more, and you could see peoples expressions and participate in conversations a little better. We were doing group presentations as well, and so having the feature where everyone could be muted except those presenting was a good to have as it prevented hearing a lot of background noise and interruptions. The presenting group could also split their screen so that everyone could see their PowerPoint slides as well and follow along with the presentation. I really liked that feature (even though I couldn’t quite get mine to work properly) because originally I thought we would just have to talk about our topic to the group without being able to show the slides because I didn’t understand how we would be able to through a video call.
So all in all I think Zoom is a great tool to use when making a video call. I was apprehensive about using it at first but found it very user friendly. The only difficulty I found was when I tried to split my screen to show my slide presentation I couldn’t get the presentation view to work. On my screen it looked like it was working but on the rest of the groups screens they were just seeing the slides in edit view. Other than that I thought everything worked smoothly, and I enjoyed using it. One thing I would be curious about learning however, is what the process is to set up a call. We didn’t get to experience that part of the program as our teacher had everything set up so I’m not sure what that entails.
For this week’s blog, we have decided to discuss and research the cons to have technology shortcuts in the classroom. During our group discussion…
- takes away from the students’ learning
- students stop thinking about the little details of their grammar and spelling
- students rely on these shortcuts
- if you don’t know it, when there is a list of possible correct options given, you don’t know which one to choose.
Following our group discussion, we researched a couple of articles and found the following quotes:
- “In using e-mail or word-processing software, we become less proficient proofreaders when we know that a spell-checker is at work” (Nordquist, 2019).
- “Typically, if you have misspelled a word the spellchecker will offer a list of alternatives. Unless your initial attempt is reasonably close to the correct spelling, you are unlikely to be offered sensible alternatives, and, even if you are, you have to be able to make sense of what is on offer” (Nordquist, 2019).
- “By middle school and high school, students start saying things like “I don’t have to spend time on this because I can ask Siri,” Gardner said. “I’m even guilty of it. I use Grammarly. … We’re less likely to self-monitor our spelling because we know the computer will do it for us” (Denn, 2019).
Based on our findings from these articles, we have found that there is good reason to be cautious about the amount these tools are used in the classroom. There are those students who need the support of these tools, however, it’s still important for them to learn basic literacy skills. In younger grades, there is no need to utilizing these tools because this is the time when students should really be learning these skills. As students get older, and have a strong understanding of grammar, spelling, and reading, then they can begin to use short-cut tools to enhance their writing, however, it is important that they do not come to rely on these tools.
Articles we used in this blog:
Photo by Will Shirley on Unsplash
Jambo! Hujambo hamjambo? This week I have been focusing on the words and phrases from my previous post. As I am trying to practice and really learn the words, I have come across a couple challenges. The first challenge I have encountered is finding the time to practice the words enough to really know them well and have them stick in my head. Balancing time for learning Swahili with time needed for other homework is proving more tricky than I thought it would be. I also don’t have opportunities to use my newfound Swahili with anyone else to really use it in conversation.
The second challenge I am finding is in the actual pronunciation of the words. Swahili is a fairly easy language to learn as the words are spoken almost exactly as they are spelled. However, in some words one syllable is emphasized a lot stronger that the others, and often the prominent syllable is not the one I would instinctively do so it throws me off. I am finding it helpful on the Hello!Jambo, though, as there is an option to listen to the word to hear how it is properly pronounced.
My focus for this next week will be to learn a little bit about the grammar and structure of Swahili as I continue practicing my word list from last week. I’m hoping to find a pattern or ‘rule’ that will help me know proper enunciation.
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