Counting Carbs

A teacher candidate's blog focussed on tasty foods, diabetes awareness, and all things education

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Free Inquiry Project Progress Week 3 – Descriptions, descriptions!

January 31, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Wow! Describing food is not an easy undertaking at all. Although I started this inquiry as an attempt to improve my cooking ability, I’m quickly realizing that I will also be expanding my vocabulary as there’s only so many times I can call something yummy or tasty!

Synonyms of tasty or yummy with far deeper meanings such as succulent, luscious, appetizing, inviting, tempting, delectable. These are parts of the English language that I’ve always been familiar with in the deepest part of my brain but are simply words that I’ve never frequently used before in the writing process. Considering most of my writing has been done as part of university classes, it makes sense that I’ve rarely used these words, I mean how often do luscious or delectable appear in most academic papers?

Now that I’m working on a blog for the first time, I’m learning how small things can make a difference in the user’s experience. One thing I realized today, for example, was that my food pictures were simply just too small to be inviting. By enlarging each picture my pages really came to life in a way I didn’t realize I was missing before.

One more new skill I learned how to do this week was edit and compress images. Earlier this week, I was attempting to upload a new header image to my blog but it simply kept giving me an error message, talk about frustrating! After some research and a bunch of failed hotfixes, I realized that I just had to decompress the images as they were of a too high pixel number and quality. Decompressing and changing the characteristics of pictures is something I’ve never done before so I’m quite proud that I was able to figure this out.

Overall I would say that week 3 has been successful so far. I’ve learned a new computer skill, refreshed myself on food lingo, and have started creating descriptions and carbohydrate counts for my food posts.

Until next time.

 

Free Inquiry Project Progress Week 2

January 25, 2021 / / 1 Comment

My Free Inquiry project has started off quite well. I was initially going to start documenting my home cooking from scratch, but it turned out I had already archived some pictures of previous dishes I’ve made so I’m using as a foundation to build off.

As is visible in the picture below, I’ve currently only included the name of the food and simple pictures.

 

From here I wish to add a few more points to each of my posts. First, I will be adding a comprehensive carbohydrate count to each post that will appear something like this:

“1/2 cup of sticky rice: 80g carbs”

“5 pieces of Japanese fried chicken: 25-30 carbs”

Secondly, I will be adding descriptions to each of my posts explaining the flavour profile of each dish and some potential add ons or changes that someone might make for dietary concerns.

One thing I’m quite proud of so far is how I’ve organized my menus on my blog. I knew going in that I was going to end up having many different foods and that I did not want my blog to be overly messy or incomprehensible. I therefore decided to do dropdown menus (the names of which I might change) and include my foods in their appropriate locations.

I have a few plans and goals in the next week and moving forward with my blog. First and foremost I want to keep challenging myself and making new dishes that I can proudly document on my blog. Secondly, I want to include a “Takeout” dropdown menu next to my “Home Cooking” so that I can start highlighting the delicious food from some local restaurants and provide my opinions and dietary information on them.

My final goal is also where I have a question. I’ve received some feedback from my cohort and they’ve suggested that I include recipes in my posts. Many recipes are my own, and I am happy to include them, but others are from resources such as cookbooks and internet websites. How would I therefore copy and paste recipes from sources other than my own without copyrighting or infringing upon another’s intellectual property? Especially in situations where I can’t find any Creative Commons information on their site?

In terms of resources I’ve found and plan to review. A friend recommended that I use a specific cookbook by the late Anthony Bourdain, so I plan to buy a copy and make some recipes from this. I also plan on further reviewing the resources found in the “Copyright & Copyleft” EDCI 336 blog post and further familiarizing myself with these materials.

My Conundrum in the Age of Information

January 24, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Thanks to the internet, we’re living in a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected at unprecedented rates. The result of this is that we have access to so much information at our fingertips, but how much of it can we freely use?

After starting my food blog, which I foolhardily initially thought would be a relatively painless endeavour, I quickly realized how many questions I had regarding what I was actually able to do without violating copyrights.

Can I post links from cooking websites? Where can I get pictures from? Can I take my own pictures of businesses’ logos and post them? Questions such as these and many many more started popping up at my head at an alarming rate. And while a strength of mine has always been problem solving, I quickly realized I was simply unprepared for answering these technology-related questions. This quickly became a conundrum for me as I realized that thus far in my life I have to this point disregarded engaging deeply and actually learning how to use technology in favour just about any other priority. But even after taking EDCI 336 for two weeks or so, I’ve realized I need to change my ways. I need to finally adapt to the new age of information and put in the effort to transform my ways whether I’m ready for it or not.

The funny thing is despite the fact that I’ve always dreaded technology (the only class I ever failed was 8th grade Electronics), I’m actually genuinely enjoying the process of customizing my own website and ingesting films such as “Most Likely to Succeed”.  I think the reason for this is because it feels like for the first time in as long as I can remember, I’m learning something that’s genuinely new and foreign to me.

 

I need to embrace that I have to learn things such as what resources I can use for my blog without copyright and what pictures I can use without copyright infringement because by doing this more, I can better prepare myself for teaching my future students how to prepare themselves for the age of information.

MLTS Film Reflection

January 18, 2021 / / 0 Comments

So who is the most likely to succeed? Not necessarily those who are proficient at writing tests or memorizing masses of academic information.

With standardized education focussing on tests and scores instead of “soft skills” such as critical thinking, confidence, resourcefulness, punctuality, time management, and collaboration, students are becomingly increasingly unprepared for entering the modern-day work environment. But how does society solve this conundrum? As mentioned in the film, our current educational model has been essentially unchanged since the days of Horace Mann and as a society we should ask ourselves, is this a good thing?

Although the economy continues to rise, human employment is becoming increasingly obsolete every year. And while the film mentioned mid-level associates and salespeople as those greatly hurt by the current technological revolution, how long is it before doctors, lawyers, or even teachers are replaced by more efficient, advanced machines or programs?

As the film mentions, we humans need to be creative. But how do we do so when our educational system  and its policies and “masterminds” stifle our creative minds at every turn? Perhaps we as educators need to be the change we see in this world. We need to help our students realize their greatest creative potential within the restrictions imposed on us by curricular standards and policies. As someone simply beginning his journey as a B.C. educator, I have yet to figure out how exactly this process will look for me. But to reference the film, I can confidently say that in my classroom I will be more of a “gardener” than an “engineer”.

image showing person walking in pre-painted footprints
Photo by Flickr user jfchenier under CC license: BY-NC 2.0

Welcome and Introduction

September 9, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:

  1. Do you want to be online vs. offline?
  2. Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
  3. Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
  4. Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.

First tasks you might explore with your new blog:

  • Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
  • Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “EdTech” category or sub-categories, Free Inquiry and EdTech Inquiry). We have also pre-loaded the Teacher Education competencies as categories should you wish to use them to document your learning. If you would like to add more course categories, please do so (e.g., add EDCI 306A with no space for Music Ed, etc.)
  • See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the course categories assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
  • Add pages
  • Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works)
  • Under Appearance,
    • Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, etc.)
    • Customize menus & navigation
    • Use widgets to customize blog content and features
  • Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep for reference)

Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to use the course topic as the category as opposed to the course number as those outside of your program would not be familiar with the number (e.g., we use “EdTech” instead of “edci336).

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:

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