I feel very reflective this weekend, thinking back over the whole course and my first term in the program overall. I’ve learned so much new information, but more than that my philosophies of teaching and learning have changed and expanded.
In our final EdTech class, we had a discussion about our visions for the future of education, inspired by speculations about our current moment in education from the past. I was struck by how much emphasis they each had on efficiency, theorizing that each iteration of educational technology would ‘revolutionize’ teaching and learning by making it faster, easier, cheaper, and more automated. But I think each of these theories fundamentally underestimates what I believe underpins all meaningful learning: time. The core competencies of communication, thinking, and personal and social responsibility cannot be sped up or made more efficient, and I think and believe that our future will be focused more and more on those cores.
I’m excited for the break, but I am inspired and energized to come back and carry on next semester!
Since joining TikTok about a year ago, engaging with the robust teacher community has been one of the highlights for me. I thought it would be fun to round up some of my favourite teacher accounts, who make content from comedy to teaching tips to encouragement and motivation.
This week has been a great one for me personally of exploring new inquiry strategies, with Trevor MacKenzie’s visit to our class as well as my Cross-Curricular Inquiry Strategies course.
In Cross-Curricular Inquiry Strategies we’ve talked a fair bit about Trevor MacKenzie’s work and his books, so it was great to “meet” him over Zoom and have a chance to hear about his work and perspectives directly. Trevor was such an engaging speaker and I felt like his teaching ethos really comes through in his presenting. In one 60 minute presentation he showed so much kindness, empathy, and care for each of our personal experiences and responses to the material he was sharing so I can imagine that being in his class as a high-school student would be such a warm and nurturing experience. He clearly practices what he preaches in terms of inquiry-based and student-centred learning so it was great to have a sense of what that looks like.
We’ve had some fascinating examples of schools who are taking Inquiry-based learning to fantastic depths in the PSII and High-Tech High, but what I love about Trevor’s work is that he shows how inquiry strategies can be used in the classrooms of the public school system. This is something that has puzzled me about inquiry from the beginning — the PSII or High-tech High look amazing, but how can we really use inquiry when we get a job in a traditional public school? I think Trevor has so much to offer in this area.
The other discovery this week for me that was hugely influential in my quest for practical inquiry strategies is Harvard’s Project Zero, particularly their list of “thinking routines”: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines
The goal of these thinking routines is to help make students’ thinking visible, and most of them incorporate some level of inquiry to greater or lesser degrees. The thinking routines are ways to get students thinking out loud, on paper, and creatively, making thinking visible to aid in formative assessment and reflexive teaching. I’ve really enjoyed looking through the Project Zero Thinking Routines and I foresee them being an extremely useful set of resources for lesson planning, formative assessment, and weaving inquiry into the curriculum.
What is an EdCamp? An EdCamp is a collaborative learning event that allows participants to democratically brainstorm, select, discuss, and learn topics of interest together. https://digitalpromise.org/edcamp/According to their website, the tenets of EdCamps are:
Free and open to all.
Participant driven: participants have an active, vital role in shaping what the experience will be.
About experience, not experts: Everyone present is invited to bring their experience to the table and learn from one another.
Rule of Two Feet/Clicks: Participants are free to move between discussions at any time.
Image: Michael Paskevicius
We had an EdCamp of our own in class on Friday. We brainstormed a list of topics, voted on the ones we most wanted to discuss, and then hosted three round-table talks in three spaces which classmates moved between freely:
importance of nature-based learning
importance of social-emotional learning
should students be able to opt out of “core” classes?
I ended up sticking in nature-based learning the whole time, but I heard from my classmates a bit about the discussions in the other rooms. I loved having a chance to talk about something that many of us are passionate about but wouldn’t necessarily find the time to discuss and it was especially engaging to have a variety of subject areas sharing ideas. I hadn’t heard of an EdCamp before this one (although I’ve been to a number of snooze-worthy conferences with pre-determined keynotes and breakout sessions) and I can absolutely see myself using this in the classroom. I think it could be an excellent supplement to a play or novel study (topics could include different characters or themes to discuss) but it would also scale beautifully to a general whole-class or even whole-school format. I would also love the opportunity to participate again with other teachers so I am definitely going to keep an eye out for more EdCamps.
We had an amazing and inspiring class with Jeff Hopkins from the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry this afternoon. They have an unbelievably exciting education model for their students, and Jeff really got my wheels turning with ideas of how to incorporate more inquiry-based strategies into my teaching, even in the more ‘traditional’ public school system.
Jeff opened his talk with a compelling question: If the education system is learning more and more all the time about the psychology of learning and how learning truly best happens, why don’t our educational practices line up with that research? He followed that up with perhaps an even more compelling question: Does it have to be like this?
Jeff Hopkins and the philosophy of the PSII argue that it doesn’t. They have set out to create an educational environment that is truly student-centred, and led entirely by student-driven inquiry and study.
Jeff emphasized that this kind of learning can happen anywhere. The PSII has set up in the urban centre of downtown Victoria to utilize the publicly available resources there such as the YMCA, local parks, and artistic spaces, but inquiry-based learning is also excellently suited to more rural areas where students can be in close contact with nature and engage in what Jeff called “cognitive apprenticeship” with mentor figures.
On the PSII’s website they offer many inquiry tools as creative commons resources, which is wonderfully generous of them and demonstrates a true value for promoting this type of education. One that I particularly enjoyed was the Inquiry Flowchart. What I love about this flowchart (and an aspect that Jeff pointed out) is that it provides a great deal of structure and scaffolding to something that can sometimes be intimidating (for both students and teachers) in its apparently free-form, no-rules format. This flowchart shows that inquiry is (though perhaps in part) not all just floundering around, browsing various topics. To complete legitimate inquiry projects at the PSII, students are expected to be curious, carefully consider and craft effective questions, be accountable to stay on task, and plan, document, and self-assess their own learning.
One of the other parts of Jeff’s talk that I found very thought-provoking has to do with how well students are meeting BC curricular competencies and whether they are getting a “well-rounded” education. He questions that 1) Are students in the public school system who may be following BC curriculum more to the letter truly well rounded? And 2) How important is it that students leave their studies as well rounded, when perhaps it is more valuable for them to have the experiencing of following their own interests and passions, being creative and critical thinkers, problem solving, and honing their own skills in their chosen fields?
Overall, I feel very inspired by Jeff’s evident passion and philosophy. I think the public school system could learn so much about effective and exciting learning from the PSII’s model, and I certainly hope to continue incorporating these strategies into my future teaching.
We had a great class this Friday about the “Why”s and “How”s of working with graphics in the classroom. One of the key points we touched on in our discussion is that multimedia learning theory and dual-coding theory assert that learning is more effective when material is presented multimodally: that is, with both auditory and visual channels (and maybe more). Multimedia can be an incredibly effective way to present information, and for some kinds of information a picture can deliver instantaneously information that could otherwise take easily a thousand words and still not be clear.
Because images have such staying power, they can also be very misleading. (if you’ve never looked at this site, it is GREAT FUN for examining the problem with graphs when it comes to discussions of correlation/causation!) We looked at differences between pixel- and vector-based images, and how photoshop, illustrator, and other softwares can be used to develop and edit both (including some open source/free software!)
Michael shared with us a challenge to #makeslidesfunagain and a great list of things to try in powerpoint, including adding images, inserting smartart, 3d models, and artistic effects, and we brainstormed suggestions for types of projects that could use powerpoint for classroom learning such as cards, posters, graphic novels, photo collages, and more.
I’m going to try and include some of these graphics skills in forthcoming posts and reflections, and maybe try to incorporate some in my next few free inquiry posts.
We had a great class today which included a workshop on video editing with Rich from the Digital Scholarship Commons. He shared with us a great collection of instructional resources from the Uvic library including how to edit video using OpenShot or iMovie, podcasting resources, screencast recording, and how to create interactive video content using H5P.
I quickly put some royalty-free music over this video of my dog and uploaded it to YouTube so I could play with the H5P capabilities of making interactive videos. I experimented with some of the different question types H5P allows you to add. This is definitely something I could see doing in the classroom with educational videos, either my own or another educational creator’s.
I’d like to learn more about H5P capabilities so I’ve saved the tutorial from the Digital Scholarship Commons to go through again. This seems like a good resource to supplement educational video content in the classroom, or just a fun way to work with video in general.
This week we had a great class about copyright and open resources for education. I don’t feel like I currently have a great understanding of how copyright and fair dealing work together, so I appreciated being given some helpful resources.
We had a fruitful conversation in class about the use of google and other big internet companies in classrooms, and how much student data they have. It seems nearly unavoidable at this point; google classroom is so prevalent in schools now for all kinds of uses. Maybe something open source would be better, but on the other hand, those are vulnerable to all sorts of bugs and google’s security is about as good as it gets. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about using this in my own classroom, but it is definitely something to think about.
I spent some time this week poking around the Education subject guides on the Uvic Library website. The Education Librarian, Pia Russell, has compiled an amazing list of journals, bibliographies, and other resources for folks in the Ed department: https://libguides.uvic.ca/education
I also really enjoyed looking at resources like Unsplash (https://unsplash.com) and Pexels (https://www.pexels.com). I’ve used royalty free music from sites like Bensound( https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music/) for making podcasts and videos before, but I hadn’t heard of either of the other two sites. I will definitely be going back to them.
Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:
Do you want to be online vs. offline?
Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.
First tasks you might explore with your new blog:
Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “EdTech” category or sub-categories, Free Inquiry and EdTech Inquiry). We have also pre-loaded the Teacher Education competencies as categories should you wish to use them to document your learning. If you would like to add more course categories, please do so (e.g., add EDCI 306A with no space for Music Ed, etc.)
See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the course categories assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
Add pages
Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works)
Under Appearance,
Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, etc.)
Customize menus & navigation
Use widgets to customize blog content and features
Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep for reference)
Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to use the course topic as the category as opposed to the course number as those outside of your program would not be familiar with the number (e.g., we use “EdTech” instead of “edci336).
Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.
Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:
