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Author: meganlindsay (Page 1 of 2)

Weekly Reflection #7: AI in Education

AI is a topic that is frequently brought up in every single one of our classes. I’ve found myself getting quite fatigued of the topic, but it is not something we can really put on the back burner when discussing education. I realize that AI is more than just Chat GPT, but I haven’t really gone beyond using chat to other AI tools. Just the other day I realized that you can get chat to generate photos! I don’t know if it did that before, it very well might have. Anyways, I asked it to generate a photo with the prompt “create an imagine of a fairy like forest that frodo might explore in the shire” here is what it gave me!

By: Chat GPT

Something that I’m still grappling with is the enivronmental impacts of AI. In this class we had quite the discussion surrounding what using Chat GPT means for the environment. I definitely will be more intentional with my use of AI tools knowing the impacts it has on the environment.

AI for teachers can be a tool that cuts lesson planning in half. I myself have used it to create different scenerios for certain activities. For example, when I taught a Social Studies lesson on the Salem Witch Trials. Katie and I asked Chat GPT to create character cards and scenerios for our role playing activity. It was really awesome because it saved us so much time and was honestly more creative than any ideas we could’ve come up with.

I still don’t know exactly where I stand on the use of AI, even after our lengthy classroom discussion. It’s scary to think that it is just beginning to develop, but it’s exciting for us as educators to have new tools to engage students with.

Week #6: Digital Inclusion in Education

The presentation about inclusion using digital resources was really interesting to for me. My cousin is on the autism spectrum and I’ve spent a lot of time with him and can attest to the fact that technology has helped him be involed with my family. Both Tracy and Kaori have children experiencing disabilities so they were really passionate aobut the topic. I think that having a relationship with someone who is experiencing a disability helps you understand how easy it can be to more inclusive by making small adjustments. The presentation and discussion by Tracy and Kaori sparked a lot of thoughts and connects for me. Working with people who have disabilities is something that I am passionate about, and have spent a lot of time doing. The organization Power To Be is an amazing organization in Victoria that gets everyone of all abilities outdoors and experiencing nature.

By: Power To Be

While I think technology offers opportunities to make our lessons at school more inclusive, I’ve seen other ways make amazing impacts and bring people out of their shells. However, at Power To Be there are lots of different technologies in use to help people get outside. The TrailRider can help people who use a wheelchair experience some amazing hikes, I know they have been up Mt. Finlayson with it lots of times.

I took a class a couple years ago, EPHE 350, which was about how to make our physcial and health education classes more inclusive for everyone. I learned a lot and I think a lot of the tips apply to every class. Instead of having extra options/side jobs for students with disabilities, we should be making everything inherently incluisve. The main thing in PHE is always having different types of equipment availible to students, so anyone can pick what level of difficulty they would like that day. This doesn’t call out anyone with disabilities like making them use a special ball that no one else uses.

Free Inquiry #3 – Canva

From: Canva.com

I decided to use this inquiry opportunity to create a unique way to display my reflection journal for our Link2Practice experience. Canva is something that I have always wanted to use and struggled to because I didn’t quite understand how it worked. I knew I wanted to create a mind-map to connect all the different concepts we discussed throughout my experiences at Oak Bay. When looking through all the options here is what you see:

As we can see, so many amazing templates, all colourful, fun and cool! I decided to choose a nature themed one since that related to my driving question. A few templates unfortunately were only included in the “pro” paid version, but there was lots of free options.

I then moved forward and began to customize the template. With the right click option I was able to duplicate some of the features and move them around to fit in more information.

After I duplicated and moved around all the little beige circles to where I wanted them to be, I could easily add text to each box and write in my little blurb. I found the add text box botton on the side very easily.

Though it did take a while to me to fiddle around with the settings, and some frustrations trying to fit everything in I was able to complete my final product! which looks like this:

I was pleased with how the final product came out and really like the easy to follow theme, where I was allowed to add little paragraphs in each section. While it is hard to read on here, I blew it up to submit it. Moreover, I found using canva for this project really helpful. All the templates are adjustable and you don’t have to follow it exactly. I didn’t follow the tutorial posted for us to use step by step because I couldn’t find one that was exactly realted to what I wanted to do. But I found the introductory videos super helpful to get me started, and it gave me the tools to discover the features on my own.

Reflection 6: EdCamp

By Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Collaboration

I was absent from this class due to illness. This meant that I had to ask my peers about this class, and look at the blog posts from my classmates to inpsire me on what to write for my blog post. This inspired me to think about collaboration in classrooms with students, and also collaborating with fellow teachers. We’re always being encouraged to share resources with one another and not gatekeep what we find or create. Teaching is not meant to be a competitive field, when we collaborate and share resources we can spend more time and energy creating relationships with students. I’ve heard that teaching can be a lonely profession, but it doesn’t have to be. Working together to create meaningful learning experiences for our classes expands our knowledge as teachers. I chose the picture above because my driving question for L2P is about nature-based learning. I believe that nature-based learning is the perfect environment to teach our students about working together. Nature is extremely interconnected and is constantly collaborating with eachother. The soil collaborates with the roots of the trees to help them grow, and the branches create leaves, which in turn fall off and enriches the soil, a cycle. Which is a lovely metaphor for when we collaborate with eachother. Okay, but what does this have to do with EdCamp?

EdCamp and Professional Development

EdCamp is a great way to collaborate with like-minded indviduals. From what I understand from our class, we chose topics that are interesting to us and formed groups based on the most popular topics. Everyone got to show case what they know about these topics, and discuss with their peers about them. I personally learn the most through discussion, and I thrive when things are explained to me in different ways from different people. As someone who loves learning in a lecture based classroom, this first semester in our PDPP has been anything but that. I’ve found through collaborating with my peers, I’m learning about different perspectives and ways of thing, as opposed to facts and academic content. This has really helped me grow as a person, and opened my mind. I have always struggled with the concept of having a growth mindset. I don’t react well to constructive cristism, but when this feedback is given to me, not in a grade based sense, I’ve found I digest it so much better. Being open to changing your perspective and admitting you might have had the wrong idea about something is super valuable as an educator.

By Stanford Alumni

Reflection 5: Multimedia Learning + Design

Learning can be really boring when a teacher is just talking at you for even 20 minutes straight. The use of visuals and other components in a classroom is important for keeping students engaged. We talk about this a lot in our other classes, and it reminds me of the concept of UDL (Universal Design for Learning).

What is UDL?

By Teachings in Education

The video above gives a great outline of what UDL is, and how it helps students learn. For us as teachers, UDL gives us different tools to engage students, and takes the pressure off of us just speaking in front of a classroom, so it’s a win win. I personally learn really well with YouTube videos. As a history major for most of my degree I spent a lot of time trying to organzie different events or classes in my brain. Particularily in the semesters where I was in 4 or 5 history classes, keeping information tucked away in the part of my brain I had for each class was difficult. YouTube video summaries on historical events became my lifeline for jumpstarting my brain when studying for a midterm or final. History videos often are paired with geographical visuals that can be super helpful for keeping sequences of events straight. Here is an example of a video that uses a map to show us how the battle for North Africa in WW2 played out. (I specifically remember watching this video a couple times)

By Real Time History

Other Multimedia Strategies

I know youtube isn’t the only way to introduce different media into the classroom, I just have found it works the best for myself in learning. In creating lessons for other classes I’ve found live polling or quizzing tools to be useful to gauge understanding for the students, or check for previous knowledge on a subject. Mentimeter being one of my favourites, as it creates a word cloud which is a wonderful visual to see where everyone is at. Here is a visual of what students see:

From Mentimeter.com

Using tools like Kahoot to gamify learning is also a create technology tool for the classroom. I’ve also participated in classes where we listen to podcasts together, which is a great way to calm students and bring the energy levels down. Students can just put their heads down and listen, or watch the captions on the projector.

Reflection 4: Jeff Hopkins (PSII)

Learning about the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry felt extremely appropriate after hearing from Trevor Mckenzie about inquiry based learning. The students at PSII take inquiry based learning to a whole new level by having their inquiry question at the centre of each school subject. The school is in the heart of downtown, and seems to lend itself well to students who are young entrepeneurs, being near all kinds of businesses. The layout of the school itself is extremely unique and lends itself to collaboration between students. Here is a YouTube video that walks through the space.

By Jeff Hopkins

Why does this matter?

Education in British Columbia has been changing a lot in the past few years, specifcally with the introduction of the proficency scale. And with the additional emphasis on the First Peoples’ Learning Principles. The ministry is trying to take the spotlight away from grades and percentages, and highlight student learning as a process. As we learn in our psychology class, when students are motivated intrinsically to seek knowledge and learn, they are much more likely to persist and excel at school. When students focus on grades, they memorize and cram for tests and when they complete the tests the information falls out of their head. With schools like PSII focused on inquiry based learning, students are learning more in each subject, because it is related to something that interests them. I know even for myself when I am allowed the freedom to choose my topic even for an essay, I almost always remember more about the topic, and produce a better product.

I included the First Peoples’ Principles of learning above because I think it relates to the structure PSII has created. Particularily “Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness on reciprocal relationships and a sense of place).”

Free Inquiry #2: Smartphone Photography

Students are using their phones for everything. Digital cameras are pretty much obsolete in our society except for when they’re used in an “aesthetic way”. So, we pretty much take all of our photos on our smartphones. This tutorial explained how to use the rule of thirds, control exposure, use different angles and more. Knowing how to take a good photo on your smartphone is important because you are capturing a moment and want to capture the feeling of the moment. Teaching students the skills to take better photos is important, no doubt they will have to take photos for a school project at some point. The section I found the most valuable was the video explaining the “rule of thirds”. This is a term I had heard before but didn’t fully understand. The tutorial included a small quiz in form of a google form to make sure you were fully prepared to carry on and begin taking photos. Additionally, it walked your through your phone settings to make sure all the right settings were applied.

After getting set up on my phone, I felt ready to go outside and take some pictures. I was excited to test out my camera after making some adjustments in my settings and learning some new information. I played with some different exposures and angles with my muse being a leaf. The first photo in the gallery below shows what it looks like to have the grid setting on, and how the slide option to change the exposure comes up. Can you tell which photos I put the exposure way up or way down?

I chose to use a couple of different leaves as it gave an easy object to focus on and contrasted well with the backgrounds. Emma and I did this photography lesson together, and we found that it was harder than we thought to line up the leaves nicely according to the rule of thirds, but the photos looked much better once the leaves were properly centred. I decided not to edit my photos because I was playing with the exposure during my photo taking and I didn’t want that to get lost. All in all, knowing the fundamentals of taking a good photo with your device is essential for anyone. Specifically, this lesson can also assist in the classroom setting when completing assignments that involve photos. I found another YouTube video that wasn’t in the tutorial that gave some really great and concise tips:

Week 4: Trevor Mackenzie

By Buddha Elemental 3D on Unsplash

Week 3: Jesse Miller Presentation

By NordWood Themes on Unsplash

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