Category: Weekly Reflections

I really liked the introduction activity to this presentation, as the class filled in we all had a sticky note resting on our tables. majority of these were pink apples, there were a handful of orange ones and only a couple green ones. Once everyone was settled and ready the presenter told us everyone with a pink note was able to stay, people with orange ones must leave in half an hour and the select few with green ones had to leave. It was a good way to show how unfair things can be and how certain people may feel, or have felt.

Another topic we spoke about with todays guest was inclusion of everyone. One of the main points was about field trips and their experience with their son. she gave us a true example that had happened to her son last year at school where the class went on a field trip and the bus that came for the class wasn’t suited for handicap people. She ended up having to leave work to come drive her son to the field trip. She spoke a lot about the importance of making everything inclusive and if a field trip isn’t going to be possible for everyone to participate in then the class shouldn’t be going.

In todays class we had a guest speaker who works with Science Venture. They are a youth camp/workshop group who puts on summer camps that brings science experiments and lab days into the summer camp setting. They offer jobs to students like myself throughout the summer as well to go work with these youth and teach them a lot of great things. It is a good group that helps teach youth with STEM.

We then looked at AI (Artificial Intelligence), we spoke about how common it is now days and how you can nearly find it everywhere. places like SIRI in your phone to Microsoft Words grammar checker to your navigation on your phone. It’s absolutely everywhere and isn’t going anywhere soon. therefore we talked about some of its uses and why it is an industry that is becoming very popular so quickly. Michael showed us a source that most people are familiar with by now called Chat-GPT (Chat for short). Chat is a AI which once given a prompt from a user searches through thousands of online sources and data bases to produce an answer. we looked at some prompts that we could give it and I really enjoyed playing with it a bit. I’ve never personally used Chat before today and I found it interesting the responses it gave. at first I was giving it funny prompts that I maybe didn’t know anything about and it gave me reasonable answers. But once I started asking it questions that I have a lot of knowledge about that’s when things got funny. I found that its main points are great, If I needed the headlines to a slideshow presentation this would by far give me the best titles for those slides. but once it started to dive into detail I found it to be both off in its information a little bit and it’s way of representing that info was very abrupt and choppy. You can easily tell that an AI wrote it, not a human.

This weeks class we were finally with Michael again! good to have you back…

we went over some more multi-media possibilities and learned some really cool photo editing features through Microsoft PowerPoint. this included how we can crop the background out of images, how to make moving or 3D slides, how to integrate icons. All of these are useful to better engage students in a slideshow presentation, or even get to know them better and share a bit about you. I really liked how easy and accessible this was to use and create your own image. I was given the opportunity to mess around with it for roughly 15 minutes and i came up with this atrocious creation…..

none the less I did manage to create something from scratch which I have never been able to do and all in all I am proud of whatever this might be called. aside from the odd water mark of course I think it is a master piece!

no its not that good just messing around again. It was just great to see how easily you can create something and its something you could have students do to tell a story or improve their slides.

This week we had Kristen join us as a guest speaker. She spoke with us about ways we can integrate outdoor education within our classroom. One topic she covered very early in her presentation was “Place Based Learning”. She explained this to us as giving students the opportunity to learn about the nature around them. Local plants, animals even cultures. I really like this form of learning and personally had this all around me growing up. I very strongly remember in grade 4 my teacher signed up to have salmon fry in our classroom. We watched the salmon hatch from their eggs and grow into fry. Once they grew to the right size we went into Goldstream river and released them with a local indigenous chief. I remember him speaking about the importance of the salmon returning every year and how people can help their population with things like hatchery’s and even smaller things like our classroom tank. I found this to be a great learning experience even in my young age which proves how important brining our local nature into the classroom can be.

We did an activity outside and she showed us a couple online apps and sources we could use within the class like plant & rock identifiers. there was a super cool editing app she shared where you could add voice overs onto your photos. she explained you can take a photo of a plant or animal and have a voice over explaining what the photo was about. I also really liked the Minecraft example where she had a couple students make a Minecraft landform and present it to her. I found that to be a cool way to have kids do something they like doing.

I really liked how the day was opened with a funny check-in with the Guiney pigs. It’s a good way to quickly get the class engaged and is a fun way to ask students how they are doing.

Something I found surprising early in the presentation was the fact that on a PowerPoint slide show as an example, a slide with a block of text vs a slide with an image and a speaker narrating. The slide with an image and narration will be much easier to retain and remember the information. Where as the block of text will be tougher to retain the information.

“Flipping the classroom” was a cool concept. My understanding on this topic was you essentially get the student to learn and research a topic at home, either with parent help or on their own. They then come back into the classroom to do work (what used to be homework) in teams with assistance from the teacher. After this they go back home and review the topic and make sure they understand it. With this teaching strategy it would definitely be better in the upper grade levels. For myself wanting to teach within the grade 3-4 range I think it would be difficult to get students to go research on their own. Getting them to go home and learn a totally new topic to them then coming back to class hoping they did essentially their “Homework” is just unrealistic. In Highschool this is for sure a concept that could be used, older students are more capable of setting off and learning/researching something.

https://watch.screencastify.com/v/2KFyrrggpoRZean41Vmp

Above is my Screencastify video, It is a snip of me playing the game Red Ball which you can find on Cool Math Games – Free Online Games for Learning and Fun

This week we had a guest speaker join us via Zoom. Jesse Miller joined us and talked about online social media platforms, keeping youth safe/protected online and how these platforms also can be used as a benefit. One of his main points was how to keep our social networks separated. He covered a topic on ‘online safety’ where he told us examples of our possible online profile and how that could be cause for problems.

I really liked the topic where he discussed online gaming. He ran us through an example where maybe we are great in a professional setting, but possibly on the weekends we may be playing something like halo. while on this game we might be using cuss words, or calling people rude things, but we never know who that might be. Could be a future student, sibling of a current student, students parents. I found this a good example to help put perspective on “Hey, we never know who is listening or viewing what we put out there”. this definitely made me think about things a little more when I am online.

Another topic I enjoyed that Jesse went over was the possible good outcomes of being online. He talked about how video games like Fortnite, or Minecraft and how the social time talking and bonding with friends while trying to strategize and problem solve can be very beneficial. Jesse also covered talking with kids about how the adults around them use social media/phones, he gave examples of how maybe a students parent drives scary due to them being on the phone. or, how a father might play too many video games and this makes things around the house difficult because mom gets mad at it.

All in all I really enjoyed Jesse’s presentation, I can tell he is very knowledgeable and has done a ton of research. I will definitely will see things online in a different way and will keep his points in mind going forward in my career.

This week we were presented with a documentary which was published in 2015, And it covered the starting year of a brand new schooling system. This schooling system focused on classroom engagement and innovations, getting kids thinking outside the box and designing learning programs that work for them. I found this system to be a cool look into future learning, everything around us is evolving at a speed teachers can’t keep up with. So…. teaching students to learn, to think for themselves, and be proactive within the changing world around them.

I found this documentary pretty innovative in their formatting, I liked the way they showed the kids failing as well. How the kid with the classroom working on the gear system didn’t finish in time for the show night. but it didn’t stop him and he finished his goal through-out the course of the summer.

This week has been overwhelming all together. The start of 5 courses with all their individual needs and different assignments we had to begin took its toll. I’ve been out of the school game for a while now and thankfully I’ve got my mind back on the grind. The most challenging thing for me this previous week has been getting this website up and going, I battled with error codes and passwords and figuring out what was needed from me to get this going. But… after all the time silently cursing in front of my computer I believe I have got a very brief understanding of how this is going to work. That is, for the reflection side of things anyway. My blog is going to be a whole different story, I’ve been debating on what my topic should be. a few things that have stumped me include the following.

• Time management – Am I able to try a whole new topic to me, or is this impossible due to other course loads?
• Is the topics I am considering to cover easy to blog about?
• are my topics relevant and fit within the criteria of this website project?

There are many other considerations but these were my main few. I hope in the coming weeks I have a better understanding of what my blog will go over.