Author: ashleyhall (Page 2 of 3)

This week I would like to talk about how I am going to bring inquiry/inclusion into the classroom. After Simone Littledale’s (VISII Principal) presentation, I learned so many new things that both me and my classmates can take a lot from. The idea of inquiry in a classroom was never something I grew up with, and was introduced to me during this program. Because it is so new to me, it seems a bit foreign and scary to introduce into the traditional school system. Simone helped to make the idea of inquiry in the classroom more achievable and less scary. One thing that confused me about inquiry was how it looks/plays out in the classroom. Simone mentioned that when doing inquiry, you can’t go full steam ahead because the students will burn out if you do. Instead they need to pace themselves and there should always be options to do other things that replenish the students such as drawing, painting, or doing yoga. After hearing this it cleared up alot of my doubts about inquiry and how the students move through the process.

One aspect of inquiry that really caught my interest was the benefits of it. Simone talked about how content and learning is often covered by peers. Students are so interested in certain topics in our world that they often just teach their classmates information, and I love that aspect of inquiry learning. Simone also talked about fostering inclusion in the classroom by incorporating things such as; designated quiet spaces, frequent body breaks, access to snacks and fidgets and by having no requirements to sitting in chairs, instead they can sit in the floor or on pillows. Simone also suggested that fostering inclusion can occur when you having regular conversations around diversity, having a flexible learning space and also having a social/emotional and mental health focus and telling students that it’s ok if you are feeling off. All of these things I have talked about are the ways that I can bring inquiry/inclusion  into the traditional school system to encourage a better classroom environment. 

Photo by Ken Whytock on Flickr, “Benefits of learning through discovery” licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 

During our class break, a couple classmates and I were talking about how we really enjoyed Simone’s talk, and we would love to incorporate more inquiry into our practicum’s coming up in a couple weeks and also for our future classrooms. We decided that we would love to see VISII in action and plan on going for a visit in 2 weeks to learn even more about inquiry!

To do further research on inquiry, I hopped over to my friend Milana’s blog page because I know she has been doing research on inquiry in the classroom. I looked at one of the articles she hyperlinked in her blog, and I decided to take a look! In this article it talked about how to bring authentic inquiry into the classroom. You can do this by designing authentic experiences for students to explore, swapping out more teacher-led lessons for student-led lessons and building in time for reflection at the end of every lesson. These are just a few, and I would suggest taking a look at this article, it sure helped me!

I would like to end this blog post with a question to my fellow classmates as to if they too were nervous about incorporating inquiry into the classroom and how they feel about it now? 

I have mixed feelings about AI, and I loved the discussion and learning that occurred this week. Last year was the first time that AI was brought to my attention and started making a large wave in the news, specifically with chatGPT. I was in my last year of my undergrad and there were always conversations about chatGPT and using it etc etc because it was this new tool that made school so much easier. The topic made me quite mad because as someone who did their undergrad in history, the process of writing a 10 page history paper is somewhat of a craft (as it is for any discipline).  When I would write my papers I had a process where I would start with days of research looking at books from the library, or the archives and  physically turning the pages and gathering my information. I loved it because you don’t really get to do that anymore in this technology-filled world. And then I would  narrow it down and form my own story from the information given to me. I take a lot of pride in the papers I wrote because they are personal and quite the process filled with hard work. So when I overheard conversations that some of my other classmates were having about them using chatGPT to write their papers in seconds and then refine it a bit, it took the art of crafting a paper away from the discipline of history and that made me sad and frustrated. It then got me thinking about the students in my future classroom, and if they are going to use AI to write papers, and never get to experience the knowledge that comes out of the process of writing a paper. Because of this I am weary of AI, and was never really a friend of it, but this class somewhat changed my opinion.

At the beginning of the class, my opinions on AI stayed the same when we were introduced to the idea that AI is now able to create videos. I thought to myself, “holy, it really can do anything, and that’s scary.” Like Andrew said, It took 30 years to get access to the internet and in a year we went from AI photos to AI videos. This is pretty crazy and  makes me curious about what the future holds in AI, but also terrifies me. My idea about AI started to shift when we did the little experiment on creating a flower. First Andrew got us to try and copy a flower by using tools such as Canva (computer assisted). I enjoyed doing this because I didn’t know Canva had this feature, and it was also fun to physically try and copy the drawing while also giving me a new tool I can use in my future classroom. Then Andrew told us to go onto the site Craiyon and try and get as close as possible to the original flower (computer generated). The lesson that came out of this is that AI can be very useful in saving time. By using computer generated, I didn’t have to sign into an account, and take time to try and physically draw the flower like I had to with computer assisted. Instead the AI platform allowed me to create a flower in 60 seconds after I gave it a prompt  and it gave me options too! My ideas towards AI started to shift after this because I realized that it can be a very helpful tool that can help to cut down on time. However you have to be okay with the AI not giving you EXACTLY what you pictured. (see below of my AI generated flower, I tried many times to change it but it wasn’t giving me the cartoon-y hand drawn image I wanted).

Image created by Ashley Hall licensed underCC BY 4.0

Screenshot from Craiyon of the flower images generated from my prompt, “Make me a cartoon image that looks like it was drawn of a white daisy with a yellow middle and have it on a pink circle for the background.” Image created by Ashley Hall licensed under CC BY 4.0

Our guest speaker Chris Du then amplified my move towards using AI in a positive way by suggesting AI can be like an assistant, but it can’t take over yours or your students’ jobs. Mr.Du had lots of insights on AI and how it can be helpful to teachers, considering he did create the AI tool TimleyGrader. I like the idea of this tool as it can be an assistant to a teacher because it cuts down on time and can help with teacher burnout, but again, it can’t do the job completely and that’s the way it should be. There should still be that human-ness to our world, but having AI tools can help amplify our lives and the business of it. Because of that, I am one step closer to becoming friends with AI. I still don’t know what my future classroom will look like in regards to students’ work and AI, but I now know there are tools out there to help me as the teacher, and I am happy about that.  

I leave this blog today with a question to my fellow readers; How do you think students will be using AI in the classroom by the time we become teachers? Will it be prominent in the classroom and encouraged, or will we not be on that level yet? 

I enjoyed the learning that was produced this week. I thought it was cool learning about the basics of content creation where you read the information, then filter it, edit it, create it and share it. It was like I was putting a name to the type of research most of us do, but without realizing it is called content curation. The steps of content curation reminded me of writing my history papers in my undergrad, and as I move into a teaching profession, I naturally see myself curating in kind of the same way as my undergrad. But now I see how important it is to properly curate information for my future classroom. The topic of hoarding or dumping came up and my thoughts were “uh oh, what one am I?” I am happy I now know the difference between being a hoarder, scrooge, tabloid and robot and how to avoid falling into those categories. 

When deciding what tool to look at during class time, I decided to look at Notion. I consider myself a lover of organization, I like to have my to-do lists, and notes all in order. However, I was skeptical of using an online platform for this because I am a big paper and pen gal. With that being said, I still decided to give it a whirl, and all it gave me was a sense of being overwhelmed. I took my time to explore the platform and try and get the hang of it, and after a while I started to feel less overwhelmed, but in conclusion, I am going to stick to my handy ol tool of pen and paper.

This isn’t to say I didn’t like the platform, I found some aspects pretty cool and I am sure if I stuck with it and explored it even more I would end up liking it. I do like that it felt very organized and had lots of headers to easily navigate the platform. I also like that you can collaborate with peers, and that AI is built into it which becomes a helpful tool in this ever changing world. So that was my experience with curation tools, and although I will opt out of using them right now, I can definitely see myself using them in the future.  I am curious if my fellow readers and classmates feel like they prefer paper and pen, or if exploring these different curation tools made them feel more organized and able to properly curate content, let me know in the comments below!  

Before I end this blog, I had one more part of this class that stood out to me, and it was during our guest speaker Joseph Gamble. A fellow classmate asked Mr. Gamble if there were any tools to help students learn French, as most teaching programs these days don’t offer teacher candidates French. Because of this most of us don’t feel confident with teaching the subject (when I say most I mean me). Mr.Gamble gave a good suggestion of using the platform Antidote which corrects your grammar, and allows you to work independently in French. I decided to explore this platform on my own and I liked what I saw. It seems like it could help lots of students as it has lots of tools in it to help promote learning French. I liked that students could listen to French being spoken because that is a super important aspect when trying to learn the language. 

Alright folks that’s all, have a wonderful week, until next time!

This week we had a guest speaker, Jesse Miller. Our first big conversation we had was about BC banning cell phones in class from bell to bell. Jesse had strong opinions that this should not take place and that students should have their phones in class, and I slightly disagree with this. 

 I don’t think they should be banned per-se but I honestly do think cellphones can be a big problem in classrooms. It is quite common for students to go on their personal devices during class and not focus on the lesson and then they can potentially fall behind. As a future teacher, this frustrates me because if I were to get the backlash of a student falling behind and getting the blame put on me, it would make me feel upset. If a student is falling behind because they are on their phone, that doesn’t seem fair to teachers who work very hard to make sure they come up with engaging lessons and instead students are sitting on their phones not paying attention. I am speaking from personal experience because when I grew up, I saw many of my classmates, including  me, go on their phone during class time, and completely dissociate with the lesson. Things may be different now and students may not be doing this as much, but I still think cell phones are a big problem in some schools. I then saw this article that had a testimony from a grade 9 student who feels like cellphones in classrooms are harming her learning. With this being said, I do think depending on the class there might have to be rules in place where cellphones have to be put away during lesson time, unless they are needed for research at a certain point. 

A couple classmates and I had a conversation about the ban on Monday and we were all in agreement that maybe they shouldn’t be completely banned, but we do believe that cellphones when available during lesson time do cause quite a bit of distraction. Through research on my own about this ban, I looked at the comments section after. The majority of comments were from parents saying, “I need to be in contact with my child at all times” and to me that is just silly. The office has a phone if you must get in contact, unless a student has a medical condition that requires them to carry a communication device. Within this conversation, there was a classmate who is also a parent, and he stated his opinion about cellphones and communication. He stated he doesn’t need his kids to have cellphones in order to communicate. He said they can use the office phone if it really comes down to an emergency, he feels there is no need for cellphones in class. It was very interesting to get multiple perspectives on this topic, especially since we are all teachers in training.

Another conversation that we had in class that stuck with me was the topic of staff posting and sending photos while at school. If they do that  on the school network, that information can be retrieved. This was crazy to me just how much teachers have to think about and be aware of their actions. This class was very informational and freaked me out a bit on just how careful we have to be with technology. It feels like teachers are heavily surveilled, which I understand, and it is a good reminder to all of us future teachers to be aware of how easy it is for anyone to find our digital footprints.

Photo by Ollie Bray on Flickr licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Learning About Copyright
Week 3 was very informational for me. In our first semester, a professor had touched on the subject that we as teachers can only use a certain amount of resources from the internet without getting in trouble with copyright. This was all that was said and so it freaked me, (as well as my friends) out after hearing this because we felt we had no elaboration and were lost on where to go to find more information… That’s where this class came in and saved the day! 

First of all, I embarrassingly had no idea that there was such a thing as “creative commons licenses”for finding images on google that are not copyrighted and therefore you can use. I was very fascinated by this, and also shocked that I had no idea about it until this class. However I am very grateful for learning about this tool.

Screenshot from Google Images

Secondly, I appreciate having a new resource like Open Educational Resources (OERs) that was shown in class. These resources reduce my anxiety on the topic of copyright and what we as teachers can and can’t use, and this will be a very valuable website in my future teaching career. I respect that in class we touched on attributing and celebrating OERs by giving credit to their information and pictures. I think a lot of us (including me) forget how important it is to do this.  I should know especially because my dad was a photographer and editor of our local newspaper, and every time someone used his photo or article without crediting him, I was stuck with listening to his rant on how disrespectful it was, so sorry dad for sometimes forgetting to celebrate people’s work, I will do better!  Click here to get an easy way to build a citation and give credit!

I like the idea of using multimedia in a classroom to record the session, so students can look back and use the video as a tool. I think this can be very beneficial because if students feel like they need to review a lesson that they didn’t quite get, they can slow it down, or review it whenever they want. Canva is a great screencasting platform that appealed to me the most. 

Live It Earth

Having David Russell-Loewen zoom in to speak to us was great. I loved being able to go through the resource and see what it was all about. My group chose to do the STEAM dog treat challenge and I instantly knew that Live It Earth is going to be used in my future classroom. The programs are so engaging for kids, and they have many cross curricular components. When my group and I were discussing the lesson, Hannah came up with the idea of turning the dog treat challenge into a math lesson as the dog treats incorporated fractions and measuring. Another member in our group then came up with the idea of not just limiting it to dogs, but any animal a student might have at home. Our group had lots of fun discussing and thinking of ways we can bring this resource into our future classrooms. Upon further exploration of the website I love that it incorporates Indigenous perspectives and that  it’s not just students sitting on screens and doing an activity on the computer, it actually gets students engaged and doing activities inside and outside the classroom and off of technology which is much needed these days (in certain aspects).  Also Live It Earth gets bonus points because David Russell-Loewen is working with the programs in my home town of Nelson BC and the Kokanee salmon lesson was filmed at the park that I went on lots of field trips to when I was younger, so that’s pretty cool!

Photo by Ashley Hall licensed under CC BY 4.0