This week I worked with Notability some more to plan some more squares. I also used YouTube to keep me focussed, but not to teach me new things about Crochet. I used the Pomodoro method to focus, with 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of break – and I found it very helpful! This week, for something new and different I started making some crochet flowers! I really enjoyed making pretty things, and seeing results quickly rather than working for long periods of time. To learn different flowers patterns, I used MoaraCrochet. This site allowed me to look through many different options of what I wanted to create, and gave a combination of images and written instructions, which made everything very clear. The website is very well organized as I can see the end result, and what flower it is before I even dive into the page with the pattern – so I can see if I really wanted to add that one to my bouquet! I loved this website, and will definitely be coming back to it! I worked on three different plants – lavender, string of pearls and a combination flower to really test my skills! I loved how simple and beginner-friendly these patterns are, and they come together quick, which is very encouraging! I loved the lavender I made and I plan on making more, but I want to make a fuller bouquet and I am not sure what will go well with lavender! I will have to look into it more, so I can make sure I like what I make for a long time! I recently deleted TikTok as it became too distracting for me, however I do remember seeing crochet flowers on there so I might have to sneak a peek on that app!
0 Comments
Digital citizenship is practically unescapable today. Parents, teachers, students, workers, and even babies are likely to have some form of online footprint, whether made themselves or not. Personally, I have been seen on Facebook since 2007 (when I was almost 4 years old). Reflecting on this, I don’t mind that I had a social media presence at that age. My family is huge, and it would be impossible to send images to every single person in my family when my parents wanted to show how cute we were! As I got older, watching movies and in classes I learned that the online world is hard to maneuver and know about, even when you’re confident you can. My schools really enforced a “we will find you” style of threat when it came to cyber-bullying, lying or harassment. Outside of that, they practiced scare tactics to keep us in check. But these scare tactics were not to keep off the internet, just to stay good on the internet. They didn’t talk about anything negative happening to those who were kind and polite online. Hearing lectures about the negative side of an online presence scared me, but I don’t think it could scared me “into submission”. I was always a goodie-two-shoes and have an extreme sense of empathy for others, so I was never one looking to be mean behind a screen, and I was quick to tell an adult or report a stranger online. I don’t think my sense of values around the internet comes from the lessons about online presence though, I think it is just who I am. I knew many many students who went unaffected by these lectures on the opposite side – bullying, harassing, and lying on the internet because “it’s just the internet”. (I would like to note - I am fortunate enough to have grown up in a situation and family where I can trust adults to help me in cases like these, whereas a lot of marginalized groups may not have this sense of security in adults of a system that oppresses them, which is understandable and in no way a reflection of who they are - negative of positive, but more so of our societal expectations of different people.) I think that teaching students about internet use is helpful, but teaching people to be a good and kind human is really where the lessons were lacking. In the future, I am not sure that I will be the one responsible for teaching about online citizenship in most cases. If I were to teach about the reality of having an online presence, I would like to focus on real stories, Canadian based because I think using real stories of real people teaches students in a deeper way than just facts. However, I would like to think I could influence my students into being good/better people to each other. I also hope I am an adult they can trust when it comes to scary situations online or offline. This week I worked on the borders of my squares for my baby blanket. I feel less productive this week because school has gotten in the way and I honestly have not made much progress. Other than that, I started to plan my details for my animals on this blanket. I did this on Notability. I plan to use many different stitches and methods to crate different looks and textures within the animals features. For example, the lions mane is based off this flower petal idea from Bella Coco on YouTube. And some of the shapes I make will be based on or inspired by this tutorial by Annemarie Benthem. Overall, this week has very little progress to report, and I am sad to admit that. Next week there will be much much more to say about my journey hopefully! Over the break, I made a lot of progress on my baby blanket project. This week I focussed more on online tools to keep me motivated rather than learning new things, partly because I wanted to continue working on my blanket instead of doing something new and partly because I needed some external motivation. For motivation, social media really helped me. Seeing other people being able to create things and have fun with things they create was really inspirational. Instagram, TikTok and Facebook were my main sources for this. All around these apps have a lot of good creators on them to help motivate people getting into the crafts. Some creators/pages I found most inspiring were CindysCrochet on TikTok, @free_crochet_patterns on Instagram and -The Canadian Crocheters- group on Facebook. These all helped keep me motivated in one way or another and made me excited to crochet every day! This week I did a lot of crochet work! I completed the base of all of my squares for my baby blanket and completed the pig square features. I also completed the other baby blanket I was working on in the previous post, made and stitched together a pillow, made this leafy headphone accessory and made a small whale plushie on my own! This week was very productive for me and I did not feel drained of crochet at any point. I also think these creators inspired me to do more with my crochet hook than I was doing previously, as I had more time. This made me more excited to get back to my projects instead of getting tired of them! This week for my learning project, I tried to document my progress using iMovie. iMovie is an app for creating trailers or videos and do some basic editing to them. The app has a lot more option on the MacBook version, but I used the iPhone version and found it moderately straight forward. I did not use a tutorial for this project as I found most things on my own. This app has many basic features like photos, videos, voice overs, music, and text. Although I felt like I could do everything pretty easily, I also found out that I do not know how to make an interesting video. I feel like my video is quite boring in a viewers’ perspective, so I could work on that if I was looking to make a more entertaining video. When opening the app you are shown this screen to the right. It gives options for starting a new project, including a ‘Magic Movie’ which would make the video for you for the most part. I did try this magic movie, but it made a horrible video so I scratched the entire thing. Below that there is ‘Storyboard’, which would only give me an error message – so not very helpful. At the bottom there is ‘Movie’, which is what I used to create my movie. This section was very clear to me, allowing me to add things wherever I wanted or delete parts of clips I did not like. When working on the movie you are able to see the movie in the upper half, and the storyboard on the lower half which is very helpful to me. You can play the movie in its entirety or only certain parts of the movie using the play button and scrolling to the section you’d like, which really allows you to focus on certain parts. You can also select certain parts of the storyboard and they will become outlined in yellow to indicate which part you are working on. Doing this will give you many many options of things to do to the clips. The one I found most helpful was the ’Split’ button. ‘Split’ allows you to take one section of video and split it into two, so you may have multiple effects on the same clip at different parts. You can also drag the ends of the clips in to delete certain parts in the beginning or end, by shortening the clip on the storyboard. The ’+’ button on the left side allows you to add more media into the video. This button covers most of what is needed to make a video – the visual. I found this part pretty straight forward. Sometimes the media I added would go to random spots, but it is easy to fix. To fix this, you just have the select the clip you want to move and drag it to the part you want it to be at in the storyboard. In the classroom, I think video is a very helpful tool to increase accessibility of the lessons and class. However, I am not sure that iMovie is the best as it is only available on Apple products and does not have any special or unique features to it. Mine also did not give me a tutorial option, so it may be difficult for students to pick up this form of creation. However, I can see videos substituting for in-class or simultaneous lessons, with video lessons or lectures made by the teacher for students to do on their own time, in their own space. I also think we can reach the augmentation of lessons with the editing process that comes with video making. This allows the teacher to fix mistakes, make things more concise and review lectures before students see them, as it is easy to forget something in a lecture on a busy day. For modification, I think videos and video editing reaches a new level in the way that we can easily work and present together, including people with long distance gaps. This would allow for people to collaborate on projects from their own home, instead of travelling or limiting the perspectives in lectures. For redefinition, I think video always redefines education in the way that it is consumed. TEDTalks for example, reach hundreds of thousands of people instead of just the three hundred people who are in the room with the presenter – something that is even hard to picture for me. I enjoy video making, but I also find it hard to keep up with. It is much easier for me personally to sit down and write about my ups and downs in this learning journey, instead of filming it in the moment of it happening. It also put a lot more pressure on me to take photos of me while I was crocheting, which is very hard to do. I am sure videos are the favourite of some people, but they are not mine. Here is my video to show how bad I am at making them! This week I looked into reading patterns online, instead of the video help I usually use. I was looking for something cute to make for valentines day, but this quickly become very hard for me. I tried to use this pattern for a heart pillow, and got lost over and over. This picture shows my most successful attempt, and even still there is a giant hole at the top and I could not replicate this for the other side of the heart. I decided that 3D crochet work was not something I am ready to do based off reading right now. Then I switched to this pattern of a flat heart, which was much more successful. I was able to make this heart many times, fairly quickly. The online confusion with this pattern was the vocabulary. I am used to the term ‘triple crochet,’ but this form uses the term ‘treble crochet’! This is confusing because it’s also called the ‘double treble crochet’ in the UK. Other than that though, this project went pretty smoothly, and I was able to follow the instructions. I am definitely getting closer to being able to understand patterns in the full crochet terminology. I wasn’t totally sure what I was going to do with all these hearts, but I was inspired by this chicken pillow shared by @fiberfairy on TikTok. I think it would be very similar to the animal blanket, and simple to make with hearts instead of little chickens. More than that, I was able to continue work on my animal blanket and start putting some circles into squares for the background! This part of the pattern has the most diversity in stitches, as there are five different types in the first round of work. This features the single crochet, half-double crochet, double crochet, treble/triple/double treble crochet and chaining. I know a lot more stitches than I did when I started this project, and I am more understanding of how to build projects and make specific aspects of shapes – like corners or gaps in the patterns. Next week, I would like to finish this heart pillow before Valentines day, and get more of the circles done for the baby blanket. My sister also asked me to make her a hat, with no given pattern so maybe I will try that after these two projects! For the most part, I believe that the age of participation is a good thing. This new availability allows for anyone to share what they care about as well as interact with others of similar groups. I think the age of participation is interlinked with our need for representation in medias today as well. When we do not feel represented, we now have the opportunity to recreate things with new and inclusive media. This idea and process can be seen in this Shelley Moore video, which expresses the idea of representation. Within educational spaces, I also think this builds a community of students who feel welcome to participate in class and included in conversations more so than before. The want for participation is seen in the development of education throughout history. For example, the inclusion of people with different gender identities, skin colors, abilities, religious beliefs, etc. into mainstream schooling are the more notable movement towards participation. But more than that, we see students obtain better results when participating in a more active-learning approach, whereas schools in the past have traditionally done a lecture-style class. Within the same framework, schools and people are encouraged to celebrate diversity in the classroom and world more than before, where they were previously encouraged to all be the same. This active participation and welcoming of all views in the classroom, creates for a more well-rounded education for all students – filling in the gaps of understanding we often see in the older generations. The idea of the looking-glass-self (“we know ourselves through our understanding of how other understand us” – Micheal Wesch) is an important human concept. I recently heard the quote “to be loved is to be known” (Timothy Keller) and I feel as though these quotes relate to each other. To be known, understood, and truly seen for who you are by someone else is a true feeling of love, and we must be able to show ourselves, to be seen as ourselves. Thus, the need for participation. Moreover, people learn from other people throughout their entire lives. This being said, with our need for representation and want for participation - the best learning can be done from students who are different from yourself. If we narrow it down to just cultural inclusion and representation, the most inclusive and educational we can be is to hear everyones voices, as discussed by Banks and adapted by Gorski here. Participation is inclusion, and that is necessary to education, now and in the future. In my day-to-day life I regularly use four main apps. These apps are Text Messages, Tiktok, Disney+ and Notability. On a normal day, I can guarantee I am opening these apps multiple times for various reasons. Text Messages are my daily communication form. My family and friends are mostly back home, in Saskatoon so communicating online is a big part of my life and social activities. Tiktok is a distracting app for me, I can never seem to ignore it. Once I get on Tiktok, I can’t get off it. Scrolling is so addicting despite me knowing I should do something more productive. In fact, every social media tends to distract me with videos. I often use the “three more videos” or the “in five minutes” strategy to convince myself to get off the distracting apps, which works most of the time. Notabilitiy is my go-to app for notetaking and school related things. I bring my iPad with me every day to take notes for every one of my classes. I like this app because it keeps everything all in one place, but still organized. It allows me to have subjects and folders, creating subcategories for anything I need. I also like to use Quizlet and URCourses for organization relating to school. Disney+ is a weird one for me. Sometimes I am using it for leisure, and to relax for the night, but most of the time I have it running on my favorite show in the background of everything I do. And I mean, EVERYTHING. I think the tv helps me fill the silence of Regina in comparison to how I have always lived (in a packed, busy house). The only time I turn it off is when I am asleep or out of the house. Overall, I think technology is beneficial to the learning experience, but it has its' own distractions. This week for my learning project, I mainly focussed on starting my project. I was planning on focussing on learning how to read patterns, but this video is beneficial to both goals. The video by 365DayofDana shows me what to do in a clear video, but also has the pattern listed at the top of the video. I watched the video one time and have not been back to watching it. I wrote down the patterns listed on the screen, and when I forget what to do, I am now able to look at the note and remember what it means I like this video specifically because it is very clear. I find that a lot of crochet projects on YouTube or Tiktok are extremely quick, without explaining anything to the audience and often not showing the work they are doing, which is extremely unhelpful. I also like that she explains the process while she is doing it, it not JUST the visual aspect. She also explains some things multiple times, which is very uncommon in the videos I have seen. Plus, she gives me the tools to do it on my own. She shows how to counts the stitches properly, during and after the steps are done so I am able to look at my own work and be sure that I didn’t miss anything! Overall, I liked the video style but I am also aware that not all videos are as educational as this one has been. This week I was able to make 9 circles for the blanket, after messing up multiple times in the beginning, due to my own miscalculations on sizing (not related to the video). Next week I will continue working on the blanket and try some new online sources! Hi there! My name is Paige Belcourt. I am in my first year of my Education Degree as well as the certificate in Inclusive Education. I am in the secondary education program, and my major is in mathematics and my minor is in French. I am studying at the University of Regina, but I am from Aberdeen, Saskatchewan and visit my family there often. Although I have always lived in small towns, I have always gone to inner-city schools in Saskatoon. Growing up, I was in advanced programs, which helped grow my love for learning and taught me a lot about my own learning style and passions. I graduated high school in 2021, after two years of online school. I decided to take 2 years off to evaluate what I would like to do with my life as COVID-19 was still heavily influencing my area, and online learning was not for me. Throughout my younger years I was in classrooms that had SMART boards, laptops, and were allowed our phones and tablets. My program was often one of the first to try new technology in my area. This meant we got to learn a lot more about technologies in educational spaces in comparison to others in our area. I tend to use YouTube or other videos for my own personal learning, as I find it more engaging than reading things online. Last semester, during my ECS 101 class, I really enjoyed Shelley Moores videos as they helped me understand complex concepts in simple ways. The combination of passionate voices and visuals really helps me engage in the materials, rather than reading an article in my own head. I enjoy blogging quite a bit and I am excited to start blogging about things I am passionate about. I have experience with blogs in my younger years, so I know a little bit about how to do things on the website portion of it all, but I am not the best at conveying my messages through text. I am not very interested in posting on social media; I always seem to forget that I can post my own things. I do enjoy the idea of sharing, because I like to talk about my passions! I am very excited to continue my educational journey through this course and others! |
AuthorMy name is Paige Belcourt and I am currently a student a the University of Regina. I am working towards a degree in Secondary Mathematics Education with a minor in French, as well as a certificate in inclusive Education. Archives
April 2024
Categories |