So Pecha Kucha Me . Duh.

  I was looking toward the challenge once I got the assignment to create a Pecha Kucha to present to my peers. However, I had a bit of a mental block to start writing, didn't know where to begin or what to include. Should I write about all of my years of teaching? My experiences going through the ESL certification process? Or just write about my digital skills and pursuit to improve them?

Each would be a book.

I fixed 20 blank slides and scrolled through my Google photo albums to connect ideas. 

I began to write (run-ons) thinking of my newcomers and what I to get them to produce their first works using Google Docs.

The night before presenting, I fidgeted with formatting text & pictures and adding transitions to the slides. Finally happy with the slides, I set the time/ pacing. I wrote a script from all Inhad jotted. I read it aloud once for a flow, and set to record my narrative.

It was all Good. Watch it.

I did experience technical difficulties submitting it. Then the more I sat with it, the less I liked my voice.

I re-recorded it on my tablet. Again found it difficult to link. I spent another 6:40 minutes recording it on my iPhone and decided to upload it to my YouTube page. It took an hour, but at 11pm I went to bed happy it was done.

Thursday, Professor Leslie Bogad played it for the class (on our Zoom). Mission accomplished. I am definitely going to get my seniors to set their PBDA presentations as Pecha Kucha -sort (because it has to be 15 minutes) this summer. 

Tool of choice 💻

 

My digital tool focus is Padlet 

When we were sent home due to COVID-19, I was ahead because I had 2 classes on GoogleClassroom. Instead of Zoom I was comfortable with G-Meet. I also liked engaging the students into forming GoogleSlides to present responses to thematic questions. 

However, now my tools for students became passe in relation to what is going on in the world.  I love to review using Kahoot. I keep my account current to be able to use its volume of images and fill-in the blanks.

My great focus is on organizing so that students get to see their to-do list conveniently. GoogleClassroom is good for students who do navigate to a separate tab. Google Keeps actually requires that they log into it for live-lists because I can't share it with more than a handful of students. So, when I had to participate by posting on a Padlet during a teachers PD, I was excited. Then a professor organized all course work using a Padlet, every week it was updated. I was Lit! So, I downloaded the program to use as an organizer with one class. I loved that it's just one page and all the classwork & assignments can be seen. Students can easily upload links and open links to the curriculum program. They can also comment on each others' presentations or artifacts immediately. It helps the students to also maintain appropriate voice & tone, considering their educational audience.

 I will continue using GoogleClassroom. Kahoot is still an inexpensive way to review in a fun way that's not messy. But, Padlet can combine almost all the documents and programs together. I see how it does maintain students' attentions because they are curious about what else they can get from it, as am I.

🦋

Digital Gaga

 Is the Digital Age making us loners?

Sherry Turkle fears that millions of people are psychologically overpowered by technology. Our mobile communication "parking lots" is "setting us up for failure by making us used to being alone while together...Hiding from each other even as we're constantly connected to each other." In her TedTalk Connected, but alone? (2021), Turkle gives examples of how her teenage daughter spends hours with her friends without engaging because each is on their respective hand-held devices. Professionals "pay attention to only the parts that interest them" while at meetings. And at funerals, she has studied how guests of the departed discretely use their cell phones as words are spoken to honor those who have passed away.

This is not a strange notion. I must confess that I glance at my phone every time it lights up with an alert while working, knowing that my full attention should be on the topic of discussion. 

I often have to show a TikTok that entertained me during dinner with my children or watch one they enjoyed.  My phone is my third hand and holds quite a lot of my attention except for my bathroom uses.  I am aware and refuse to be the person in the bathroom while on the throne with her cell phone as I have witnessed others be. However, I hardly ever feel alone at home, at work or while at an event. I love to ask about others' life experiences or what's their favorite TikTok or if they read the last EOC post about the issues of the House of Congress on Insta.  So, although tech "changes what we do" I do not believe "that it changes who we are." 

I was raised receiving one toy or gift at Christmas and my birthday; sewing and crocheting as my grandmother taught me. I had writing, reading and dancing as hobbies. And, I was only allowed to watch 2 hours of television a day, after my chores and homework were done, and before my curfew of 8 o'clock, on the tv my siblings and I shared. That I meant that I hit to listen to the radio a lot because I didn't get to the remote fast enough to watch something I enjoyed. I learned how to not be bored and how to create my own experiences. Today, many of whom have grown up digitally have not been able to develop social skills or learned to create "something out of nothing" when they are bored because their parents put them in front of screens and other technology that produced entertainment for them without much of their own critical thoughts applied. This leads some to "get lost in technology."

In Turkle's article, The Pandemic Made Us Strangers (20121) in Time, she reflects on how we - people in many nations - did feel lonely and "were truly "together alone" during the Covid-19 pandemic. We yearned for physical connection and made many digital relationships to make up for what we lacked. Our screens became our friends as we also spent time "staring into the green light on top of the laptop" giving "the other person the illusion that we were looking into their eyes."  The Covid-19 pandemic made the use of digital devices a madness, a culture in which it's awkward to talk in person and more comfortable to text.

I think that the closer in age one is to the time of the pandemic, the easier it is for one to accept digital connection in place of eye-to-eye conversations. I'm a touchy-feely person who prefers a voice Ann a possibility to touch over a typed response anyday.  

Aiming to be the Jetsons

Listening to Sugata Mitra speak about how students were given advanced technology to help them study and prepare for the future, and that their response was to critic how slow or how much better it could be instead of appreciating what it facilitates them to do is typical of reactions from the students I interact with on a daily basis. It actually makes me feel that students today lack manners to express thanks and that they have a greater sense of entitlement than others in past generations, as Mitra shares of the young girl who insisted he "Get on with it" while holding out her hand when he asked what she thought about providing her and other children with computers. This is why Chromebooks are lost, broken or given away without impunity. They complain about walking a mile because their white sneakers will be scratched, or come during lunch hour.

Mitra's TedTalk is of the noble notion to enable children in India to learn from each other, producing a "children-driven education" by giving them digital tools and access to programs and mentoring stored in cloud space, available 24/7.  All we talk about in our present educational systems is having student-centered lessons. This ideology would be appeased by Mitra's notion. As an adult student, I appreciate that. It would be greatly improved than the "Bureaucratic Administration Machine (BAM)" which produces lots of people in schools who are "identical to each other who can be able to do the same simple skills" as he explains of those industrialized institutions which are now "obsolete."

The most plain of Mitra's points, to me, is that students producing with the use of computers are more ahead of those who do not - the poor who cannot afford one compared to the rich parents' kids who "must be gifted."

He also researched conducting experiments by having children use computers "in a whole-in-the-wall." His implied research question being simply Can children teach others how to use computers? "In nine months a group of children left alone with a computer, in any language, would be able to reach the same standards as an office secretary in the West."  Then we see an eight-year-old teaching his six-year-old sister how to browse. Morrocan nine-year-old explaining functions of a processor to his eight-year-old sister. The examples proved several things: First, Mitra was correct. Curiosity led children to the whole-in-the-wall, to learn how to use it through play. Second, age and gender didn't matter to the children who taught others what they knew. Third, language is not a deterrent to the use of technology-related activities.

So, I was impressed. In my own classrooms, I am impressed with what teenagers perform now that the computer systems are much more evolved and enable them to produce elevated activities than the computer programs available during my teen years. Mitra's TedTalk also resonated with what resonates with Sanjana Kindakar's belief that children can prove themselves not inferior, as she explains "India's educational system as one-size fits all" evolving to one proving that it's helpful to see how much one can learn from others' questions in her essay Why Don't We Ask Questions Anymore?

In both cases, the authors studied how children blossomed in their academic pursuits once broken from the British/European systems that preferred that they didn't advance.

I would suggest you view Sugata Mitra's TedTalk, and see how children -people everywhere- in general want to become like the Jetsons, users of high-quality technological resources that facilitates everyday tasks and expands their educational and economical horizons. 💚

 reference

Kundaikar, Sanjana.  (2017). Why don't we ask questions anymore?” Medium, 23 Nov.  blog.toppr.com/why-dont-we-ask-questions-any-more-22ebed4875d5.

Mitra, S. (n.d.). Build a school in the cloud. Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud | TED Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud