Page 2 of 2

Michael opened our class this morning by telling us not to worry if we forgot our tents… good thing I didn’t bring mine to school for this camping trip! Today we participated in an EdCamp activity where we each wrote down some burning questions/concerns we have about our future careers, and then voted on some specific topics to focus on. I wrote “How do I manage the classroom when I have a ratio of 1:25?”. My peers also brought forward great questions, including:

• How do I teach on a budget?
• How much screen time should I be allowing in my classroom/how much technology is too much?
• How do I deal with problematic parents?
• Is it worth gaining additional qualifications to get a 5+ pay grade?
• How do I implement a successful gardening program at my school?
• What are different mindfulness strategies to incorporate into my classroom?

My topic, along with three others, ended up being selected for the EdCamp activity. At first I felt pretty awkward because only two people decided to join my group; however, having a more intimate group led to some very productive and personal discussion! Today was a great introduction to EdCamp, but I hope that the next time I participate in one I will have more time to talk and that it will be easier to switch groups. While I was happy to be able to discuss my question more closely, I really wanted time to also delve deeper into the other issues that my classmates brought up. 

Out of everything we talked about in our small group discussion, Jayme, Jessie, and I decided to highlight the three most important points. 

1. Establish Clear Expectations and Routines
   1. A great way to do this is through co-creation of a classroom agreement. At the beginning of the year, I can ask my students to brainstorm a class code of conduct and sign their names on it. They will be more motivated to follow the rules since they played a part in making them, as they feel greater personal responsibility and understand why they are important. 
   2. I want to create routines for different transition activities I have with my students, like Simon Says (I already use this with many of my swim groups), music dance breaks, and choral responses (ex. I say ‘Who lives in a pineapple under the sea’ and they say ‘Spongebob Squarepants’). As often as possible, I want to incorporate movement into my transitions as this is a great way to help students refresh their brains and bodies before the next activity. 
2. Maximize Student Engagement
   1. Something I really liked during my Link2Practice was the students’ use of whiteboards. Using whiteboards rather than pen and paper lowers the stakes of the activity, as it is so easy to erase things and make changes! Whiteboard use is also an excellent use of formative assessment; teachers can ask questions and then assess understanding based on what students write on their whiteboards.
   2. As much as possible, I want to incorporate student choice into my activity planning. For example, I can give students a selection of possible short stories and get a classroom vote for which one I read aloud to the class. Rather than providing open choices, I want to let my students choose from a selection of predetermined options – this will allow me control over what I am choosing to teach students, while letting them choose a choice that will be the most engaging to them.
3. Build Strong Relationships and Community
   1. It is really important to me that I get to know all my students as human beings, and learn what makes them special. In the first week of school, I will assign my students a get to know you project so that I understand more about who they are as people. Students will respect me more and be more motivated in school if they see that I am interested in their lives outside of the classroom. My grade 5 teacher also got us to write in a weekly journal, where I often discussed my weekend plans – I loved getting to tell my teacher about my life, and will definitely be implementing this technique.
   2. My classroom’s mental health is also extremely important to me. Every morning, I hope to offer a daily check-in where my students tell me (most likely using technology) how they are feeling. The beluga check-in we did in class this morning is a very good way of accomplishing this! Understanding my students’ mental health is a great way of fostering community in my classroom because it will help me meet them where they are at and perhaps make changes to my plans based on energy levels if necessary. I also want all my students to know that my classroom is a supportive, open space where they can always come to me for help if needed. 

In other news, for my science class with Erika I used my knowledge from this class to design some worksheets. Our experiment was about reaction time, and we asked students to complete it 5 times before filling out the discussion questions on the back side. I really loved designing these 🙂

Over the last few days, my mind travelled back in time as I tried to answer your question: Was there a specific video or multimedia source that stood out to you the most as a child?

When you asked us this over Zoom, my mind went to all the obvious answers: Bill Nye, John and Hank Green, various grammar videos, etc. These resources are useful and I want to use them all in my future classroom, but almost every student my age knows what I’m talking about when I bring up these names. I wanted to think of some unique things that teachers from my past did with multimedia.

When I saw an eagle in the sky while I was camping, I remembered a super memorable webcam I watched 15 years ago… and hence this video was born.

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!

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

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!

Looking forward to hearing your feedback!