Category: EdTech (Page 2 of 3)

I wanted to create a blog post where I left a link to Edutopia as a future resource for myself, so here it is!

https://www.edutopia.org/

Edutopia has been recommended as a great resource with research based ideas for teachers. Hopefully it is something that will help me down the road!

On Monday we had the opportunity to visit an inquiry based classroom at George Jay Elementary.  Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt, co-author of Inquiry Mindset, was kind enough to host our tech class for an afternoon visit with her.

http://rebeccabathursthunt.com

While there she spoke about the different stages of inquiry and gave us examples of how it could be used in different classrooms.

Retrieved from:

http://rebeccabathursthunt.com/sketchnotes/

She teaches kindergarten, which means that she rarely moves beyond controlled inquiry with her students. However, she has reached the less teacher guided inquiry once in the past years with her students. A key take away that I had was that just because you are an inquiry based classroom, that does not mean that you don’t have teacher guided questions and projects. It is important to start out with structured inquiry if your students have never experienced inquiry before. I also reflected that, just as students progress and process at different rates, some students may need teacher guided inquiery for a longer time, while others may be ready for a free inquiry at a faster rate.

We were also given the chance to explore her classroom. I have put some pictures from the class below.

She also gave us the link to her slideshow, which is posted below as well.

bit.ly/IMUvic2018

I have provided a link to Michael’s blog, where he provided us with various additional resources from our class visit to PSII. There are lots of useful links that I know will be helpful in the future!

Resources from the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry

This weekend I had my second go at painting with watercolour paints. I had thicker paper this time and I a LOT lighter with my paints. The result was much better and the paint actually looks like watercolour paints. I decided to add some paint to the zentangles I had been doodling. I only have primary colours in my paint set so I created the pink, purple, and teal colour by combining different primary colours together. That was probably my favourite part of the entire process, creating the colours. I should have let my pen ink dry out longer, unfortunately when the water hit my lines, the pen ink bled out a little.

Here is the 3 colours that I created below:

The first thing I have to say after our visit to the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII), can I please go back in time and redo my high school education?

Jeff Hopkins, founder of the school, provided us with a great introduction of the school, were given time to ask many questions, and allowed to freely explore the building. He spent some time going over how they communicate and work with their students to ensure that all students get what they need from their school experience. He also gave a great rundown on how the students and staff use Trello to communicate and track learning. They lay out their card orders as follows:

I really like that they encourage students to write down all the questions that they have around their learning, even if they aren’t going to explore them right away.

One room that I did not get to enter but interested me was the Sensory Room. The room was created by a student as an inquiry project, there is a sign in whiteboard, and people can choose if they are willing to share the sensory room or use it by themselves. There was also a quiet library work area, which means that they are allowing their students to choose the kind of environment they feel they would work best in.

I did not have the chance to speak to any students but it appeared that all the students I saw were working hard and collaborating together. I hope to have another opportunity to learn more about this forward thinking school.

It has been a few weeks since I have gotten a chance to sit down and play around with my painting again. This time I wanted to try out my watercolour paints. I was a bit nervous since I have more experiences using acrylic paint over watercolour. I watched this YouTube video to get some tips before getting started. In hindsight I should have watched the entire video but I was a bit impatient so I decided to kind of wing it. 

I realized before starting that I did not have any ‘watercolour’ paper, which meant that the effects of the paint weren’t quite what I had hoped for. Even so, it was still fun playing around with the colours and creating different textures on the paper. 

I decided to tie in some concepts that we have been covering in our Teaching Art in the Elementary and Middle School Classrooms. This week we looked at using ‘lines’ in art so I decided to follow that theme with my painting at home. I started by using a sharpie to draw different lines on the paper. Once I had done that, I painted the various shapes that had been created by my lines intersecting.

Going forward I will try to be a bi more patient and watch some more tutorials in their entirety. I found another tutorial that seems quite useful as well. I know that my sketching skills will not be nowhere near this artist’s, however it will still be fun to try some pencil sketchings on the paper before putting paint on as well. Here it is posted below:

At the beginning of the month we were asked to review BC FIPPA Guidelines and reflect on what we learned. While reading the document I had various questions arise that  I wanted to share.

The first question is around how to best teach students about asking for consent from their peers before posting content with their peers in it. Even if the students obtain consent from their peers, if they are posting the content while at school, does that fall under the responsibility of the teacher and school?

Another question that arose for me, if a school uses codenames in their email, does that protect the privacy of the individual? Will the content being stored still connect it to the name of that individual if the full name has been used elsewhere?

These are questions that probably have simple and obvious answers, but the unfamiliar language has my head spinning.

How do we best set up students to be successful at jobs that don’t yet exist? This is a question that stemmed from watching the movie Most Likely to Succeed in our EDCI 336 class. While we all know that jobs are not the priority when thinking about our students, it was still a question that caused me to stop and wonder. During the film an interviewee mentioned that the most important things we can teach kids now are “soft skills”; things like communication, problem solving, interpersonal skills, and creativity. If you are able to model and encourage these skills with your students, does that mean they will have the greatest chance at adapting to future jobs and envrionments that we have yet to create? 

These questions are ones that I am hoping to explore further as I begin my education to become a teacher. I know that there are no concrete answers as society is evolving further and further towards a technology centred one. One thing I do know is that the importance of human connection remains, a central aspect of teaching that I can focus on while exploring all that this career has to offer.