About The Blogger

Welcome to Blake's Bistro. This is my Blog Sphere for EME 6414.

I have been a Mathematics Educator at my local middle school for nearly 5 years.

I work part-time as a Maitre d' and Level 1 Sommelier at a local restaurant, designing and restructuring wine menus.

I have a beautiful wife and 6-year-old daughter, plus our 10-year-old dog, Apollo.

Looking to hone in on my diverse set of interests through blogging and instinctive/interest-based learning to see where it takes me as I prepare to graduate from the ISLT program at FSU.

Comments

Does the digital native/immigrant dichotomy work?

I felt, as I was reading the Prenska article, that my knee-jerk reaction was that I was fortunate to have grown up at the right time (mid-late 2000s), when Web 2.0 features were coming into mainstream culture. I was learning them like everyone else, and I had an advantage. My reaction to the digital immigrants was that these were relatively older users I saw on Facebook, either using ChatGPT for the first time and sharing a tacky image (see Figure 1), or exclusively using their online interactions in my local ‘rants, raves, and reviews’ to initiate arguments. My brain's intuition couldn't have been right. Is there a right way to interact with online communities? That's what constitutes me as a digital native? Are these users who use Facebook and AI in those other ways digital immigrants? Although it's a niche of folks who argue on Facebook, they still use that social media website as it was intended: to connect and interact with others online. So, what is ...

Prodigy Slander won't be tolerated....well, maybe

Happy Summer, educators. In Florida, anyway! While embarking on my Reddit Challenge, I came across a post on r/edtech about the learning game Prodigy, which has role-playing elements that I've used in my own math instruction. I figured I'd post my initial reactions to this article and talk about how EdTech in the classroom, and more specifically, game-based learning, has been more divisive than we think. https://web.archive.org/web/20260516165144/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/homework-video-games-ed-tech/687198/ The author of this Atlantic article, Will Oremus, begins and ends the piece with observations of his son playing the Prodigy learning platform that many classrooms are adopting and integrating into their curricula. From my personal experience in a niche example in 1 school district out of the nation's 18,000ish, Prodigy is used more in elementary contexts (K-5) and then tapers off at the middle and high school levels. The author's...

Understanding Hashtags: From my insufferable, 2011 Instagram Posts, to Legit Instructional Materials

I've never used hashtags to filter my virtual consent consumption until recently. My first attempts at tagging my Instagram posts... 15 years ago... were used to provide additional information about the post and, of course, for comedic effect. They were not used for the practical purpose of having my posts sorted by content. Tags' prevalence in the early 2010s seemed irrelevant to me, personally. At the time, since I had mostly used YouTube and Facebook, tags weren't available until Twitter came along. YouTube was easily categorized by content creators using keywords, and Facebook's search engine found keywords mentioned in posts. I never explicitly saw the #. Now, when X (FKA Twitter) came to my attention in the early-to-late 2010s, the 'tweets' stood out to me as a unique format: a short, concise update followed by a hashtag. On mobile, the hashtags were always linked and took the user to an organized subsection of popular/'hot' posts that contained th...

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