This might sound crazy, but last Saturday I and four of my friends went on a snorkelling trip. When we woke up and saw snow we were tempted to cancel, but after spending lots of time planning and borrowing equipment from others we felt that we had invested too much time into the excursion to cancel. I admit I was slightly terrified about the cold.
Saturday was my third time snorkelling in Victoria, and it was by far the most fun and the most frigid. Because our group was short a pair of fins, I decided to try out using my old pair of fins that are designed for competitive swimming. As you can see from the pictures I have attached below, these look very different from typical snorkelling fins.
Fins Designed for Snorkelling:
Fins Designed for Competitive Swimming:
I had expected my fins to be inefficient, but I loved using them! I found that I had more control over my feet, which allowed me to kick more powerfully and stay underwater for longer. My movement feels limited with the snorkelling fins, since they are made of hard plastic that does not bend with the foot.
Because I was able to spend more time underwater, I saw so many more things! I saw a few white sea anenomes that I looked up on iNaturalist, and found that their technical name is Metridium farcimen. I saw some other anenomes as well, but sadly was not able to take good enough pictures to properly identify them. I’ve discovered that I tend to see more at Breakwater Park than Ten Mile Point – Ten Mile is beautiful but the breakwater has much more diversity of wildlife. I’m not sure if this is actually a characteristic of the two areas or whether the water is just shallower at the breakwater, allowing me to see more – I will try and investigate the science behind this before I go snorkelling again.
I made an iMovie to document Saturday’s snorkel trip. I didn’t get any footage of the aftermath because I could not stop shivering! This was hard for me to make – I am looking forward to improving my videography skills by using the resources we were given after Friday’s class. I also want to credit my roommates, Makenna and Sarah, for not only getting me into snorkelling but taking some really amazing photos of the experience. Some of them look too good to be true, but I promise they are 100% real!
Over the weekend as I visited with a friend from home and watched the snow fall outside, I thought about expanding the scope of my inquiry project. Aside from being passionate about the ocean (I am a kayak instructor back home, but do not have access to kayaking here), a big reason why I wanted to get into snorkelling was because of wanting to expand my outdoor-related knowledge. Despite being a huge outdoor enthusiast my whole life, I find myself in the dark about the wildlife I see on a daily basis.
I reluctantly admit that I was a Pokemon GO kid- I remember going to Stockholm with my family as a child, and the most exciting part of the trip was that my hostel was a PokeStop. So much of my time that summer was spent on my phone looking for tourist hubs where I could catch different Pokemon characters. When chatting with my roommate over coffee, she discussed how the iNaturalist app has a similar addictive effect to Pokemon GO- only it doesn’t promote engagement with made-up characters, it encourages students to go outside and take pictures of plants and animals they see in their natural environment. We were talking about how cool it would be to get students in a competition to try and upload as many unique sightings to iNaturalist as possible. Uploading specimens to iNaturalist gives students outdoor literacy skills, promoting a greater understanding of their surroundings. Let’s be real here – most of my future students are going to be addicted to technology. Given that this is the case, why not introduce them to apps like iNaturalist that provide a productive way to spend time outdoors and enrich an important knowledge base?
When I first moved to Canada as an 8-year old, neither I nor my parents were literate about the world around us. I saw my peers eating random berries they found on trees and every time got anxious because my mom had told me never to eat anything in the wild. I don’t like thinking about what could have happened to me if I had ignored my parents’ advice and eaten some random berry that looked vaguely similar to one my friend ate often. Nature literacy isn’t just a fun little activity for students – it is a must for young children growing up in British Columbia. However, how am I supposed to teach nature literacy if I know very little about plant identification myself?
While I will continue to upload content of my snorkelling journey, I will also be trying to gain more familiarity with the plants I interact with every day. My friend and I walked up Mount Doug on Sunday, and I was able to learn so much – I now know what a salal plant looks like, the appearance of a licorice tree, and that maple trees can be identified by their opposite branching patterns. In the next few weeks, I will be doing my best to expand my knowledge from this very rudimentary baseline.
I cannot imagine going through my ~18 years in school without the support of my trusty assistants, Word and PowerPoint. My sister and I learned how to type by working together to write pages of Word Documents that ended up being a mix of random letters blurred together. In grade 7, I – like many others – discovered the art of adding transitions to my PowerPoint slides. I felt deeply offended when my teacher told me it was unprofessional to use twelve different transitions in the same presentation. For those wondering, my original go-to was “Page Curl”.
As somebody who sometimes struggles to get used to new software, I was worried that I would have to learn a lot of technologies to be a successful teacher. Yesterday’s lecture showed me that I could not have been more wrong! Despite all the flashy technologies targeted at teachers, most lessons can be accomplished by sticking with the basics. I was really excited to see Michael demonstrate all the different ways to utilize PowerPoint and Word within an elementary school classroom. Both are also usually easily convertible into Google Slides presentations, making it easier than ever to share resources with other teachers.
I got inspired by yesterday’s class and decided to play around with PowerPoint to make some of my own worksheets. Each one was designed with a specific curricular goal in mind – who knows, maybe I will use these in a real classroom one day! I also welcome feedback from anyone who comes across this blog post about how to make these better.
Grade 3 Mathematics
Big Idea: Development of computational fluency in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers
Curricular Competency: Develop mental math strategies and abilities to make sense of quantities
Content: Multiplication and Division Concepts, Number Concepts up to 1000
Grade 3 is the first year that students get introduced to their times tables. While worksheets like this one seem to be getting phased out within elementary school classrooms, I believe that repetition of skills is sometimes key to mastery. I intend to use this worksheet to cement knowledge into students’ brains after doing several fun multiplication-related activities.
Grade 3 English/Language Arts
Big Idea: Using language in creative and playful ways helps us understand how language works
Curricular Competencies: Use sources of information and prior knowledge to make meaning, develop and apply expanding word knowledge
Content: Writing processes, word patterns/families, sentence structure
I designed this worksheet for students who have spent the last few days exploring the “ough” grapheme. Looking at the list of words below, you can tell this is a hard one for students to master because of how many different sounds the grapheme can make. Either before or after the worksheet, teachers can compare the different words within the bubble and discuss which ones sound the same and which sound different.
Grade 5 Science
Big Idea: Multicellular organisms have organ systems that enable them to survive and interact with their environment
Curricular Competencies: Make observations in familiar or unfamiliar contexts, transfer or apply learning to new situations
Content: Students are expected to know basic structures and functions of body systems – digestive, musculo-skeletal, respiratory, circulatory
I was inspired by the diagram of the water cycle that Michael covered up with text boxes, so I replicated that here with the digestive system. There’s no reason why I should have to spend time drawing my own diagram or looking for one with pre-made text boxes when it took me less than five minutes to design this (of course, remember to give images credit when necessary and use with permission). I intend for this worksheet to be a review for students who are familiar with the digestive system, or an activity to complete with a partner in the morning to get ready for the school day ahead.
Thank you for taking the time to look at my reflection and worksheets!
Here is my second inquiry project post. If you can’t tell, I’m quite obsessed with the photos my roommate and I took while snorkelling! Before proceeding further into this course, I thought it would be useful to describe my general plan for this passion project. I also wanted to get started with some of the technology I will be getting used to (iNaturalist).
When I (hopefully) teach outdoor education in my future, I want to use iNaturalist as a tool for helping my students become literate about the plants and animals surrounding them daily. I’m quite bad at using the app right now, but that’s why we have a growth mindset and keep practicing!
To my great embarrassment as a 14 year old trying to fit in with my friends, my family was resistant to letting me download Instagram. When I eventually became active on the platform, my first username was ‘kitkat234’ because my family did not want me to post anything that could potentially trace back to me or my identity. I was reminded almost daily that putting content online meant it was there forever- even on apps like Snapchat that claimed to delete photos after 10 seconds. Any time I posted a photo with people in it, I texted them individually to get their consent.
Ten years later and I feel much more desensitized to the potentially dangerous side of social media. My Instagram handle is my first and last name, I have a LinkedIn account to update my connections about major life milestones, and I have a friends only Instagram page where I post my life updates – the good, bad, and ugly. Jesse’s presentation brought me back to when I was 13 years old and had virtually no digital footprint. It terrifies me that there is so much information about me online for people I do not know to potentially see. Though I firmly believe I have never posted anything that others could view as offensive and problematic, any future educator needs to be aware that social climates change. A post that seems hilarious now could turn into a huge problem ten years down the road.
An extreme example of this is a girl from my Queen’s University graduating class. In 2023, I attended a debate for the Arts and Sciences Commission’s presidential election. Partway through the debate, most audience members including myself received an anonymous AirDrop – a picture, screenshotted from Snapchat in 2016, of one of the candidates with black paint on her face holding a watermelon. The text she had included on the photo is considered highly offensive and I do not want to write it down, but I have attached a news article for anyone wanting more context. She was forced to withdraw from the election, and watch her aspirations as a politician go up in smoke. I Googled her name while writing this post, and the top five articles all relate to this scandal.
I’m not saying I agree with my classmate’s actions nine years ago – I was horrified to see this image pop up on my phone – but I can’t help but feel bad for her. Something she posted without fully understanding what she was saying will now haunt her for life.
See this article for more context about the racist photo AirDropped at a Queen’s University debate in 2023.
I’ve always understood that I need to be careful of what I post – but as an aspiring educator, some responsibility falls on me to educate children about how to be appropriate citizens in a digital society. This task is daunting because the online world is constantly changing. For instance, Jesse talked about the rise of AI and the new risks we are all faced with because of this software. When Jesse told our class the story of a student who used AI to create fake nudes of their teacher, I realized that I do not know nearly enough about how to promote the safe use of AI in my classroom. During my time as a teacher, I anticipate having to educate my students about technologies and websites that have yet to be created.
These last few years I have been trying to pretend that AI does not exist. Most of my friends used Chat GPT to help them at some point in undergrad, but I did not want to acknowledge that it was real. My first semester at UVic made me realize that my future profession carries a responsibility to educate myself about any type of technology my students may be using, and Jesse’s lecture on Friday reinforced the importance of doing so. AI and internet safety scare me, but what scares me more is the thought of one of my students ruining their life over something that I could have prevented through high-quality education. Jesse made a good point that AI today was Google in 2003 – many people were scared of Google when it first came out, much like we are wary of AI today. However, Google has become embedded in almost everything we do as a society and has become a very productive force within education. I believe that AI has potential to achieve very positive things within an elementary school classroom, if educators are given the guidance to equip students on how to effectively use the technology.
Some things I wish everybody knew that I learned in Jesse’s presentation:
Snapchat saves everything- including the drafts you never end up sending.
If you ever need a student’s contact information for something school-related, put it into the Notes app: don’t make them a contact on your phone, because then it will start suggesting you follow each other on various social media.
Digital media literacy is not just a parent’s domain: it should be reinforced in all areas of a young person’s life.
Screenshotting information as a way of leveraging it over somebody could be illegal, depending on the context.
Thank you for bringing Jesse in to our classroom- I learned so much from his presentation and I am so much more motivated now to take time to go over digital literacy and safety with my future students.
Although I was unable to attend class on Friday, I read through your slides and watched Most Likely to Succeed independently.
I found it really interesting to see the differences between my own (perhaps more typical) high school experience, and the experience of the students at High Tech High. What really resonated with me was the statistic that if students had to take a test a few months after they had studied for it, they would remember very little of the content. I can relate to this as I recently completed a psychology degree and ever since have been feeling like I should remember more of the content I learned.
High Tech High’s innovative model allows students to fully engage with material they learn at school, in a way that works with them and their interests. School is more about completing a task that students are really passionate about, and less than rote memorization. To be honest, I would have liked high school much more if I had gone to High Tech High. However, I share the concerns of many of my classmates that these students may not be ready for the academic structure of most universities. Times may be changing, but getting into higher education (ex. medical school or law school) requires a very high GPA. Students at High Tech High will not come into university with exam experience, and I am curious how they would handle this extreme shift in their schooling. Personally, I had never taken a three-hour long exam when I attended university and I found this to be a huge jump – it would have been way harder if I had never done a written examination before!
I decided to use Canva for my first inquiry post. This was my first time interacting with Canva on my own, and I found it really user-friendly and fun!
I am really excited to get started with this personal inquiry project, and I look forward to updating you on my snorkelling journey through multiple modes of technology.
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