Inquiry
We started off this week by learning about types of student inquiry, and I would like to touch on that first. The idea of students participating in inquiry projects is new to me. I never experienced this growing up, and so learning about it has gotten me very excited about my future self providing my future students with opportunities to partake in inquiry. Inquiry projects came up in our first term of this program, which we touched on briefly, and the topic left me with some questions. I was always worried about the fact that students wouldn’t participate or engage in it, and if given the option to do inquiry, how would you push kids down the right path of a topic? It just seemed too open for me to manage as a teacher. However, after this class where we talked about the different types of inquiry such as structured, controlled, guided and free inquiry, I feel much more confident about introducing inquiry projects. Now that I know there are different types of inquiry it will be easy to start with say a structured or guided inquiry at the beginning of the year and then ease into a free inquiry later on in the year. This section of the class was very beneficial for me!
FIPPA!!!
Photo by Blue Coat Photos on Flickr licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
The next section of our class focused on privacy and what we as teachers need to think about when using a new tool. This conversation both scared me and made me realize how aware I need to be when using any tool that deals with students privacy. it was so interesting to learn all the little things you have to be careful about in regards to the privacy of students, for example; If there is information about their lives, you can’t put their last name, we can’t use certain platforms because the data isn’t stored in Canada, anyone can search teachers and see their records of the potential bad things they have done etc etc. Having Ken Yew speak to our class about privacy relating to teaching was so beneficial. As someone who works in a school district, he brought lots of insight on real situations that we as future teachers may not have known about, but now we do. The learning that came out of this week was eye opening, scary and so important to understand because teachers hold so much of students privacy on the internet, we need to be cautious and know exactly what we are doing in order to keep our students safe. The good news however is that as Ken Yew stated, districts give so much support to ensure online safety, we just need to ask!
Teaching Online Safety
Learning about the tool “Terms of Service:Didn’t Read” was so important to discover not only for teachers, but also a super important tool to teach students so they understand the circumstances of their online presence. After class, some classmates and I were having a discussion on how we as teachers definitely want to focus on teaching our students about online safety especially because we were the first generation to have smartphones in the classroom, and we never learned about digital footprints and the dangers of the internet, and that would have been so helpful to know. I love that we have now been equipped with some tools to teach online safety that I will definitely be using such as “Terms of Service: Didn’t Read” and the graphic novel, Social Smarts: Nothing Personal!
P.S. I Got Pwned…
Im going to end this blog off with an ironic story. When the topic of getting pwned came up in class, the friends around me quickly got onto the website “have I been pwned?” only to find out we all have been pwned multiple times which was both freaky and funny to watch everyone whisper “noooooo I’ve been pwned.” 10 minutes after class ended an email popped up stating that my twitter (or X account) has had unusual login attempts….. someone was trying to pwned me… how ironic 🙁
Photo by Ashley Hall is licensed under CC BY 4.0
