Mrs. Pasta's Education Portfolio

Slow is faster than stuck. -Tom Frose

Category: EDCI 336

This is a category for the EdTech course. Please add this category in addition to the relevant edtech assignment category(ies).

Learning Canning: A tribute to my grandma

September 22, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I first heard about this Free Inquiry project months before I started this class. My mind went to a myriad of interesting things I would like to learn. 

There is a spot on my local trails that I really wanted to master on my mountain bike. But then I considered the likelihood of getting injured. No thanks. 

Fontana, California
Photo credit singletrack.com

Then I thought about indoor gardening. Wouldn’t that be cool to do with my future class! Yes. But I kept killing all my seedlings and just didn’t need that kind of responsibility in my life right now. So I passed on that idea too.

Photo credit Kateryna Hliznitsova from Upsplash

What to do? What to do? Summer ensued and as I looked at my garden, that I am not wholly responsible for (recall the aforementioned seedling death), I realized that I have always wanted to learn to can and preserve food.

Photo by Compagnons on Upsplash

I thought a lot about why I didn’t learn from my mom before me. I knew my grandma had canned for her family, but why didn’t Grandma pass the tradition on to my mom and her four siblings?

I thought about it more and more. I asked questions. I stayed curious. Was my mom a modern woman raising a family through the 80s and 90s not to be be bothered with the traditions of yore?

Then I thought further back to my mom’s childhood. My grandma was diagnosed, at 32 years old, with breast cancer. She spent the next 10 years in and out of a hospital an hour away from her rural farm to receive treatment.

My momma, the oldest of 5, started to take care of her family at 11 years old. hen grandma was home she would need a lot of time to recover from her treatment.

When would there have been time or energy to spend days canning and preserving? Or if there was a day when energy allowed, was it likely that grandma sent the kids outside to play?

These women that came before me are the epitome of resilience. 

Photo credit Barbara Wright

After months of considering what I would do for this project I will try to honour my grandma in this small way.  By learning a lost skill and thinking of her and her journey.

My plan is to can or preserve: tomatoes, plums, apples, and a mystery food.  Stay tuned. 

Welcome and Introduction

September 9, 2020 /

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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