Continuing To Expand My Knowledge

I am sure many of you thought I was done with my learning and was going to wrap up my blogging. Well, I am back! 🙂 This past week, Ashley Osachoff reached over to me via Twitter and asked if I wanted to collaborate with her to have a conversation in ASL.

I thought why not, Katia suggested to me to try collaborating with someone in the class that was learning ASL or reach out to ASL users on Twitter to check out my blog. I reached out to the cfounder of the ASL App, and now I have collaborated with someone from my class!

Throughout chatting Ashley and I decided to have our conversation over Zoom since we have become familiar with Zoom over the course of the semester. For myself, I was able to learn how to create my own Zoom room, host a meeting, and how to record over Zoom. Before we recorded, we created a google document, with the conversation we would have, this was so we could practice since we are both not fluent it made sense to know what one another was going to sign so we knew how to reply properly.

I knew many of the words that we were going to be using since in a previous week I learned them for the week. But while practicing I learned that Ashley was not aware of the signs for many of the words that we were going to be using so she asked me what app or website  I was using, so I suggest she download the ASL App because it has been a lifesaver for me throughout my learning project!

I hope Ashley was just as nervous about creating the conversation as I was. I was scared to have a conversation since I did not think my signing was good enough to communicate with someone else. But I went with the conversation, and it turned out to be great. I found having a conversation with someone else increased my confidence in signing. I practiced a lot before going into my conversation with Ashley, just because I wanted to make sure I knew the signs and the conversation would go smoothly.

Throughout our conversation, I was actually able to watch Ashley and know what she was signing even without the conversation beside me, which I thought was a great accomplishment. I was now able to sign a bit, but also understand what others were signing. I am so glad that Ashley reached out to me to create a conversation in ASL. Thank you for the conversation and expanding my learning in ASL! I suggest you all go check out Ashley Osachoff’s blog and watch her learning in ASL. Also, give her a follow on Twitter since in class we have been working on creating our Personal Learning Network (PLN) and to check out all she has tweeted!