Category: Weekly Reflections Page 1 of 2

This week, guest speaker Tina O’Keefe gave us a presentation on gamification and game-based learning. Although we’ve been discussing this topic throughout the whole term, it was really awesome to see a teacher’s rich and comprehensive implementation of tech in her class. The google classroom digital choice board that Tina showed us reminded me of Soft Start, which is an activity my link2practice mentor teacher uses in her class. The digital choice board gives a variety of activities at different levels that students have autonomy with. Students can choose activities which they can enjoy and learn from depending on level they feel they are at. This is exactly what I like about Soft Start, which is just an offline version where student have free choice activity time. I feel like UDL comes into play with both of these activities, as they are designed to be inclusive and autonomous rather than adapted to be inclusive.

Furthermore, gamification and game-based learning is incorporated in both Soft Start and Tina’s digital choice board. Games are a way for students to learn in an engaging way that normalizes trial and error. Instead of a one off test that students can fail or pass, with games, it is the norm to fail a level, but continuously try in order to progress. Even games that directly have to do with curricular content can be so beneficial to a student’s overall learning. Games such as chess, sudoku, and puzzles of any sort.

Hour of Code is a great resource we were introduced to with tons of different games and activities for varying grades to learn coding. One that I found for my grade 4/5 link2practice class is SciGirls: Code Quest. This game incorporates science with its ocean based theme, is leveled for beginners and increases in difficulty, which allows for development and is also goal-based, which incites motivation and incentive. In addition, the game has both audio and visual elements that students can interact with.

To go further, indigenizing online learning is a topic that comes with complexities because tech education is inherently not aligned with the traditonal indigenous ways of learning and knowing, which are rooted in community, togetherness, experience and place. The article “The Five R’s for Indigenizing Online Learning: A Case Study of the First Nations Schools’ Principals Course”, discusses this hurdle and how it can be addressed using the five R’s: respect, relevance, reciprocity, responsibility and relationships. In some cases, where accessibility to education is limited, online learning may be the only plausible option and the R’s must be implemented into decisions for how to indigenize online learning.

Hearing Jeff Hopkin’s talk this week took me back to one of our first reflection posts on the film Most Likely to Succeed, which was a documentary about another innovative tech school called High Tech High. That school seemed so far out of reach to me when I watched it, but it was in much closer in reach than I thought. Jeff’s Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII) is right here in Victoria and the school is taking strides into a very similar direction as High Tech High with unstructured classes, student inquiry based learning, and rule-breaking!

For both High Tech High and PSII, what boggles me the most is the trust that the parents have with signing their children up with such radically innovative schools and I give a big kudos to them and the students themselves. However, It also says a lot that someone like Jeff, with so much experience in the traditional public school system would veer off the conventional tracks completely to start up a school like PSII. It says a lot about the currect school system, which I went through, which most of you readers went through, and will work with. It makes me question how I was taught and how students are taught now.

I wrote about this in my Most Likely to Succeed reflection as well, but I personally see the issues of the educational system rooted in expectations, expectations of a post-secondary education/degree. Because students are expected to know this and this in grade 5, they must learn this in grade 4. Because students need to get into university, they must know this and do this and get this grade. Students are trained to get a degree that they’ve been convinced guarantees stability. This is why I really like Jeff’s approach to avoid the BC curriculum in PSII. Schools like PSII and High Tech High are experimental, and pioneering. They’re examples for the future and It may take a long time, but I can see a future where these innovative schools will become the traditional system for all of BC and perhaps Canada.

“Students who only know how to perform well in today’s education system—get good grades and test scores, and earn degrees—will no longer be those who are most likely to succeed. Thriving in the twenty-first century will require real competencies, far more than academic credentials.”

Tony Wagner, Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era

I had never heard of EdCamps before until this week’s class. Having an event like EdCamps to have meaningful discussions on areas of education that I’m interested in, sounds amazing. Furthermore, these discussions provide differing perspectives from a variety of people in the field of education. From our own sample EdCamp in class, I joined the Gender Identity, Classroom Management, and ELL Learning Support discussions. All of these conversations were really enlightenting, but in the Classroom Management talk, the discussion on TOC preparation stood out to me the most.

Just in the past 2 months, my cohort has been told on multiple occasions that as substitutes, we could be called to high schools too, despite having graduated from the Elementary BEd program. This definitely scares me, but the emergency sub bag idea from Joanna, made me think of possibly creating an online emergency sub bag with tech ed resources for all grade levels including high school grades. With this thought (which I also wrote about in my comment on Nova’s “Week 7: The Tactical TOC” blog post), I thought I should actually try starting an emergency online resource collection. Below, I’ve curated a list of possible resources for the grade 10-12 level, which are the most daunting grades to me. I’ve tried to select resources that could be used in any class of any subject.

HIGH SCHOOL TechEd RESOURCES (Grades 10-12)

1. Kahoot: Trivia Kahoots to use for a whole class activity

• “All About Smartphone”
• “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”
• “General Trivia”

2. Countries of the World Quiz: Students challenge themselves to name as many countries as possible within the time limit. This can be done as a class as well (no internet help allowed).

• https://www.jetpunk.com/quizzes/how-many-countries-can-you-name

3. Films

• The Pursuit of Happyness (Movie 2006)
  • Accessible through Netflix

• Dead Poets Society (Movie 1989)
  • Accessible through Disney Plus

• The Rescue (Documentary 2021)
  • Accessible through Disney Plus

• My Octopus Teacher (Documentary 2020)
  • Accessible through Netflix

4. GeoGuessr: Students can play individually or as a class to find the location of 360 image on a map.

https://www.geoguessr.com/

These are just a few resource options, but I’m sure there are so many more! Comment on this post with more ideas for a high school class or add onto the ones I’ve mentioned with more movies or documentaries, kahoot games and online games. Thanks for reading!

In this week’s class, we had a great workshop class with guest speaker Rich McCue. The speaker went over numerous EdTech resources to use within educational videos such as, timelapses, slow motion, 360º cameras, GIFs, and virtual reality. With Rich, we learned how to make our own interactive screen recorded educational video using Screencastify and the H5P program! I chose to create a video explaining how to play the online game Wordle with multiple choice questions embedded throughout. Check it out below!

I’ll definitely be using H5P tools for my own class projects and in my own future classrooms! I want to teach more intermediate elementary classes so I think students would be able to learn indepentantly with H5P tools like the tutorial videos we made in class. My Link2Practice partner and I actually had the chance to lead a picture book art activity in our grade 4/5 class and the picture book I wanted to use was not available to us in hard copy. Thankfully, there were a lot of youtube videos online of teachers and students reading the book so all was well and lesson went great! Despite the book being read to the students from a video, the students were really engaged. The book was called The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt by Riel Nason.

In the future, I could incorporate H5P tools to embed interactivity in my own picture book reading video. The video would include questions that pertain to the activity planned around the book. For example, our art activity about The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt, was for the class to create their own quilt ghost by creating many square patches with different patterns with a cool tone focus. These art elements and the acitivty itself can be introduced, hinted at, and or highlighted through interactive questions throughout the book reading video. There could be questions such as, “What kinds of colours do you see on the quilt ghost?” or “What shape is the quilt made up of?”.

According to the Multimedia Learning Theory, including interactivity to a video should increase longterm understanding. Having multiple mediums within our learning and teaching tools engages students by requring multiple senses and active minds. In the case of the picture book video with interactive questions, there is incentive to listen in order to answer questions correctly and the questions embedded in the video are preparing students for the activity that will follow. I’m so glad I got to learn how to use this amazing H5P tool! I know it’s going to come in handy in the future and even right now as I go into practicums and work as a tutor.

For the Thanksgiving long weekend, I went back home to the mainland, where I ate a lot and slept a whole lot. It was so nice to have my mom’s home-cooked meals again after a month and going back to my double bed, it felt so big and comfortable compared to the twin bed I have in Victoria. For our family’s little Thanksgiving meal, I had the pleasure of contributing with bacon wrapped asparagus. It was so easy to make and so tasty that I’m tempted to make myself a whole batch here in Victoria, but my food budget does not have room for that at the moment so I’ll simply have to find joy in my memory of the dish.

I’ve really been loving all the food free inquiry projects and since mine has nothing to do with food, I thought I would take this opportunity to do a food post of my own.

The recipe I used was from Well Plated By Erin Clarke, but I adjusted the serving size to 12 because that’s how many bacon slices were in my package and also, there were 6 people to feed, which meant everyone got 2 bundles. The recipe is easily adaptable and I used it as more of a guideline for ingredients and cooking method. It was such a simple recipe to make and my whole family loved it so I would 100% recommend!

Overall, I had a great restful weekend and I’m already looking forward to the home-cooked meals that are coming when I go home again for reading break!

Giving my phone away for classes was a normal daily pattern in high school. It never felt comfortable to do so, but it also never felt weird to me that teachers would ask us to give them our personal phones. I remember gazing at the shoe hanger or box full of phones during classes, wondering if I got an important notification or just out of discomfort with the fact that my phone was not secure with me. Only recently after Jesse’s talk and our class conversation this week did I come to realize how weird it is that I’m so used to teachers taking my phone.

If I think about it carefully, I should have the right to refuse giving my own personal phone away to a teacher, but I know for a fact that some, if not most teachers wouldn’t have reacted well to a student’s refusal. I’ve never tried it, but I just can’t see it ending well with how serious my teachers were with their phone jails. Also, if I look back on my personal learning experience and learning outcomes from high school, there is no difference in productivity and success between classes where I had my phone or didn’t. However, it’s no lie that devices can be a distraction, so navigating that in my future classes is going to be a learning process that starts now.

Jesse’s talk was really eye-opening on some aspects, but also reaffirming for me and my experience with technology at home and in the classroom. Time and time again I hear that technology must be used wisely, but after hearing Jesse’s talk, I think as an educator, that responsibility quadruples in importance. The chance of seeing a student on a dating app is not an issue I had ever thought about and the dangers of my iPhone photos floating around in the cloud hadn’t ever crossed my mind. Also, I was not aware of how public my personal posts and messages could become under public school wifi, which was honestly quite scary. However, it makes me aware of the integrity I should carry myself with on the internet and in my public or private accounts as a future educator.

Although there’s a lot to worry about with technology use, it’s become an unavoidable, essential part of our lives, which is a point I really appreciated Jesse talking about. As a Gen-Z myself, throughout my schooling, the use of tech has evolved drastically. As everyone around me started acquiring their own ipods and ipads, how we communicated with each other shifted, making me feel left out without a device of my own. My parents and teachers disciplined me on device use, labelling it as addictive, distracting and unproductive. Meanwhile, I was learning my way around new technology that in a few years would be embedded into schools and workplaces as essential tools. My parents now spend just as much time on their devices as I do. Not to say there aren’t any detriments that come with technology, but being a responsible digital citizen is crucial, as Jesse is teaching.

Within the film Most Likely to Succeed, its exploration into the innovative school of High Tech High captivated me completely. The way the school functions, completely breaks the traditional ways of instructing, learning, and assessing. Students and teachers have almost complete autonomy as to how they teach, learn, and show their learning. At large, High Tech High is the high school of my dreams. The school is focused on genuine learning of not only content, but soft skills such as communication, creative thinking, time management and conflict resolution, with the intent to prepare students for the technologically advancing world we live in. The students in the film were completely engaged and in control of their learning and It was clear that High Tech High Students were experiencing insightful learning, rather than short-term memorization.

There is a lot to learn from the way the High Tech High teachers approached instructing in the film. Seeing the amount of control the students were given to complete their projects shows that their teachers were prioritizing deeper understanding. They allowed for students to experience conflicts with one another, and to get lost in their learning process no matter the time it would take to find understanding and success. A huge example of this is the way the student Brian, failed to lead his group to finish their exhibition piece on time, but he continued to work on it even through the summer. His teacher stuck by him and supported him as he made more mistakes and learned from those missteps to finally find success. There is a scene in the film where Brian’s teacher observes him making mistakes right in front of him. His teacher voices how tempting it is to plainly point out the issue that needs fixing, but he resists, knowing full well that it would actually be a disservice to Brian’s learning process. In the end, not only was Brian incredibly content, but it was obvious his teacher found an equal amount of excitement to see Brian’s growth. As a future teacher, I hope to build a similar community within my classroom where students feel comfortable to learn and make mistakes.