Photo by August de Richelieu from Pexels
For our EdTech inquiry we decided to take a closer look at google classroom and create some resources and insight into the best ways to use it for remote learning because in this new normal, even with the vaccine, remote learning will probably become more common.
And if that doesn’t work the class code is: r7afbme
Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels
Support systems are so important but often you can’t find the right people in person so social media can really help.
There are so many great creators, some are those suffering from mental health issues and others are therapists. Some are both. I have created a compilation of some of my favourites from Instagram. These are of course most relatable to my own issues.
Alegra Kastens – obsessivelyeverafter
Mimi – the.lovelybecoming
Amanda Petrik-Gardner – anxietyocdtreatment
TikTok also has some amazing creators, including myself, though I’m less familiar with particular creators, I just let the algorithm do it’s think, try and you will find you way.
Humour, visibility and representation are so important. The more common and normal mental health, even the ugly parts, becomes the easier it will be for people to reach out and get help.
Here is my contribution to that humor.
Above is obviously not our group or what we were able to do but gives a better idea of what EdTech Camp is intended to be. Facilitators and educators coming together to share ideas and technology.
Unfortunately, I was a little late to the party, but I enjoyed the rooms that I did pop into. It was nice to kind of go unnoticed and contribute where I could. The experience weirdly reminded me of an event that took place at my highschool when I was in the eighth grade where we had facilitators come through and run a bunch of workshops, or the jazz festival that I attended and got to choose the workshops and masterclasses that I attended.
I just think it is a great idea and model for professional development, and while it was great to bring in people from wherever, I hope in a post covid world I can participate in one in person.
I really appreciated Rich coming to talk with us, this may have been the most engaging class of the term.
So why engage kids with learning code?
We explored beginner coding on a code.org, below is me exploring the site a bit. I think this is a great tool if you have the technology in class and students can continue to do it at home if they get into it. Scratch is another tool that looks promising but I haven’t gotten a chance to really look at it. It is however the same simple block coding.
This week we looked at gaming and gamefication in the classroom, particularly we concentrated on Minecraft. I think gaming is a great way to get kids engaged and form a classroom community, be it online or physical games. I’ve attached two gameplay videos, the first is me stumbling through Minecraft for about 30 minutes and the second is a ten minute Prodigy Math Games gameplay video. I think both tools are a great potential option for the classroom, but I definitely need a 12 year old tutor to help me with Minecraft.
Minecraft
Prodigy Math Games
Gamefication vs Game Based Learning
Chantelle Adams was such a great speaker, I appreciate hearing more of the parental perspective as opposed to the educator perspective.
It is frustrating to hear all the issues with access to technology that students are having in our area when the school system is already stacked against them. Though I can’t really say it is a surprise. Unfortunately students that require accommodations are viewed as something to deal with instead of as a student to empower. There are of course always exceptions but at least where I have been that is what I have observed. It is hard to blame teachers sometimes though, class sizes are big and you want to be able to provide your best to everyone.
At least we do have some technology now, 20 years ago it must have been so much harder when there weren’t really laptops and computers were reserved for typing and research in the computer lab.
I found the discussion around engaging with a student’s family interesting. It is so hard to think about recognizing an issue and wanting to help a student, and the parents not being on board or being so overwhelmed that you can’t make progress. It was good to consider that we should start slow and that jumping right into it isn’t usually the way to go. Ideally, no matter where they are coming from they are parents who care about their kid (and if not that is a different issue to deal with).
I also really appreciated all of the links and resources that were provided for us which are now saved to my Google Drive (but I am unsure if I have permission to share that. However, some of the sources that she mentioned which I’m sure is fine to repear are
And while she said not all of these are ideal, they are somewhere to start.
On a more positive note I think there is a lot of really cool inclusive tech coming out to make the lives of teachers and the students who need it easier, I just hope as awareness and acceptance of neurodivergencies and physical limitations grows, having access won’t be such a struggle.
I appreciated our lesson on modality. I think it is really important to be learning about the different forms of access for students because in all honesty, with anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and variants, I don’t think COVID is ever going to completely go away. As new teachers we need to be prepared for a world that may be multi-access.
We spoke a lot about the benefits and biases surrounding face to face, online and hybrid learning. While online learning has been quite frustrating at times, I do enjoy not having to take two busses to get to campus each morning and this is nothing compared to the many students who live much further.
In my high school, we also had students that lived on Gabriola Island, every morning they had to take the boat over and were often late which frustrated teachers. I wonder now if we had had better tech access at that time how many would have chosen online or hybrid learning. We were the tech hub for the district for learn at home, but that wasn’t integrated into mainstream learning as far as I know.
I do know that there are cases when it would not work. Particularly the community that I lived in last year, attendance was poor so one would think it could be helpful but internet access was non-existent for most households and I doubt everyone had the technology for it to work which is unfortunate because those inequalities really act as a barrier for education access in remote communities, and consequently, Indigenous communities.
Despite pros and cons, I think that increasing the options and giving students choice is always overall something positive that we should be striving for.
Habit stacking is something that I have been wanting to look into for a while. It was mentioned in a number of my self help books that I read over the beginning of the pandemic. Habit stacking is basically just building positive habits but you structure them in a way that doing one reminds you to do the others.
To look into habit stacking I read the book Habit Stacking by S.J. Scott. In the book Scott talks about how how habit stacking improved his life and made him use his time more efficiently and help him work towards bigger goals. He defines some guidelines for habit stacking.
He also defines the seven primary areas of you life that you should be focusing habit stacking in:
And a one habit stack doesn’t have to be just for one of these areas. You can have a morning stack that has you make your bed (organization) make a smoothie (health) text someone that you love them (relationship) and sit down to meditate (spirituality/health).
A habit stack may also be the trigger for you to start a bigger habit like sitting down to write or going for a run.
Overall you are in control of how you set up your habit stacks, there is no habit stack for every person and you need to create a routine that works for you. Here is another site that goes into more detail.
So, I started creating morning and evening routines and for a while I did quite well, however, one skipped day turned into two and so on and so on. I found that if I create a good morning routine I also need to follow a good evening routine because otherwise I neglect my sleep hygiene and subsequently everything else. However, the app I found does make keeping track of habit stacks much easier. It is called Routinery and you can see an example of how to use it below. Overall I think that habit stacking can be positive and I think it works very well for certain people. It was helpful for me but not life changing.
I really like the idea of inquiry. I think that allowing so much choice and room for passion is an ideal setting for learning and I wish that I had been given those opportunities when I was in school. Attempting to do it now, after almost 20 years of schooling that was not inquiry based, extremely difficult. I don’t do well when there is little structure. I wish that I did because that is life most of the time.
Trevor is a really fascinating guy and creates so many great resources. I know that our Facebook group and other social media was abuzz after he spoke with us this week, and I really appreciate the time he took to explain to us all the different kinds of inquiry because really when I think about inquiry I sometimes get stuck on only seeing it as free inquiry, and settings like Summerhill where kids are basically free to do whatever they want and unfortunately that doesn’t really mesh well with our society and established schooling system. With the spectrum from the teacher selected to student selected and from structured inquiry to free inquiry there are so many ways to guide students into a freer style of learning and inquiry.
Personally, I gotta say I kind of feel like I got thrown in the deep end this semester with this class and the focus on inquiry as our products. And I know, that it is an attempt to give us freedom and time to explore technology in a way that is more relevant to our lives but when you have four classes that aren’t inquiry based and have many deadlines it is really easy to let a class with an inquiry structure end up on the backburner, at least for me.
All that being said, I do want to use inquiry in my classroom but I am going to be very mindful in the ways I use it. I think that in giving students choice, they also deserve the choice of a more structured learning style, external boundaries and goals are really helpful for some people but limiting to others. Really it boils down to knowing who your students are and what they are capable of.
One thing that I do really love about Trevor is how well he manages his social media, while I’m still not really active with Twitter, I followed him on Instagram and I think that his content is phenomenal. Now I guess we’ll have to see if he gets hip with the kids on Tik Tok as trends change.
So I didn’t actually do much on the pro-d day but I do have experience in audio and visual editing. All through highschool I really believed I could make it as a singer on YouTube and while now I don’t think I’ll be “making it big” any time soon I have definitely edited both videos to go up there and audio to go to SoundCloud. I’ve linked a video that I created for work last year which also displays my super amazing (sarcasm) ability to make gifs and edit those into videos. However, that video was also had a few things added by the media team at my work before publishing.
One thing I really enjoy doing is creating harmonies which obviously requires multiple tracks (and multiple takes). Here is a song I put up a few years ago, there is harmony as well as a separate guitar track that I had to splice together. The video was put together with iMovie with the audio file imported from Garageband. (You also now have my YouTube channel… so have fun with that.
The programs I most use now are iMovie and Garageband. I think they are relatively simple to use if you don’t need to do anything complicated and they come free with apple products which I have. I also just downloaded OBS and have added a video here showing me using it for the first time.
And as promised here is a tutorial for this program from How To Tech: