I was pretty exhausted this lecture, so I feel like I couldn’t participate as much as I would have been able to otherwise. I was glad that we got the chance to discuss some of the concepts surrounding technology in education and the conversations seemed fairly productive. There were a lot of really useful resources in the Mural, and it was nice to get the chance to check out a few of them as a class. I found it a bit hard to stay focused and engaged when we were just discussing different resources, their principles, and what they can be used for. Going into more depth with them could be an easier way to make me think of applications for them. I think checking them out as a class or even individually at the computers would be a really good activity and allow people some time to experiment with the programs and see their applications. That being said, I definitely have a mental list of things I want to experiment with now. The University of Colorado PhET simulations are especially interesting to me. They seem like they’d be really useful in a science classroom as either resources or mentor texts for students interested in creating a learning tool as an assignment of some kind. MURAL seemed really useful, but I’m kind of hoping they update it a bit before I’d use it in a classroom. There is no mobile site for it and trying to access digital whiteboards that way just leads to a page prompting you to download the app. Said app isn’t actually all that useful either. It’s “view-only” which means that people using their mobile devices won’t be able to do anything but watch other people collaborate on the whiteboard. In the context of an in-person classroom this would be redundant as the board would likely be projected and displayed in the class anyways. It still seems like a useful tool to use in a classroom but there might be alternatives. I’ll definitely keep my eye on it and see if they improve mobile support
Tag: Reflection336
I think this was a really important presentation for us to see. Disabled students are overlooked in education so much. It’s nice to get some insight into all the steps and difficulties that can occur for disabled students and their families in getting essential technology. I’ll be keeping BCEdAccess in mind in case I need assistance from them for students in the future. I think a discussion on ableism was really useful as well. Often adults accommodating for disabled students can make them feel extreme singled out or talked down out. People can often take on an overly friendly and simplified tone with people who don’t need those things to understand another person. This just causes the person’s attempt at being inclusive to demonstrate the stereotypical image of a disabled person that exists in their mind. Interactions like this can also decrease the likelihood that students will come to teachers for help with their disabilities.
I’m glad that we talked about technology being potentially detrimental as well. I find Zoom classes to be incredibly difficult to learn from and really painful to sit through. This is also a huge issue with deaf and hard of hearing people. Often hearing aids can still be quite lacking for people and put them in a difficult and traumatizing position where understanding others is difficult and frustrating. I have a deaf friend that really hates “feel-good” videos about babies and young children hearing through hearing aid devices for the first time. People can assume that hearing aids bring people to a full-hearing level when that really misses the large range of hearing disability manifestations. People could struggle with differentiating different sounds for their entire lives and struggle with expressing themselves verbally. This can affect reading abilities as well due to our reliance on teaching written word through oral sounds and speaking. A key problem with these approaches is that they often totally alienate hard of hearing and deaf people. Students are alienated from hearing peers and often don’t have a larger deaf and hard of hearing community to talk with. Hard of hearing people being forced to learn spoken language as opposed to sign language can hurt the ways they can communicate with other people with similar experiences to them and the world at large. It also gives less incentive to educators to learn sign languages, something that must be done carefully as well. ASL has been heavily damaged in the past due to people learning it from hearing people who relate it to spoken language. This relation doesn’t exist for deaf and hard of hearing people so the framework for using the language can totally change
It was really great to hear Trevor Mackenzie’s thoughts. I was really engaged with the pacific school of inquiry and innovation talk, but it was a tricky thing for me to balance. I really loved the ideas, but I could only pick a few and needed to mentally modify them to work them into a public school setting. This talk really helped give me a clear mental image of what inquiry can look like in a public school setting. I think the idea of just keeping things totally open with students is ideal, but I was really surprised to see just all the ways that can manifest. I’m pretty excited to see what types of strategies I can work into my own classes from this lecture. I found the student self-assessment grading to be really interesting too. I was talking with some teachers during my observations and they’ve been facing issues with students being unable to fail and repeat middle school grades. I’m curious if this is pandemic related or how we can balance ensuring student understanding and inquiry otherwise.
I made a lot of notes on the books he recommended and am looking forwards to learning about them more in the future. They were:
It was nice to hear about strategies for dealing with classroom problems that are rooted in student-control. Like using groups to generate questions is really smart. I think it’s a pretty common occurrence for no questions to come up in the question part of a class and then for a large group of students to approach the teacher individually after class. I definitely did that a lot and I see it pretty frequently in my university classes as well. Unfortunately, those students going to ask individually are probably just a small portion of the students who do have questions that they could or want to ask
I think this week’s lecture was pretty good. We covered a lot of useful things and it was nice to get to talk about online distributed learning versus in-person learning. It was kind of surprising to hear how well online lecturing worked for some of the people in the class. I found that I had really opposite experiences in a lot of aspects and really struggle with online classes. I was luckily and only really needed to do a semester (and a half) of school online before finishing my degree. I felt like I would have needed to take time off from school and just worked or something instead if I had to take more online semesters. They caused me a lot of stress and disruption compared to normal classes and I didn’t want to suffer academically because of a different learning mode.
I thought that “Mad Tea” Liberating Structure was fun. Learning about Liberating Structures was really great, I think a lot of them will be really useful resources. There’s a lot of nice flexibility in them as well, finding things that could work well for science education and then fine tuning them seems like a really great tool to engage students with pretty abstract concepts.
I’m definitely behind on my free inquiry project. I’ve been doing more figure drawing practice so I might just post that and discuss it a bit. School has been so busy recently that I unfortunately haven’t really had much free time in any form. I think discussing the practice I’ve been doing could help, I just feel a bit bad about it not being something that’s all that new.
Some pretty interesting topics this week. I found that the models for integrating learning into teaching were pretty useful to see. Often there’s not a lot of frameworks for using technology in the classroom.
I think that my favorite approach out of the three presented in class was the SAMR model. I think it provides a good source of ideas for how an educator can use technology in different ways in the classroom. The model leans towards technological integration being inherently better which is a bit of a problem. The idea that “transform” can be for better or worse is important, but when the other category is “enhance” it becomes fairly clear that its meant to be positive. There’s also the issue with visuals depicting the stages of substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition as a linear process where redefinition is something to be worked towards through the other stages. In my opinion this framing is something that can encourage teachers to rush to integrate technology for the sake of being seen as innovative or relatable to students. Approaches like this often heavily miss the mark as technology isn’t being applied properly to get to a main point.
A lot of the visuals for SAMR seem to reflect this idea. Such as the one in class where the types of integration are seen as increasingly more meaningful (going from standing on the beach wondering about what’s inside the ocean to being in a submarine immersed in the ocean). This frames technology as something that’s required to reach deeper levels of content understanding, when it could equally hinder understanding. I think its also unfortunate to frame it as a deeper understanding rather than a different understanding. I don’t think depicting a snorkel versus a submarine is helpful because they’re both attempts to do the same thing (the more technologically advanced version being significantly better). The integration techniques that are in the “transformation” category shouldn’t really be seen as deeper understanding, but instead different understandings. These different understandings can absolutely be more meaningful and deeper for students, but the whole point is that they’re exploring different approaches unavailable through traditional means. I think teachers trying to use technology to facilitate deeper understandings of the same topics doesn’t really work, the key idea is to pivot and change what directions the class is capable of going in.
That example is just with the diagram used in class, but a lot of the graphics online fall into similar issues. The most common representation I can see is a stacked layout where the categories are arranged almost like a hierarchical pyramid or stairs. Substitution and modification are at the bottom and lead upwards to augmentation and redefinition. I really don’t like these graphics either. It seems like they’re trying to present redefinition as something to work towards in the same way free inquiry is an end goal to inquiry approaches. I think this misses the mark in a lot of different ways. These approaches are separate tools from one another. I don’t think bad things would happen if a teacher was able to redefine a unit using technology and students hadn’t seen an example of substitution, modification, or augmentation yet. I also don’t think educators need to fully understand something like modification in order to explore new tasks through redefinition. The only thing that really links these groups is how involved and integral technology is to the lesson or concept. If you frame them as a sequence to go through SMAR just becomes a guide on how to reach redefining content using technology or how to integrate technology more. I don’t like this approach because it hinders teachers from seeing the different options for integrating technology in meaningful ways. All the tools provided by SMAR are really good and can be integrated into classrooms to allow tech to assist to education. Unfortunately, the current idea around SMAR seem too overzealous to integrate technology for the sake of integrating technology. Education needs to come first, technology needs to facilitate it. If you sacrifice education for the point of technological integration, then the technology is only serving to create the illusion of innovation.
This balancing act is why I like the Constructive Alignment as a model of tech integration. Remaining focused on designing for learning is critical and learning goals should always be kept in mind. This approach is good because it will cause educators to think along a framework of how they can use technology to reach a learning goal, rather than how they can integrate technology in a more general sense. My main issues with the constructive alignment and TPACK framework is that they’re very theoretical. They’re great examples of solid theory, but trying to think of ways that they can be applied is difficult. I find that the TPACK framework makes this substantially more challenging. TPACK seems to focus more on the different aspects of teaching and how they should be brought to together for effective teaching. It doesn’t really say what those Venn-diagram overlaps look like though or how this crossing over can be done in a traditional classroom. I think these models work well in conjunction with SMAR and can be used to ensure that the frameworks balance each other out.
I liked the idea of EdCamps a lot and thought that they were a great way of creating discussion between people. I think that there can be some issues with the size of the groups doing them, but it seemed to still work well with a smaller group of people. One of my main issues was feeling stuck in a group. I didn’t want to just randomly get up and leave when someone was talking or had just finished saying something. I think a bigger group could help with this, but it could make it a bit more difficult to let everyone be heard. Larger topics breaking up into smaller groups discussing them or discussing subtopics could help remedy that. I’m probably just overthinking it too, seems more like a social-anxiety issue than an EdCamp issue.
This week we had a presentation from Jeff Hopkins about his school The Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). I really loved getting a chance to hear about this school. It seems like an incredibly good approach to teaching that is deeply beneficial for the students. This model seems like an effective way of achieving my personal goals of wanting to educate in a way that doesn’t bar neurodivergent students from learning about the world. Its a bit scary to approach an education system that has been created totally from scratch, but it seems scary in a good way to me. I think that inquiry schools like this are extremely promising and the future of education. I think a lot of my fear comes from the pressure of wanting to do this system justice so it can catch on, rather than me being afraid of something new. Most of my experience with traditional models of education have been as a student. I was lucky with my ADHD being stereotypical enough to have it noticed early. Lots of students don’t have this luxury though and plenty of students with ADHD can make it through school fine without medication. These students aren’t lucky for that though. Frequently they reach university and suddenly face deep crises and need to jump through the extremely complicated hoops surrounding adult ADHD diagnoses. I think inquiry models help students with ADHD learn in so many beneficial ways. They learn the content, but the introspection and critical thinking really helps them learn about themselves too. Jeff discussed a student with ADHD and how she uses different spaces to accomplish work. I found it really uplifting to hear about a student figuring out strategies that took me until halfway through my undergrad to figure out.
I would really love to work in an inquiry school. The freedom and flexibility is scary, but deeply exciting at the same time. It gives so much room for students to take control of their own learning and give feedback to teachers. It can feel like a more complicated system, but I think teachers are often more afraid of the sudden loss of control and authority that they’ll need to go through. It’s scary to trust students with so much responsibility, but honestly if someone can’t trust students like that I don’t think they’d be the best at teaching in general. Trusting students with genuine responsibility like this requires teachers to see students as human beings. I think this process of trust would be incredibly great for students and teachers. Students deal with a lot of condescension and the devaluing of their experiences can be frustrating at best and totally alienating at worst. Inquiry models of education not only get rid of this effect, but replace it with something truly beneficial for students. The process of inquiry gives students confidence in themselves and a sense of control. This can fundamentally shift student’s self-image from a position where they see themselves as just inherently not good at something to a position where they believe themselves capable of overcoming obstacles and learning. This goes for specific subjects too. Students can see themselves as scientists, artists, mathematicians, philosophers, and countless other members of society in the present. Students aren’t forced to wait until they’ve spent mountains of effort, time, and money in a post-secondary institution to feel like they’ve earned that title. Students can internalize those titles because they’ve gone through processes truly representative of those fields. Memorizing scientific information doesn’t make students feel like scientists and has the potential to make them believe that scientists just do work rote memorization for a career. Giving students a chance to explore science through inquiry gives them an opportunity to truly do science.
This presentation has given me a lot to think about. I saw PSII as an appealing institution beforehand, but now I see it as something that I really want to fight to get involved with. Regardless of whether or not I end up there, I think these models of inquiry can be extremely beneficial in all teaching environments. Jeff brought up that they were helping Reynolds with setting up a program and I believe that is their Flex program? I talked with a teacher at Esquimalt High School who did his practicum in that program and it seems really appealing. I’d love to try to create programs like that in public schools, I feel like the future talk we’ll be having will help give me some strategies for doing that as well. No matter where my career in education goes, I’d like inquiry to be a core part of it. Even a regular classroom that isn’t in an inquiry institution or part of a special program would benefit so much inquiry strategies. I’ve been in a few high school science programs that have genuinely made me upset at how unengaging they present science. Science is really important to me and was one of the first things to make me truly start wondering about the world around me. It really changed my perspective to one of almost constant questioning and observing. It gave me a really good perspective to see the beauty of the world and students missing out on that is just deeply depressing.
PSII has made some absolutely phenomenal resources for inquiry strategies and assessment. I’m going to attach them to this post so that I can have easy access to them later on. Assessment is something Jeff talked about as being a critical aspect of what they were looking for in teachers. I see assessment as something that should allow students to apply their understanding in critical ways. This will show that they know the material and they know how to use it, but most importantly it will help foster critical thinking in students. I find myself thinking of Dr. Blades’ Explore, Discuss, Understand (E.D.U) model a lot and the ways that it can be used to assess students. I’m going to keep assessment in mind and really try to study the core competency assessment forms that P.S.I.I has developed. I think that they’re a great resources and would be really beneficial for my own understanding of how to approach assessment. The other thing they are looking for in teachers are broad passions outside of just their teachable. I feel somewhat confident about this requirement? My ADHD makes me really hyperfixate on my hobbies which is honestly something I really love. I can get passionate about subjects and topics super easily and I feel like an environment like an inquiry institute would be a great place for me because talking with students about their projects seems like a ton of fun. I really like things like art and writing so I think it would be fun to bring that to a classroom and try to integrate it with scientific concepts that are often difficult to pin down and give students context for. I’ll need to spend some time reflecting on my own hobbies and passions. Just saying “I’m enthusiastic about everything and would love to work with students on whatever it is they’re interested in” probably won’t give people a good picture of me. I’m really glad to have that idea in the back of my mind now though. I think the topics of visual art, the social contexts that affect trends in them, and how they use things like colour would be a good starting place. I’m not sure how well I can predict what I’m going to be engaged with though. I might just try to be introspective as things come up and try to take step backs to understand what I like about them.
Resources
- EDCI 336 Page on P.S.I.I
- Trello
- Really useful tool for helping keep track of tasks and planning (for students and teachers). In the case of P.S.I.I students use it to help them plan their inquiry projects. I have a few freelance friends who use it to organize work in a way where clients can see the progress being made.
- Inside the Black Box
- Really interesting sounding research paper on the flaws of current assessment standards. WILL NEED TO READ, it sounds really interesting
- Also available here
- Stuart Shanker
- Researcher on self-regulation with ideas that Jeff said would be relevant to me wanting to learn more about helping students with ADHD
- From Neurons to Neighbourhoods
- Was also recommended while discussing ADHD and inquiry.
- Have downloaded PDF of it from here
- Have attached it below but I’m not sure how much wordpress will like that. I’ll upload it to my google drive so I can get it on my phone and find it in the future easily.
- PSII Media and Outreach
- TONS of incredibly useful CC resources here, will include the ones we discussed in class below, but will take a deeper look at all of them
- PSII Assessment Framework
- STUDY this, seems extremely beneficial and something I’d like to understand thoroughly
- PSII Inquiry Flowchart
- PSII Approach to learning diagram
- Good connections to BC curriculum, literacies, and the values that PSII see as most important for students as members of society
- I’m really on board with the things that PSII values. I think they’re all vital traits for people to engaging in meaningful ways with their communities and society.
This week we focused on graphic creation and there were a lot of fun things covered in this class. I’m pretty familiar with photo-editing programs like Photoshop and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and visual art programs like Clip Studio Paint but was interested to see what types of other options are out there. I was really really surprised when PowerPoint was brought up, but it seems like a phenomenal resource. I’ve done similar things with the program before for making images, but it was usually just to make images of slides. Using it to combine images and apply effect is something I hadn’t thought of before. It’s a fun tool to play around with too. Already knowing the way PowerPoint works makes it pretty easy to get adjusted to editing images with it.
I think that PowerPoint will serve two main functions for me with this. The first is for the SmartArt graphics which I really like. Trying to build a graph like the ones available through SmartArt is always really frustrating (especially if you’re using a picky program like GIMP). I think that I’ll get a ton of use out of this feature in teaching and just for personal uses as well.
These images are super useful although they need to be treated fairly carefully. The version on PowerPoint is a vector image and stays clean regardless of adjustments, but exporting them as a raster image can lead compression artifacts becoming an issue. Ensuring that the graphs are made with this in mind is helpful for reducing this effect. In the case of the graphs above, I removed the outlines around the shapes and changed the font to a thicker one.
PowerPoint does give the option to save these graphics as vector images (as .wmf and .emf files specifically). I’m not entirely sure how good this conversion is though. Something changed between making the images on PowerPoint and putting them in this WordPress blog. If you look at the graph above you can see that the font has been changed and a lot of the text is no longer centred in the circles. I can’t truly fault this to PowerPoint though. WordPress doesn’t accept .wmf and .emf filetypes due to security risks so I needed to convert them to .svg (the standard vector image file type) through a file-conversion website. The text was either changed when I saved the graph as a .wmf and .emf from PowerPoint or when I converted those files to .svg images. I’m writing this from a school computer and don’t have access to any software that would let me look at the .emf and .wmf files unfortunately. It’s definitely a difficult trade-off and the differences can be seen quite clearly in the graphs on this blog. The .png graph with adjustments has text that fits with the graph aesthetically and is centred in the circles (although it still has a bit of blur). The vector image graph has much cleaner shapes and texts and doesn’t seem out of focus like the .png version.
The second function is adding “artistic effects” to images. I find that photo filters can be a bit hard to track down, although I haven’t experimented too much with other programs. They’re really straightforwards to use in PowerPoint. The filters are easy to find and the advanced options give a decent amount of flexibility. I made the image above by inserting the same image several times, cropping them, and then applying the filters them. It works well to give the impression that different areas of a single image are under the effect of different filters.
I tried out the in-browser vector image editor Vectr during class. It seems like a really good tool for creating vector images in terms of accessibility. Not needing to download software is convenient and would be good for a lot of people. It’s understandably limited in a few ways, but for what it is I think it’s a good tool. I think it can be a bit lacking in teaching people how vector graphics work and how to make them through other means. For someone unfamiliar with vector graphics it could be slightly frustrating. Shapes often change when shrunk or expanded which is something that needs to be accounted for and worked around. The guides to position shapes are really well implemented and it’s a quick process to line things up with each other. Free-drawn lines can be a bit strange, but nothing too extreme that would make them no longer useful.
Other Useful Resources
- Prisma
- Fun way of adding painting-based filters to photos
- Mirror Lab
- Seems like an interesting way of manipulating photos with set filters. Likely need to pay for the full version
- Wikipedia list of raster graphics editors and vector graphics editors
I found Jesse Miller’s presentation to be really interesting. I’m glad that he approached social media and the internet as aspects of our lives that we can’t just ignore in the classroom. I see a lot of people talking about phones and what to do to manage them. Phones are definitely a concern for me, but I agree that taking them away from students is a bit too extreme. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with doing that, and frankly I think it’s an overreach of a teacher’s power. Taking phones has the potential to affect student attendance and students could be using them in good faith or as a coping mechanism. I think phones are something that teachers should out-compete rather than something that teachers need to separate from students.
I found the self-searching to be a pretty interesting exercise. I’ve done it a fair amount of times with my deadname and have struggled to find anything that actually relates to me. My name was pretty generic and was shared with some cricket superstar. Hard to find any information about myself with all the results relating to him taking up all the space. Also a bit of an existential experience, I don’t think I’ll ever get to a “suggested search: desktop wallpaper” level of fame of popularity ever. There’s also a local actor who shares that name. I find it a bit strange that I could have watched a commercial featuring someone who lives on the island and had the same name as me.
Searching up my actual name is interesting. There’s definitely less results and the people who show up are just other normal people. I’m curious if more results relating to me will start showing up as a create an online presence while going by my preferred name. It’s definitely comforting to have that element of control too. All of my other online presences use usernames that aren’t related to me. I don’t really have anything I’m concerned about students or parents seeing, but having the comfort of it being pretty inaccessible is nice.
This week the main resource reviewed was the ISTE Standards. These standards are in my opinion an extremely useful resource for implementing technology in education. Technology in education has been a mixed experience for me in the past. Most of my experience with it comes from education courses and emergency measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This likely skews my perspective towards being apprehensive towards how technology is applied in the classroom. The former focused mostly on technological tools that can be used in education, rather than how to apply them. The later was done due to urgent circumstances and amplified a lot of the issues that make traditional education difficult. I found that online classes brought all the same challenges of traditional learning, but without the engagement of being around peers and an educator in-person.
Technological resources need to be understood in terms of operation and application. Training educators in operation of these technologies is critical for using them, but it doesn’t inherently mean that they’ll be used effectively. Without training in application, educators will just end up using these technologies to teach traditionally with different tools. Resources like Prezi are really tools, but they often seem like alternative means of approaching traditional technologies like slideshows. Approaches like this often feel like using technology out of a hope that the modern technology itself will advance the learning experience to a more modern model. This can cause problems for educators as they can end up teaching using out-dated approaches on technology that they aren’t familiar with, further complicating the learning process.
I’ve been pretty hopeful about this course so far. Discussing inquiry and resources like the ISTE Standards seem like good places to start in ensuring that application of technology is given the time it needs. I specifically focused on the ISTE Standards for Educators. The seven points included on this list seem like really great starting places for educators looking to implement new technologies in modern ways. Each broader standard includes a breakdown of approaches to take in order to achieve the standard. Phrases and words that might be unfamiliar to educators are highlighted and can be hovered over for a definition. I found the definitions helped give a concrete reference for the standard requirements. Phrases like “authentic learning experiences that leverage technology” can seem empty buzzwords on the surface, but defining the terms grounds them in a tangible concept.
An example of a definition and its associated phrase
The Standards lack any examples of them being applied, but I don’t think this is too much of a downside. There’s a large range of approaches that educators can take to teaching. Providing broader definitions and requirements needed to meet standards allows for these standards to be used for a wide range of educational approaches.