It’s the first week of a new semester, a new program and a new imposed reality of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of my EDCI 336 course, Technology and Innovation in Education, I set up a WordPress blog. I’ll be posting here weekly with different updates on my learning, specifically in relation to the applications of and links between technology and education.

Setting up a WordPress blog this week didn’t feel instinctive to me – I struggled. While I managed to set up a username/account quite quickly, accessing and editing my site was another issue. I received an email confirmation that my site had been created within 7 minutes or so, but upon clicking the link, I found that I absolutely could not access it. Instead, I consistently received an error message in my browser. By the conclusion of our first EDCI 336 course, I’d somehow managed to create 3 different blogs (honestly not sure how this occurred, as I thought I’d only done 2).

I feel as though the physical distance/remoteness of online learning may have played a role in making the process of setting up a WordPress blog seem a little bit more challenging. Our instructor utilized an incredible tactic of having students share their screens on Zoom, in order to troubleshoot or better understand any issues they were having. I was not aware that this was a function on Zoom (despite using it frequently during these last few months), so I’m happy to be constantly learning new functionalities, even within platforms that I use regularly.

I spent a little bit of time this afternoon exploring Unsplash and thus far, I find it to be an incredible resource! This is a website wherein you can browse and search a database of over 2 million freely usable images. During my masters I spent 3 semesters as a French TA at UVic and I feel like this site would have been extremely useful for me then. I loved to create powerpoints (a bit old school, perhaps) to structure my lesson plan, as well as provide visual cues for my learners. I’ve often wondered about the legalities and implications of my using images taken from the web for these powerpoints, so I’m interested in learning more on this subject in EDCI 336.

Now… I’m off to figure out how to delete my other two, now obsolete, WordPress blogs!

 

Photo by Marvin Meyer from Unsplash.