Hi! My name is Ruth and I am a high school math teacher in the Coquitlam School District. I recently started the MAEL program this past September.
I am currently on maternity leave because I just had my baby daughter, Macey, this past November! She is our perfect Christmas present :).
I am looking forward to learning and working through LDRS 591 with everyone!
Here are a couple pictures of our baby daughter!
Realizing that I had totally forgotten about this second part of the activity until this morning, I decided to do this activity in my office at work. I share the office with two of my coworkers who are also online teachers. It is a small space with 4 desks and the decor truly leaves much to be desired as offices go. However, boring as it is, this office is a big part of my life. I spend 6-7 hours a day here, five days a week. My coworkers are what makes this space one of my favourite places to be. In between our bouts of work, I enjoy occasionally chatting and laughing with them over things that happen at home and on the weekends.
To protect my coworkers’ privacy, I tried as much as possible not to take pictures of them (even though I personally think they make the space!). I found it difficult to find interesting objects around the office to take pictures of and I realized how little I actually pay attention to my surroundings while I am at work.
My favourite picture is the one of my blood test kit next to the jar of Carnation hot chocolate powder. I brought in the hot chocolate mix last year to share with my coworkesr. As a contrast, my blood test kit (for my gestational diabetes) sits next to it. I like this picture because it kind of reminds me of the way life changes as time goes on. Last year my coworkers laughed with me when I delighted in the fact that I could have a cup of hot chocolate with 60% few calories whereas the past couple of week, we have been laughing at how I can’t even eat an apple without worry about the sugar levels in fruit.
Looking through my pictures, I realize that my favourite pictures are the ones that I connect memories with. For example, as a “creative” photo, I took a picture of the calendar on my wall. My coworker gave me the yoga cat calendar last year for Christmas when I first started working at Coquitlam Open Learning. However, just looking at the picture, it is obvious that the emotion is cannot be connected without telling the story. I would like to explore more opportunities to take photos that can communicate emotion without any dialogue.
For my sound effect story, I created a short clip of a baby being woken up from a nap by a telephone ringing. Being 30 weeks pregnant, I’ve got babies on my mind! I imagine this will be a situation that I will face in the near future. Or maybe not…I won’t be so careless to take my cell phone off silent mode!
I found Audacity to be quite user friendly. It only took me a few minutes to figure out how to trim, silent, and move the timing of the different audio clips around. However, I did not use any of the special fade in/fade out effects this time because I felt like my audio clips blended well enough without the effects. In total, I used 4 different audio clips.
Next time, I would like to explore “stacking” more than one audio clip at a time. Since it was my first experience with audio editing on Audacity, I stuck to a simple single audio sound at a time for this track. I would like to explore using different background and ambiance sounds next time.
I got all my audio clips from SoundBible. I was surprised at how many sound effects were available and how easy they were to download and use!
Last but not least, here is my audio track!
The hardest part of this activity for me was trying to figure out what to record! I hate the sound of my own voice recorded so I really wanted to avoid it. In the end, I went with background classroom noise for my Anchor.fm audio and a clip of my colleagues discussing new technology during our recent Professional Development session for my SoundCloud audio.
The Anchor.fm app was fairly user friendly. However, I did have to google how to make my stream an “episode” so that it would stay on my station for longer than 24 hours.
I could not figure out how to record on my iPhone using the SoundCloud app so I finally resorted to record using my laptop. However, the recording sounds a bit broken up because the microphone on my laptop is less sensitive than the one on my iPhone.
For future use, I’d like to learn how to actually export an audio file off of Anchor.fm instead of just having it stored on my station. This may be something that is only available in the paid section of the app though. I’d also like to figure out how to record using my iPhone on SoundCloud so that I can get better quality for my audio clips and just for general ease of use.
Here is the link to my Anchor.fm audio: click here
And here is my SoundCloud audio below:
The tips that I used from David duChemin’s free ebook TEN: Ten Way to Improve Your Crave. None of Them Involve Buying Gear are:
Overall, I am not sure if this photo is great and I know that there is much room for improvement in terms of my skills and technique. However, after reading David’s duChemin’s ebook, I am definitely more conscious of the way I take photos and I am more aware of the different components that go into taking a simple photo. I really do like this photo I chose though because seeing it reminds me of the moment and how I laughed with my colleagues about how easily we were amused.
Whenever I receive an email like this, my first reaction is to delete it because I generally mistrust emails that come from unknown sources. I do not give my personal or work email out easily so it is unusual for me to receive unsolicited emails like this.
This email seems sketchy to me because of the poor punctuation and poor referencing of sources. There are also some grammar mistakes and this detracts from it’s credibility. I suppose I could take the time to research the legitimacy of it’s claims but I generally would not spend the time to do so. There is no proof in this email that the information actually came from the Center for Disease Control so I would need to confirm this information by researching the Manheim Research Institute and if this organization is legitimate, going one step further and researching the actual claims about the bananas. A quick google search showed me that there really is not a record of a Manheim Research Institute in Atlanta, Georgia and so, my search stops there and this email is ignored and delete.d
Here are some snapshots of my results when I googled the terms without any advance search strategies:
I found that for most the searches, the people that came up were Caucasians with the exception of the “leader” and “teacher” searches. This makes sense though because my location is in Canada, which is predominantly Caucasian population.
One thing I noticed was that the search for doctor only brought up images of men while the google for nurses only brought up images of women. These are stereotypes that I am surprised to see in 2017 while doing a search on Google in Canada.
Here are some of my new results after adding some advance search strategies:
I searched for teacher and added Canada as the location tag since in the original simple search, I had gotten a more multicultural result compared to the other searches. Once I added the Canada tag, I only got images of Caucasian teachers.
Next, I searched for doctor and added China as the location tag. Immediately, there was a big difference because I received images of Asian doctors instead.
I had a little trouble using the academic google search shown in Alan November’s article so I used Google Scholar instead, which is what I usually use when I am looking for an academic article. Other than that, I found the other searches pretty straight-forward.
Google Chrome is my usual go-to internet browser. I was not able to find information on how long Google keeps cookies from third parties. However, there are ways to change the settings so that cookies from certain sets are blocked or to have Google automatically delete all cookies by default when you close your browser.
The usual websites that I visit (school district email, Facebook, Gmail, Whatsapp Web) did not have many trackers, most had less than 10 connected sites. I was surprised to see that the TWU student portal website had 10 connected websites. When I visited retail sites such as Gap Online or BabiesRUs Online, I noticed a huge jump in the number of connected sites. Gap Online had 27 connected sites and BabiesRUs had over 60 connected sites! In total, I visited 17 websites and had connected with 190 third party sites.
While I realize the importance of protecting my privacy online, I am not too concerned about cookies and trackers. I did clear the cookies in Google in the process of doing this assignment but to be honest, I often enjoy the ads that pop up in my Facebook or Instagram.
Ruth Leong, also known by her maiden name as Ruth Cheng, is a high school math teacher who is currently teaching in the Coquitlam School District. In the past, she has taught in the Surrey and North Vancouver school districts. Before entering the teaching profession, Ruth worked as a statistical analyst at the British Columbia Dental Association.
Ruth graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Science (Mathematics major) in 2012 and a Bachelor of Education (Secondary Education Concentration) in 2013. Ruth is also fluent in Chinese.
Ruth is active on her Instagram account where she documents many of the events in her life. She mostly posts about her outings with her friends and her travels with her husband, Haymen.
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Being a high school teacher, I have come to be very aware of what I share and what is shared about me on the internet. In fact, there have been many times when I have purposely gone through and removed content online that I do not want others (mainly my students!) to see. An example of this was the website I created for my wedding a few years ago. While there was nothing inappropriate on it, it felt private and I did not want the information to be available online after the occasion had passed.
From my search, the only sneak-peek that was available into my personal life was the picture (seen above) from my Instagram page. Of course, it also lists my Instagram account name, which leads to more pictures from my day-to-day life. My Instagram account used to be private to the public. However, I recently consciously changed it because sometimes I like to share my posts with friends and family who do not have an Instagram account. When I was a new teacher, it was really important for me to keep my personal life private. However, as I become more comfortable in my profession, I realize that even if students stumble across my page, it would perhaps make me more personable and human.
I like to describe myself as candid and friendly. As such, I try to portray this through my posts on Facebook and Instagram. While my Facebook page is quite hidden and cannot be found through a simple search online, I believe that my Instagram account does show this if one really does spend the time looking through all the posts! Having said this, I am always mentally self-censoring, making sure that things that I post are not at risk of being taken the wrong way or out of context. I am always making sure that any posts I like align with my values and beliefs. Sometimes it’s easy to “like” a post on Facebook or Instagram because it is posted by a good friend. However, I understand that everything I do online can be seen by others and I want to make sure that it only adds positively to my online presence.
– Ruth
My main goal when planning and building this preliminary structure for my site was to keep it fairly simple and easy to read. For this reason, I chose the simplest theme available. However, I found that the default aesthetics of the site were not pleasing to me. For example, I found the spacing of the font in the body of the posts to be too far apart. So, I changed this by using the customization options for the theme. I was mostly able to change all the spacing and sizing issues I had with the look of the site.
While I appreciate how easy ready-made themes make site building, I also find it slightly restrictive as there are some things that you cannot customize. For example, I wanted to list my categories as a sidebar menu on my site. However, this theme only allows users to place menus in the main navigation location at the top of the page under the header. Given more time, I would like to learn to build my own site from coding so that I could customize my page to exactly what I would like.
Right now, the main thing that I am struggling with is trying to figure out how to register my site so that my posts can be syndicated to the Course Hub. I have already followed the instructions given but I can’t seem to find my posts on the Course Hub page.
– Ruth