Category: Weekly Reflections

In today’s class, we experimented with gamification and some apps that come along with that. Prodigy is an RPG style game with the intentions of engaging kids in math and literacy exercises, through a fun, inclusive, intrinsically-motivated way. I typically do not gravitate towards video games especially not of this style, however the reviews I over heard from my peers were very positive. Also, the statistics they share online are quite promising. Students are twice as likely to enjoy learning math with prodigy. In one school district, 68% more math skills were master in just one month of using prodigy. And, 96% of parents and teachers are satisfied with what their student is learning on prodigy. Another positive is that it’s free to register, but students do need to make an account which can get sticky with privacy requirements based on your district. I do have a few concerns with a Prodigy and programs like it. My first issue is that kids are already on screens way too much. According to both the AACAP (American Academy of Children and Adolescent Psychology) and Independent UK children spend 4-6 hours per day on their screens. When you consider that 8-10 hours of their 24 hour days are spent sleeping this is a pretty crazy statistic. I think especially since the outbreak of COVID-19 we have seen some devastating impacts on the physical and mental wellbeing of our youth and a lot of it is due to the amount of time they spend cooped up with a screen in front of their face. Another concern I have, is that eventually these kids who do not have a particular liking for math will need to still participate in math class without the added benefit of getting to play a video game while they do it. Will games like this cause students to develop a dependency on the dopamine rush provided by these games? Will they ever learn to become intrinsically motivated on their own, or are we slowly pushing students down the path of needing constant approval and reward for completing a task? These are questions that I think only time will tell but I am definitely interested in using Prodigy as a math and English learning tool, however I will approach this tool with caution.

This Week, our class visited the design lab in our local district. This eye-opening experience really got me thinking about how tech can be used in the classroom. I am not well versed in technology by any means, and I find it quite a hurdle when faced with a problem surrounding technology. However, the work we did at the design lab showed how education in BC is really starting to look at the innovative side of technology. While we were there, my group built a train set. The challenge (as per assigned by the design lab coordinator) was to build a track that looped 3 times. We were also given little coloured tabs and an electric train that when it sensed the colours would perform different tasks (yellow= train whistle, red = stop, blue= stop and gas up, green = reverse) we were able to come up with some pretty cool designs that didn’t make a full 3 loops but 2 and a half and that felt like a pretty cool accomplishment. I would love to bring a class here again in the future. I think it would be awesome for teaching students the beginnings of code, teamwork/team building, problem solving, and how to better understand the world through the lens of technology. I was specifically interested in the cardboard building tools and would love to create a lesson around this. I think I would make it a social studies lesson and start by explaining the foundations of a community. Talk about what sort of things a community needs to survive and thrive and then challenge the class to build their own community where everyone plays a role. Here’s a tour of our train track!

This week our class attended a local elementary school to help a grade 2 class with their Take Me Outside Day activity. I love this program and the initiative it shows for promoting outdoor learning. My ultimate goal as an aspiring educator is to eventually run my own K-6 (maybe even K-12) outdoor school. I believe that nature can teach us so much more than we give it credit for, and that we waste so much potential when we stuff kids into a stuffy classroom. It was fun to get outside with the students and connect with them, but some of my connections lead me to believe that this activity could have been executed a lot better. Most of the kids were pretty upset that they didn’t see any animals and some of them stated that “If we would have gone to the lake, we would have seen some”. It was pretty cool though getting to talk to them about this and asking questions like “Why do you think the animals like the lake better?” or “Why don’t you think we are seeing as many animals here?” they all gave me fairly accurate answers such as: “Well the animals like the water for drinking and because they can find lots of food around there” and “The animals don’t want to come around here because there’s lots of dogs that come here”. It was nice to hear them making these kinds of connections to nature and their environment. I also felt like the boundaries were way too strict especially considering the adult-to-kid ratio was basically 1:1. I felt like we didn’t need a boundary but rather a rule of “Stay with in eyesight of your adult”. Also, the area that was enclosed by the boundary was pretty sad. Both of my students were finding more litter than they were natural materials for sculpture building. Overall, great activity, poor execution.

In researching the Take Me Outside Day website, these were some cool activities I found that I’d love to try in my classroom one day:

• Invasive Species Scavenger Hunt by ISCBC
• Ripples of Change – a lesson on the severity of climate change and how we can make ripples of change in our community.
• Project Learning Tree activity guide book – specifically the back yard safari activity would have been great for this class!

Recently there has been a lot of controversy around AI. How is it being used? Are students using it to teach? What sort of environmental impacts does it have? Will a technology like this eventually take over the world? It is important to remember that with every unknow comes a risk. Despite the risks of AI in the classroom I do believe there is a time and a place for it. Believe it or not, we’ve already been using AI in the classroom! The first task I believe AI is useful for is generating ideas. Although I think that it’s important for kids to learn how to be creative and imagine ideas on their own, when certain assignments or classes might not be super interesting to them it could be challenging to develop ideas on something you’re not necessarily passionate about. I also feel like this should have strict expectations surrounding it and should not be used for kids grade 3 and under as their imagination is still very important in those younger years. Another tool I absolutely love and use for myself quite a lot is Grammarly. This can be really helpful for students in writing assignments as it helps them edit all sorts of different types of writing. One feature of Grammarly that I believe can be really useful to educators is the plagiarism checker. This is an AI tool that automatically scans all your students writing for plagiarism. You need to be cautious with this one however, because it isn’t always the most accurate and only flags things that could be plagiarized. On the topic of useful teacher AI platforms, MagicSchool. This is a generative AI tool designed specifically for educators. It has a ton of great features such as report card comment creator, cheesy joke creator, song creator, and much more. One tool that I think I will find particularly helpful in my classroom is the rubric generator. This will help me create rubrics easily and on time so that my students have a clear outline of my expectations for each assignment, before they even begin said assignment. Here is one I created for this assignment in less than 5 minutes!

This week our class was granted the opportunity to work with two grade 3 classes from Marysville Elementary to create stop motion videos. While we were there, we got to meet teachers, the principle, and the lovely students. The past few weeks I’ve felt very stressed, lost and there was lot of doubt in my mind about whether I am on the right path, but this experience made me feel very excited and confident that I am on the right track to being an excellent educator. This experience was very good for exposing me to the SD6 environment, where I haven’t spent much time. It was also a great way to get some teacher tips, fresh from the source, on classroom management, job applications, and becoming an excellent teacher. When thing I would have changed was maybe having more time because my group of students had some excellent ideas for our stop motion, but we were unable to execute all of it. I believe this is a very important experience for all teacher candidates and should be included in every course. In conclusion, if I were to do this again, I wouldn’t change much other than trying to get more time or even doing it in 2 sessions. I also would have liked to slow down at the beginning to do some work on learning names because I genuinely don’t remember one of my students’ names. Overall, a great experience and I’m looking forward to working in schools again in the future.

For this week’s reflection, I made a screen cast summarizing Epic! Books. This platform is a great tool for teachers looking to expand their “classroom library” for free!! Epic Books gives students and teachers access to over 40K books. The books range from levels aged 0-2 – 12+yrs. There are many categories and options for read only, read along, and audio books. This app would be super beneficial for a new teacher, a teacher looking to expand their classroom library, a parent who wants to expand their child’s love for literature, or a teacher working in a remote area that might have limited access to books of this kind.

The first quote that stood out to me was: “I want my message to be one of positive change, not negative awareness”. I think way to often the topic of social media and the wild-wild-web is glorified and talked about in a fear inducing manner. The problem with having these kinds of conversations around it is that students become closed off about the topic and do not want to share openly what’s going on for them on social media. I also like the idea that social media doesn’t have to be a negative thing if we don’t make it one. If we can educate or students and prepare them for the risks of social media, it doesn’t have to be something we fear. The second portion of Miller’s talk I was drawn to, was the section where he talks about media literacy, specifically when he states, “becoming media literate means more than turning the mobile device towards you and sharing a photo… Media literacy means the device is turned outward… knowing when to record an event and when to put the phone down.” This makes me think of a video that went viral back in 2019 when two 16-year-old girls began recording a Tik Toc immediately after getting in a car crash. They got a lot of criticism for this and shrugged it off as “we were just keeping ourselves entertained until the police got there”, but it goes to show where teens priorities are these days. The third quote I found interesting from Miller’s speech was “if we focus only on developing digital citizenship, we will surely fail to develop digital leaders.” I think this brings light to the sheep-like behavior that social media produces in students. Far too many kids are worried about the new latest trend, or the next big influencer, or who’s following who, that they don’t make time for original thought or imagination. This Ted Talk is one I will definitely keep in my toolbox when it comes time to teach my own classroom and my own children about what it means to have media literacy.

I first began on social media when I created my first Instagram account at around age 12 (Shhh don’t tell anyone I lied about my birthday!!!) at first, I enjoyed the initial intentions of social media as someone with family who didn’t live very close to me (Kamloops and Vancouver). I loved being able to connect with the family I didn’t get to see very often. It was also a nice way of seeing what my friends were up to outside of school.

Throughout my teens I felt a need to be active on social media. I’d post fairly frequently (once weekly or biweekly), and I definitely enjoyed the mini dopamine rushes I got from watching that “liked” count go up just a little for each post. Though I never had an overly negative experience on social media, my general interest for being involved with it decreased significantly.  

Today, I find social media to be quite intimidating and unappealing. In a mini survey I completed in my women’s history course last year, I concluded that social media, despite its benefits, has become a manipulative environment for most of its users into the submission to gender roles. Amongst other negative aspects to social media – lowing self-confidence, motivation, and productivity – the negative impact of its manipulative algorithms on society has led me to be a little more stand offish towards using it. I post only occasionally now and its only to keep family updated on my life. I do however believe it could be a great tool for keeping parents informed on what’s going on in their student’s classroom and would consider using a blog format social media page as a way of interacting with students’ families.

Here, I’ve linked a couple of teacher Instagram accounts I find inspirational:

• Gender_Inclusive_Schools
• Educator_Andrea
• MsHoneysclasshive