Category: Weekly Reflections (Page 1 of 2)

Here we are at the end of the road, what a journey it has been, I sure have learned a lot! It is funny to look back at all my posts and see the little mistakes I made with posts, or seeing how afraid I was to start this course and to see the growth I have made. I feel much more confident with tech now. Looking back at my first blog post, I struggled with setting up my WordPress but I promised myself that I would have a growth mindset throughout this experience, and I can confidently say I did. I feel so much better at navigating technology and finding great resources in the technology world that I never knew existed.

In honor of this being the last blog post, I thought I would do a countdown of the top 5 takeaways from this course in the category of “information” and “resources” so here we go!

Starting with the information category in no particular order or ranking. 

1.Creative Commons

When I first learned about creative commons at the beginning of the course, I was shocked that I had no idea what it was. I am so happy I was exposed to this tool before I entered into my teaching career! I now know how to attribute images and find ones that are not copyrighted and I can apply that to my future teaching when I need to create presentations or resources that pull from online images. 

2. AI

The power of AI! This class has definitely changed my opinion on AI from once being a hater, to now seeing it as a powerful tool in the teaching profession. It is a time saver, and a helpful assistant, but you still have to be weary when using it. I loved doing the experiment on creating your own flower and then getting AI to create a flower. It really puts into perspective how useful the tool can be. I will be applying AI to my future teaching practice as a tool and time saver for sure. 

3.Inquiry 

We had two weeks in this class where we talked about Inquiry, and it was super beneficial. This class has exposed me the most to the topic of inquiry and I am thankful for that. In our second week we touched on the topic and we learned about the different types of inquiry such as structured, controlled, guided and free inquiry.  This was a cool introduction to inquiry because I was able to see all the possibilities. Then in week 8 we dove deeper into inquiry, and this is where I gained information that I can apply to my future teaching practice. The biggest takeaway for me was just the idea that we can bring little bits of inquiry into the traditional school system.  We don’t have to completely change the system but by bringing inquiry into the classroom in small segments it will create an abundance of benefits. Swapping out more teacher-led lessons for student-led lessons and building in time for reflection at the end of every lesson is something I want to try once I get my own classroom. In my upcoming practicum there are two blocks a week where students engage in inquiry, and I am very excited to see the process take place. 

4.The Potential Of Zoom

We talked about this in week 9 and it was also the topic of my group’s inquiry project. As our world has transitioned out of Covid-19 lockdown, the Zoom classroom has stayed with us. I never really thought about how zoom class could stick with us years from now, I thought it would die down, but now I see that we can use it to our advantage in the school system. 

5. Internet Safety 

This came up in multiple classes, for both the safety of teachers and the safety of students when using the internet. This was so beneficial for me going into the teaching profession and understanding all the considerations we must take when using the internet. I will now always think about FIPPA to ensure I keep my class information as safe as can be. 

Now lets turn our attention over to my top 5 resources from this class that I will always keep in my back pocket. 

1.Live It Earth

I loved this resource because science is definitely not my strong suit, so having a fun interactive way of teaching Stem is so beneficial. I love all the challenges, learning and fun that this platform has to offer. I will definitely be using this in my future practice.

2.BrainPOP ELL

This resource came out of my own research after the EDcamp class. Finding resources for ELL learners is something we are not taught in this program (at least not yet) which seems a little silly to me. So when I discovered this resource I got quite excited. What I really like about this resource is the interactive and easy to access component. It isnt overwhelming and I like that there are different units so that students can progress. 

3.Interland

As I discussed above, internet safety was a big takeaway for me during this class. Interland is a cool resource that can teach students the importance of internet safety in an accessible and understanding way. I think every young student should try this game out, and I will definitely be remembering this resource  for my future classroom.

4. TimelyGrader

A quick shoutout to our guest speaker Chris Du and his AI tool, who joined us in week 6. TimelyGrader works as a teachers assistant, and my favourite feature of this tool is the  rubrics it can create to provide a structured framework for assessing assignments, outlining specific criteria and expectations because rubrics are biggg time consumers. It is safe to say I will definitely be using this in the near future. 

5.PBS Kids Games 

I LOVE this resource. It is an awesome website filled with so many games that provide fun and creative ways to let students use their imagination and learn at the same time.  I tried out the game “Story Creator” where it based its activity off of real life story creators, and allows students to make their own fun story.  I was having a grand old time making my characters be in a pizza palace, getting stuck in pudding and being rescued by a dinosaur. This resource allows teachers to meet curriculum expectations while also adding fun to it, this will always be in my back pocket!

Screenshot of me playing PBSKids Game. Photo by Ashley Hall off of the PBS Kids website licensed under CC 4.0

So there we have it, my top 10 takeaways from this course. One topic I wish to learn more about, as I am not too confident in it is the idea of being a curator or a dumper. I think I need to work on understanding that topic a bit more, but that will come with time!

This blog has come to an end. It has been a pleasure interacting with you all through my keyboard. Until we meet again.

Yours Truly,

Ashley Hall

This class was really cool to learn about. Although I grew up during the technology boom of this generation, I was never exposed to gamification in the classroom. Because of this I was very intrigued as to how I can incorporate this into my future classroom. I liked the discussion our class was having about if too much gamification is a bad thing. On one hand it can be super engaging for students, but on the other hand if there is too much gamification, it can make the times when there are no games in the classroom super boring.  

This conversation really made me think deeper about the pros and cons of gamification. I agree that we shouldn’t gamify everything, and I don’t think that is the intention of gamification, but one pro that I see that can be so beneficial is that it can get even the most disengaged students engaged in learning. Joanna made a good point by saying  “this is the reality we gave them” (as in being surrounded by technology) so why not play to that advantage and give the students a tool that they really enjoy and engage in. I decided to check out one of the educational tools we discussed in our class to see what it was all about, here are my thoughts: 

I hopped over to the website Interland to see what it was all about. This game was created so that students can be prepared to make smart decisions and to safely explore and play online. The first thing I noticed about this platform was how awesome the wording was for kids. It used sentences such as “be a confident explorer of the online world” and “spread good vibes” when entering the kind kingdom. I think this language is super accessible and fun for kids which adds just that much more to the game. Next, I checked out the topics Interland teaches kids. There was kind kingdom, teaching kids that  it’s cool to be kind. There was reality river, teaching kids to not fall for fake information. There was mindful mountain, teaching kids to share with care. And finally there was tower of treasure, teaching kids to secure your secrets and internet safe. I decided to explore tower of treasure. I liked how interactive it was and it had just the right amount of information for kids to grasp the concepts. As an adult, I even learned a little something about keeping your passwords safe, so all in all it was a very helpful game to explore. I will definitely be using this especially with younger students who are just learning how to use the internet, and it is also a good refresher for older students as well! 

Here I am playing the tower of treasure world, learning about safe passwords.

Photo by Ashley Hall is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Here I am finishing the tower of treasure world, an “epic win” as they say

Photo by Ashley Hall is licensed under CC BY 4.0

One thing I really liked about what our guest speaker Laura had to say was on the topic of relationships and gamification/ coding. Laura brought up the idea that we often make students do awkward icebreaker games that can make students nervous at times. Instead why don’t we put them in the experience of figuring out coding and put their focus on something shared so that it takes away that awkward feeling while still building a relationship. I liked this idea because  it gives students a common purpose and makes the environment more comfortable for all, while also being able to immerse themselves in learning. 

This class was super cool to engage in and I would like to end this blog post with a question to my fellow readers. If gamification was incorporated into your learning as a young student, would you have been more engaged in the learning? Let me know in the comments below!

This week’s tech class was super cool! I never knew what “EdCamp” was, but after participating in a mini one, I see all the benefits to it. First of all, I really liked all the choices that were offered. It was cool to be able to switch back and forth between groups if you wanted to and get a variety of learning. The only downside I felt was that all the topics were so rich and beneficial that it sucked not being able to attend all of them! However, it is nice we get access to all the notes from every group so that you can see what others talked about. My favourite part about EdCamp is that you got to learn from everyone, and all their perspectives. It’s so cool to have a room filled with knowledgeable classmates who bring something new and different to every topic. For the first session, I was in the group, “Managing Difficult Behaviours.”  Our group came up with lots of great ideas and strategies and reasons for why students could be acting this way. One of the most beneficial conversations we had, and something that I feel like is so obvious but so important is really ensuring you have a good relationship with a student. This allows for genuine conversations, trust and makes the child not feel targeted when something goes wrong.

 For the second group I was in “Tools for ELL Learners.” This conversation was also super beneficial, and again hearing what everyone had to say was so cool as it was a collaboration from so many different perspectives and ideas. This was a topic that I didn’t know much about, and I am anxious about it in my future classroom because I feel like I have been given no resources for this topic. One classmate pointed out that it is not a bad thing to continue learning their first language, in fact extremely important! And it is important to be doing so at school. Students will lose literacy abilities when we disrupt their progress in their first language. During this session we also talked about using technology with ELL learners such as Edpuzzle, and I found this super helpful to learn about. It can be used to insert Youtube videos to translate, vocabulary work, and comprehension. After class I decided to check out other edtech tools that could be used for ELL learners. I came across this article that gave quite a few tools, and decided to explore one form the list. I came across this tool called BrainPOP ELL. I explored the site, and found that it had a good mixture of easy to access movies, activities, quizzes and games for all different ages. In each level, there are 6 units in it providing students with lots of support. It connects reading and written words, there are interactive features that allow students to practice grammar and explore new vocabulary.  It is good to know that there are tools out there that can support ELL learners and that are easy access fro teachers. 

Screenshot from the BrainPOP ELL site, showing the different levels and units.

Overall, this was a super cool and helpful class. I loved hearing everyone’s different opinions and ideas. It was a great way to have an open discussion and brainstorm all together!

When Covid-19 stormed the world, I was in the last month of my second year of University. When the world moved all education online for my third and half of my fourth year of University, I was only able to see online education from that level. So going into this class, I had my doubts and was curious as to how online school would look for those not yet at the post-secondary level. All I knew prior to this class was that zoom classes consisted of getting motivated to turn on your camera and get out of bed. We are all mature adults, who, for the most part could seem to get to class on time and have motivation to complete the work.  so my skepticism was how would this look for younger students? Do they have the motivation? Are they self-disiplined enough to hold themselves accountable without the teacher being physically present?  I was happily proved wrong, and honestly it seems like younger students might even be more engaged and motivated then us older folk were at online classes. 

After listening to Meghan Carrico, she really answered all my doubts and questions about online school in the primary and intermediate years. Her talk really opened my eyes to how a class could be done online. I never knew what the structure of online school would look like in younger years, but after fridays class,it seems manageable nad well laid out

I get all the benefits to online classes, like students who don’t feel comfortable in a real classroom setting, accessibility and  students living in rural areas, etc, etc can all learn online. I just worry about the social aspect of it at such a young age. The socialization during your younger years is so important, and you learn the most through your social connections in my opinion. By having young students online in-front of a screen all the time, and not in person with classmates it seems harmful. I read an article by Forbes saying the harmful effects of zoom, such as the social isolation that I already talked about, but also theres no outside play with friends, or critical brain breaks like the article suggests. I think in order to balance it out, a blended classroom would be beneficial,  just like how universities have shifted to after Covid. If you are sick or cant make it you can hop on zoom so you dont miss any learning. I love that 

Photo by Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC 4.0

I am curious if any of my fellow classmates can share their feelings towards social interactions with their classmates during covid. Did it have an effect on you? Do you feel like nothing really changed? Let me know! 

Enjoy your day everyone, cheers!

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

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