A story of "Virtual Communication Tools"

Emails - Blogger - Facetime/Facebook - Texts - What's Up - Tweeter - Zoom Connections

The World Wide Cloud

From phone calls to emails to text to FaceTime:  Before 2020, my contact with family was sporadic phone calls, annual visits, and family reunions in person.  I had given up my negativity towards texting, "I might distract people while driving.  Nothing is so important that I cannot send via email." During 2020, I began to text Bitmojis, musical and how-to videos, pictures, Facebook posts. Then, when one of my sisters faced health challenges, the other one united us in supporting each other with weekly FaceTime check-ins.  As the pandemic continued, one of my sisters enjoyed FaceTime connections so much that we began a daily FaceTime call, which we continue to this day.  In the initial days of the lockdown, my son and his wife needed a way for my toddler grandchildren to communicate with "Grandma and Viejo" to provide some sort of normality to the passing weeks. As the weeks became months and the children were not attending school in person, FaceTime gave us the opportunity to become virtual sitters.  As my grandchildren have never visited Edmond, Oklahoma, where I reside, we were able to take virtual tours of the house, make and share breakfast time, talk about what the virus meant to them, problem-solved, learned how to write the first letters of a name, teach a little bit of Spanish, read books, take virtual walks around the neighborhood to how the seasons were changing-as we learned about taking care of mother earth and climate change-.  We also shared how neighbors were decorating for Halloween, a tradition not of my preference in October.  We also experienced how the leaves were changing in Oklahoma and Massachusetts. In November, my grandchild and I realized that maple syrup is delicious, but expensive because not all maple trees give syrup.  Only sugar maples do.  Our investigation was limited to YouTube videos for toddlers, but we discovered that the season to extract syrup from sugar maple trees is getting shorter due to climate change and the size of the leaves of the trees is an indicator of the ability of the tree to produce syrup.

Finally, in the month of December, we shared how the time change made mornings have light in Brookline, Massachusetts, and kept them in darkness in Edmond, Oklahoma.  As this blog is written on December, 6th, FaceTime empowered us to follow the creation of making gingerbread houses with their parents-no friends this time. I also shared with my granddaughter my only Xmas decoration this year, my diminishing collection of Santa Clauses.

What's Up:  In 2008, due to a family wedding, my connection to What Up begins.  We frantically communicated preparations, arrival schedules, transportation, and congratulations.  What's Up then became a way to communicate with relatives in Peru, where I was born.  In 2020, via email, I contacted a high school friend who lives in Switzerland.  She began a new What's Up - Zoom Group and now we connect with regularity to celebrate birthdays or hear short stories, poems, music, articles created by the few members of my high school in Peru.  Most of the members in this group live around the world and the personal perspectives are slowly getting into global viewpoints.  We are in the "flow stage" when we talk.  Time is forgotten because we are so into our dialogs.

Facebook: My "personal" site started when I returned to Peru in the early 2000s and my high school friends were communicated via Facebook.  As my school gave permission to have Facebook to communicate with service alumni, I created a second Facebook account, my "professional" Facebook.  The negativity in the postings and the liability issues stopped my usage of Facebook for a long time. During the Covid-2020, my professional Facebook account became my "personal" Facebook account I use to post "What was in my mind."  My purpose is to keep in touch with the outside world during my self-imposed lockdown to keep health workers from having to take care of me. I do not leave Facebook despite the fear of hacking, conspiracy theories, political maneuvering, etc. because this social media outlet has connected me to amazing learning experiences.  Some of the connections I made through Facebook are blogs, podcasts of note, Edmodo (Modern Language Educators Facebook of choice), Coursera online free courses, PBS free educational experiences, Global Climate Change Project Challenge, amazing Zoom celebrations, mainstream performances, to name just a few.  I also created Facebook sites for my student service-learning groups, Casady YAC, and Youth LEAD OKC.  Both sites have been deleted as they were connected to my personal Facebook.

Blogs:  I loved this reflective online tool since the first moment I first heard of it, which I do not remember where or from whom it was.  I documented everything in reflective blogs while I was an active educator.  My blog reflection changed into an unreliable teaching tool as the Internet connection at my schools was in the infancy stage but as a somewhat safer online resource to provide daily class experiences before Google Drives and Google Classroom.  Some of my professional early blogs were reflections of student service activities and they were connected to my school email, no longer active since I retired at the end of the academic school year of 2017-2018. I used blogs instead of files and they were very helpful when new generations of students decided to look at previous years calendar of service activities to plan their academic year activities.  Some blogs were simply teens planning team minutes such as the Casady YAC and Casady YAC Leads blogs and the Youth LEAD OKC Blog.  Others were project-specific files such as Casady's MLK Day of Service,  Casady's Peace Week.  Then, when I learned about Padlet, I used it as an even quicker way to reflect and showcase our school year of activities.  A couple of early reflective global service-learning experiences blogs are Peru Andes 2009 Education Trip, Green Team. An example of a teaching blog at the infancy stage is Mrs. Clay's Fifth Grade Class.  

Twitter:  I retired from education in the academic school year 2017-2018 to have schedule flexibility to be with my grandchildren when they needed me.  I was traveling with great frequency from Oklahoma to Massachusetts and my educational institution did not offer me the option of being a full-time virtual educator but as I had to keep up with my students while I was helping my family in 2017.  The technology director helped me move at baby steps implementing connections to Google Drive, Google Classroom, Google Forms, iPad, iPhone Apps for personal and educational use.  He was an avid Twitter and empowered me to consider Twitter more seriously.  I started a Twitter account when Facebook started to be the "parents" way of connecting, and the Twitter hoopla began with the teens for whom I facilitated service-learning experiences.  Now, during retirement,  I connect Twitter to  "quick negativity." I avoid using this social media platform like the plague.  The Coursera online courses I am auditing suggests Twitter connections, therefore, I am beginning to explore more communication through this medium.

Zoom: The most recent addition to my technology tools.  At the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic, I was reluctant to use it because of the security issues.  Then, friends and family from all over the world were connecting What's Up to Zoom as it had the capability of a greater number of participants in one FaceTime call.  Then, as I began auditing courses online, I started to connect to members of my study group and their private initiatives to help people during the pandemic via zoom.  The Coursera courses use their Zoom version to help members of the class to communicate call HOWDY.  It is not as clean yet as Zoom but has empowered me to want to start hosting my own Zoom meeting instead of just being a participant.