Category: Weekly Reflections

This is the category to apply to your Weekly Reflection posts from the course.

Making My Own Worksheets!

February 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

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!

Promoting Digital Safety: Why does it matter to my future students?

January 27, 2025 /

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.

Racist image of AMS executive candidate made public
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. 

image showing person walking in pre-painted footprints
Photo by Flickr user jfchenier under CC license: BY-NC 2.0

Welcome and Introduction

September 9, 2020 /

Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:

  1. Do you want to be online vs. offline?
  2. Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
  3. Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
  4. Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.

First tasks you might explore with your new blog:

  • Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
  • Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “EdTech” category or sub-categories, Free Inquiry and EdTech Inquiry). We have also pre-loaded the Teacher Education competencies as categories should you wish to use them to document your learning. If you would like to add more course categories, please do so (e.g., add EDCI 306A with no space for Music Ed, etc.)
  • See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the course categories assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
  • Add pages
  • Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works)
  • Under Appearance,
    • Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, etc.)
    • Customize menus & navigation
    • Use widgets to customize blog content and features
  • Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep for reference)

Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to use the course topic as the category as opposed to the course number as those outside of your program would not be familiar with the number (e.g., we use “EdTech” instead of “edci336).

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:

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