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.

Have a great week!

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.