Twine and Zoom

For today’s class, we all stayed home. Although, there’s a little bit more to it than that. Because of the current pandemic with COVID-19 and health officials recommending social isolation, UVic has closed for the remainder of the term. No need to panic, since we still have video conference calls. Last week, I was a guinea pig for video calling for a possible shutdown, we used the BlueJeans system. For today’s class, we used Zoom. As the New York Times puts it, “teenagers have jokingly referred to themselves as ‘Zoomers’ online for years; now the name is literal.”

Since most schools across the world have been shut down, many professors are turning towards conference calling as a solution to lectures. Zoom is a pretty good system that also allows for screen-sharing. This feature came in handy for our class, as we were doing group presentations. One pitfall of Zoom, and all other video-conferencing systems, is that it requires a laptop/tablet and a stable internet connection, which not every home has access to. I do think it is a really cool operating tool, and it could be interesting to see whether more people decide to use Zoom in the future.

Not only did we use Zoom, but we also looked at Twine. Twine is a story-telling website that creates choose your own adventure stories online. Twine also introduces the idea of coding to students. I think that Twine would be beneficial for Grades 5 and up. In my schooling experience, we started writing our own stories in Grade 6. I believe Twine would be good for students who don’t want to draw pictures and would rather focus on the story. Twine would be good for combining computer science and English language arts, by teaching students about how the system works, and how computers/coding helps build the system.

As a fond reader and storyteller, I really enjoyed playing around with Twine. I got really into my story and will probably keep writing it after I post this blog.