Reflection
I chose to do my multimedia assignment on Ashley Hinck‘s article “Digital Ghosts in the Modern Classroom” . For my artifact, I chose to do a twitter essay because I’m familiar with using the app in my personal life, so I thought it would be interesting to use it for school. I’ve seen them before, but had never done one myself. One thing that I didn’t account for was how much organization went into doing this. I had to plan out each tweet with understandable sentences that fit with the character count. Another difficulty that I faced was that once I tweeted something in the thread, I didn’t have the liberty to edit it without having to start the thread from the beginning. For example, after I had finished tweeting everything, I noticed that I had a typo in the first Tweet of my thread, so I had to redo everything.
As for the article content, I never realized that I have been conditioned to using templates in the classroom where I only believed that there were either right answers, or wrong ones. While reading the article, it was very difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that some teachers allow students to make mistakes and revise them, and that these teachers don’t always follow a linear plan. As a teacher, I want to give students this opportunity to learn non-linearly and linearly. Although I’ve never done any non-linear learning as a student, I’d like to learn to teach this way so that I have a mix of teaching methods that allow all student to be as successful as possible.
https://twitter.com/AWhiteUWindsor/status/1178561003275067392
In my own personal experience, I wish that I had had the opportunity to learn digital skills. My brother took a class in high school where they learned basic coding, learned how to develop their own website, and learned how to use tools such as Photoshop. When I try to do stuff like this, I have to search tutorials online and try to self-teach everything and that ends up taking hours to make one small tweak.
I’m an avid user of platform based social media, but this assignment has made me rethink how I spend my free-time. That’s not saying everything is going to change, but I definitely want to make a conscious effort to think outside the ‘box’.
As a child I was very creative, and now, after reading this, I wonder if I lost that sense of creativity after being exposed to all of that template learning. I used to make crafts with anything I could find: sticks, beads, glue, anything. Now I need specific instructions to follow to make something crafty. It also makes me wonder how different my life would have been if I knew that it was okay to make mistakes. Would I have been more apt to participate in school? Would I have anxiety about sharing my opinion?
As a post-secondary student, the thought of failing stresses me out even more. During my undergraduate experiences, most of my classes were very template based with the exception of some essay writing. Although template learning in schools can create a negative learning experiences, they have prepared me for university. So if we’re going to try and avoid template teaching and learning, all institutions need to be involved or we’d be just setting students up for failure.
Now, as I start my journey of becoming an educator, I need to make sure that my experiences don’t restrict my teaching abilities. As a new teacher, I need to be open to teaching new things and I need to be open to progress my teaching methods to stay relevant and to allow students to be set up for success, something I wish that my educators would have been open to.