To live is to experience.
To experience is to learn.
To learn is to grow.

My professional learning journey has taken me to challenging places physically, intellectually, and emotionally. It has taken me to rural districts, foreign cultures, First Nations communities, and suburbia. Here is what I have learned on my teaching journey.

1. Who am I as a learning professional? – I believe in creating authentic social relationships, as opposed to judgmental ones based on authority and power. I know one of my strengths in teaching is that I am able to effectively and responsibly wield power in the classroom, but that exemplary educators are able to share that power with their students, to let it go. I must believe in their own ability, for I am merely a guide and mentor, not some benign Protector of Knowledge.

   I believe that my inquiry journey into technology has opened my eyes into the importance of multiliteracies, particularly how we assess them, and that digital technologies are only one aspect of multiliteracy education. My inquiry has shown me the divide between the privileged and the forgotten – from urban powerhouses, where each classroom receives its own set of iPads; to dying boom towns, where a school of 1000 students must share 30 portable laptops; to rural communities, where the investment into new technologies has already taken place, but that both teacher and student are ill-equipped to use and thereby benefit from the investment itself.I am my grandmother. While it might seem odd to state, especially of a woman I knew little of, there is no doubt that my relationship to the profession of “learning professional” (previously known as “teacher”) is rooted from the connection I have to this woman. Though I only met her twice when I was three and ten years old, I remembered how unconditional love guided her every action and when I later visited the rural village where she taught, strangers would approach me and tell me what a wonderful person and teacher she was. Her story has shown me that excellent teachers are flexible, creative, and resourceful. When me SAs and FA celebrated my ability to engage with students respectfully and sensitively, I knew where this skills and instinct came from. I am only half the teacher and half the person she was, but I seek to improve myself each day with her as my north star.

2. What are my educational commitments? – Below I have highlighted my teaching philosophy. This philosophy is always a work-in-progress and I hope to expand it further as I acquire knowledge and teaching experience.
   
   I believe that education is empowerment.
   I was taught at a young age to always value my education as “the one thing no one can ever take from [me]”. This is an axiom I live by and I make sure to teach it to my students. In this pursuit of student empowerment, I choose to promote 21st century skills in the classes I teach, thereby giving students the tools they need to navigate the world they will soon inherit. In order to prepare my students for the world, I emphasize critical, historical, and geographic thinking. In particular, I challenge them to speak out in class and challenge one another’s ideas, as I can not imagine learning without respectful dialogue.

   I believe that relationship is everything.
   My personal life experiences have taught me that learning can happen anywhere. Following this, people must people strive to relate to each other, but also to the unique environments we find ourselves in. Therefore all learning is lived experience. But learning to happen and growth to occur, all relationships must be establish on the basis of mutual trust between parties. By promoting healthy relationships based on mutual trust, as opposed to obedience and authority, learning professionals can build bridges between students, colleagues, disciplines, administrators, parents, and the larger community.

   I believe that resilience is growth.
   Students need to be taught how to successfully cope with failure, namely, that we experience the most growth by learning from all experience, even if our experiences are initially viewed by us to be unsuccessful or unrewarding. I also believe that a great teacher is a reflective practitioner, but exemplary teachers model this reflective practice for their students each day and provide them with the critical thinking and communicative tools they need to themselves become reflective and engaged individuals. By representing the concept of failure as a positive learning experience, students are allowed to reflect and develop a positive self image by creating positive mindsets, which also increases self efficacy.

3. What have I learned from this year? – I have learned to focus on the process and the value of formative assessment practices. My inquiry focused on technology in education, but when I realized that my school district was underfunded and that most teachers who utilized new technologies paid out of their own pockets, I realized that a shift in thinking was necessary. This shift brought me to best assessment practices and multiliteracies theories, of which there are four: cognitive-psychological, psycholinguistic, sociocultural, and sociopolitical. Each of these multiliteracies theories acknowledges the breadth of knowledge humans acquire over a lifetime and by using each theory in my assessment practices, I can maximize student engagement and better support learning in a positive classroom environment. The advantage of transferring my inquiry from digital technologies to best assessment practices using multiliteracies theories, is that I can still continue to research, design, and reflect upon the role of digital technologies within an assessment through multiliteracies framework.Moving forward, I hope to establish best assessment practices early on in my professional career and possibly work towards a TESL certificate within the year. I plan to dedicate any professional development opportunities that come my way in the near future, towards assessment, inquiry, and multiliteracies.

These experiences unique to my story have shaped who I have become and how I see the work of a teacher as it relates to students, colleagues, and community. I thank you for taking the time to read this reflection and hope it has inspired you.

In this post, I will reflect on my previous two meetings with my colleague, who generously reviewed my inquiry thus far and offered some guidance as I head into practicum next week.

First Meeting:

My peer reviewer pointed two important areas of my inquiry that are yet to be addressed. The first we discussed was my school’s BYOD policy and the social and academic effects it might have on my students who do not have daily access to technologies like smartphones. Admittedly, this is a valid and grounding rule for me moving forward. Failure to ensure equal access to technologies in the classroom would fly in the face of one of the B.Ed. programs underlying themes – equity. I myself bought my first smartphone when I was 21 years old. All I had in high school was a flip phone. This means that I had to find and implement strategies that would reduce student stress and pressure, as well as promote harmony in the classroom. One strategy that was suggested to me was to ask for volunteers to bring in their devices – one per student group – the day of the activity, where they would then be assigned the role of video editor.

The second area that needed to be addressed was on how I would use the SAMR model in my lesson planning. Before I can do this, I first need to find technologies that either all my students or the school have access to.

Second Meeting:

In this meeting I came to my peer reviewer with two specific technologies I intend to explore in greater detail – video gaming and virtual reality. My peer reviewer advised me to think about how I would keep students engaged, especially those who – for example – disliked video gaming. I plan on incorporating a choose-your-own-adventure video game from the Canadian War Museum website called Over the Top. I plan on polling student interests and emotion by having them fill out a Mood Meter handout as an exit slip. As teachers, we have to be willing to take risks, but these risks are meaningless if students are not adequately prepared to meet them and if teachers do not assess their impact.

Until next time,
Alex M.

In this post, I will discuss how Bloom’s taxonomy and Dr. Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR model can assist teachers in developing engaging classroom activities for students.

Last term, my inquiry class received a visit from one of our program’s technology specialists, who introduced us to a few effective ways to integrate digital media and new technologies into classroom learning. Some of the technologies we experimented with were Padlet, stop-motion, and green screens. While it was interesting to interact with these technologies ourselves and experiences their practical application to learning, the greatest takeaway for me was the ensuing discussion on the SAMR model (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition), which can be used to help teachers to meaningfully incorporate technologies into their lesson planning. The model focuses on two categories: enhancement and transformation. Substitution and augmentation fall under the enhancement category, whereas modification and redefinition fall under transformation. Allow me to use the example of writing an essay to illustrate how the SAMR model is used. An example of substitution would be having students write out their paper on the computer – software replaces pen and paper. An example of augmentation would be utilizing text-to-speech technologies to change the functionality of the software – this would not be achievable using pen and paper alone. Posting the finished draft of the essay on a blog, where peers could provide constructive feedback, would be an example of modification. Finally, redefinition would be encouraging students to express their written ability through the use of various multimedia. An excellent example of this technology-in-action can be found in BC school district 60’s Wireless Writing Program http://www.prn.bc.ca/projects/wwp/. This program uses tablet technology to teach students about writing, acknowledging the act of writing as more than penmanship, but rather the communication of thoughts and ideas. In summary, the SAMR model is a tool for thoughtful teachers to use when checking to ensure their learning outcomes are reflected in the technology-centred activities they have planned. SAMR also keeps teachers honest with their planning, as they have to consider that various needs of their students at all times.

Bloom’s taxonomy is a model that helps teachers to plan learning activities that require a higher-order level of thinking and/or skill level. Bloom’s focuses on six higher-order skills: creativity, evaluation, analysis, application, understanding, and memory. Coupled with the SAMR model, Bloom’s will keep teachers honest about lesson planning and how they incorporate technologies into the class. As I mentioned in my last post, I will be exploring gaming and virtual reality technologies in my classrooms and research throughout practicum. I am excited to use these tools to keep me honest as both an academic and professional.

Next steps: I spent most of yesterday looking at different virtual reality apps that could be educational for my practicum students. I discovered that YouTube has been exploring with history through VR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDfsGX5pCHk and mobile app developers have created a VR flight experience called FK 23 Bantam, compatible with Google Cardboard. My goals for this week and throughout my practicum experiences are to find more resources I could potentially use in my classes.

Until next time,
Alex M.

Last week I met with a colleague in my inquiry class who will act as my peer reviewer for the remainder of the second term. They outlined that I should begin planning my next steps as I head into the extended practicum, so that I might have some activities in mind that I could incorporate into my unit objectives and lesson planning. In this post, I will discuss some of my latest findings into what other teachers have been doing to build community in their classrooms using new technologies and digital media. In particular, I will focus on one blog post and two online articles that share how educators are using new technologies to create meaningful learning experiences for students. In addition to this, I will share a lesson I created myself and have dubbed ‘Vinespeare’.

Gaming in the Classroom:
I was particularly excited to find out that teachers are finding innovative ways to teach students through video gaming (Bristow, 2013). I remember as a teenager myself, my video games often taught me a lot about world history, as many of the games I played were created by studios that hired historians to provide historical accuracy to their games. This meant that I learned about ancient Roman warfare while playing Age of Empires. Teachers today are finding use in Minecraft (also a game I enjoy playing!). I recently came across an incredible article describing how students in a New Zealand school put in hours of work researching and building a virtual memorial to the Battle of Gallipoli in WWI. The project was so impressive, that a local museum is displaying the student’s hard work (Barns, 2015). Now if that does not show the meaningful application of technology promoting community, I don’t know what does. This could be extended to teach students about a variety of topics: coding, mathematics, comparative civilizations, geography, and so on. Unfortunately, my practicum school does not have Minecraft Education and so this idea will remain an aspiration for the short term.

Virtual Reality:
David Nield writing for The Guardian online, published an article on wearable technologies in the classroom and how they are shaping how students learn. The article talks about a new Google program called Expeditions, which allows teachers to take their students on virtual field trips (Holland, 2015). While I believe this to be the future of field trips, eliminating costs and potential safety risks taking students to see the real thing, one obvious problem is that not all teachers have access to VR technologies. I know this to be the case in my practicum school, which belongs to a district that has experienced some economic hardship in the last years. Nield cites research that points towards how wearable technologies are increasing student retention of learning and “widening the spectrum of accessibility” among students (Nield, 2015).

One of the mediums I hope to experiment with during my practicum is virtual reality through Google Cardboard. I purchased two pairs for my own use, so resources would be limited, but I remain optimistic. My gut tells me that most schools do not have VR technologies, because the field as an educational tool is yet to be truly developed for classroom instruction and districts desire safe investments. A long term goal of mine would be to take students on a virtual field trip to explore the remains of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, located at the bottom of the sea in the Northwest Passage.

Supporting my interest in wearable technologies in the classroom, a kindergarten teacher, Margaret Powers, has a blog titled 365 Days of Glass, where she documents her experiences using Google Glass in her classroom (Powers, 2016). Her findings are very interesting insofar as they have enabled her to connect her young students with resources that are otherwise inaccessible. In one activity, students studied dinosaurs and got the opportunity to interview a palaeontologist.

Vinespeare:
I thought of this lesson as part of a unit plan for an English methods course I took last term. The gist of the lesson is that it has a duration of two classes and requires student volunteers to have access to a reliable smart phone or tablet, which they can bring to class. It requires student volunteers to have the app VivaVideo downloaded onto their device, which will be used to record students acting out scenes from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 1, Scene 2). It is a very short, humours scene and I want students to embrace the laughter and performance of the play in a medium they are familiar with. Student groups will first storyboard their scene in six sections (one for each second of video), providing an image for each scene, as well as a few sentences for context. The object is that students will explore the difficulties in creating relatable and consumable content for their peers, while synthesizing important information and experiencing the joy in engaging authentically with written text. Although Vine was discontinued last year as an app, most people are familiar with the format – 6 second comedy narratives. After the activity, students will be given a Mood Meter handout to determine how the activity made them feel, as well as the extent to which it increased their self-efficacy. I am interested to know whether or not students enjoy these activities and whether or not they find them as meaningful.

Housekeeping:
I haven’t had an in-depth discussion with either of my SAs, because my practicum school is outside of the Lower Mainland region. Most of our correspondence has focused around getting myself set up and ready for January 30th. I have sent them an e-mail requesting an informal sit-down and discussion about their experiences with technology in the classroom, but they have yet to respond. I do, however, know that they will expect me to be able to effectively manage a class before permitting me to test out my inquiry ideas. In all likelihood, most of my digital media-based activities will occur towards the latter weeks of my extended practicum.

Until next time,
Alex M.

Online Newspapers and Blogs:
Nield, David. (2015, July 28). Wearable technology in the classroom: what’s available and what does it do? The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/jul/28/wearable-technology-classroom-virtual-reality

Holland, Jennifer. (2015, May 28). Announcing Expeditions: taking students places a school bus can’t go. Retrieved from http://googleforeducation.blogspot.ca/2015/05/announcing-expeditions-taking-students.html

Powers, Margaret. (2016). 365 Days of Glass. Retrieved from http://365daysofglass.com/

Shrock, Kathy. (2017, Jan. 21). Samr and Bloom’s. Retrieved from http://www.schrockguide.net/samr.html

Bristow, Elliot. (2013, Nov. 21). Gaming in Education – Minecraft in Schools? Retrieved from https://www.theedublogger.com/2013/11/21/gaming-in-education-minecraft-in-schools/

Puentedura, Ruben R. (2014, Dec. 12). Technology in Education: An Integrated Approach. Retrieved from www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/archives/000141.html

Barns, Tiana. (2015, April 23). Students Build Gallipoli in Minecraft. Radio New Zealand. Retrieved from www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/271892/students-build-gallipoli-in-minecraft

One of the research books I have been reading is Dr. Mari K. Swingle’s i-Minds: How Cell Phones, Computers, Gaming, and Social Media are Changing out Brains, Our Behaviour, and the Evolution of Our Species. The book was an interesting read to say the least. In this post, I will summarize the books key points and relate how it has influenced my inquiry.

Dr. Swingle is a clinical psychologist and graduate of UBC. Most of her book’s claims stem from either her own personal experience working with patients, or her research. She says from the outset that digital media is not inherently negative, but that there are alarming findings that suggest many youths addicted to digital media are being negatively impacted both emotionally and cognitively by the technology they are using. According to her, the key question we must ask ourselves is what it is i-media is facilitating – focus not on what digital media has given us, but rather what it has replaced or taken away (Swingle, 2015). Swingle’s analysis is based on three perspectives: the species-wide implications of overusing technology, the generation-specific changes and extent to which we immerse ourselves in digital media, and finally the extent to which people use digital media to either include or exclude activities or relationships.

The book argues that we are seeing an era of unprecedented arousal. We are being overstimulated and this has negatively affected our ability to self-regulate. This means that we are less able to self-stimulate and self-entertain, which has resulted in a reduced ability to observe, integrate information, and most importantly, be creative, “In essence, we have less ability to sustain focus on the normal, the baseline, including states of observation, contemplation, and transitions from which ideas spark – what many under the age of twenty now consider a void, proclaiming boredom” (Swingle, 2015).

The personal and cultural implications of this phenomenon has been an altered brain state, affecting learning socialization, and creativity. Swingle is in effect critiquing a society’s inability to reflect on its use of digital media – we have forgotten why we needed it to begin with. It is a daunting task, navigating this new, digital age, but this is true only insofar as we do not know where we are going. Swingle closes her book by reminding readers to “keep looking, keep examining, keep questioning, and be equally open to change and the potential of the future as to the wisdom of the past” (Swingle, 2015).

Dr. Swingle’s thoughts of hyper-arousal got me thinking: is there any educational benefit in having students bring their cellphones to class if they are not using them for learning? This prompted a further question: what are my students doing to “unplug” from their devices and reconnect with themselves and each other? What am I doing? I have decided that I am going to try to enforce a no cellphone policy in my classes (I say try because both of my SAs are relatively easy-going on this issue and the school adopts a “case-by-case” policy on cellphones). This might sound paradoxical for me to suggest that by banning technology from my classes, I can find innovative ways of bringing technology together with community. My response would be that if my value as an educator to society is based upon my ability to guide students in the social process of learning, then having technology in my classes is only beneficial insofar as it facilitates student learning, which means that not every minute of class time is tech time. If a no cellphone policy is to be successful, then I will have to devise a way of convincing my students to buy in to the idea. This “digital contract” is something I will need to research into and build upon in the new year.

In summary, Swingle’s book advocates for a more conscientious and therefore meaningful engagement with technology in our lives. My task then is to devise a means of restricting and promoting technology in the classroom, with the following guiding questions in mind for both myself and my students, “Where did we come from? Where are we now? Where are we going?”

Until next time,
Alex M.

In this post, I will properly cite the two Youtube videos I previously wrote about: Digital Aristotle: Thoughts on the Future of Education and This will Revolutionize Education.

Grey, CGP. (2012, November 5). Digital Aristotle: Thoughts on the Future of Education

. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM170-M&t=3s

Veritasium. (2014, December 1). This will Revolutionize Education

. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c&t=6s

Until next time,
Alex M.

Welcome to the blog post that is also a proposal! Specifically, it is my inquiry proposal. It’s title (in case you missed it) is How can Meaningful Technology Support Classroom Learning? What I hope to achieve in this inquiry is provide a starting point for all teachers not technologically inclined to engage with the issue safely and responsibly. My essential question remains, how can teachers responsibly engage with new technologies to enhance their classrooms as supportive learning environments?

Allow me to be honest – I do not like technology. It changes too quickly and is revolutionizing the ways in which we experience our world. This is all very exciting if one has access to the funds to purchase the latest and greatest in tech. There is another issue: our new renaissance evolves alongside our materialist tendencies – you can’t play with new technologies unless you buy them. I come from a family that believes in buying what we know we need, as opposed to what we want or think we need. As a teacher, I know that I cannot hide nor can I stop the technological tsunami headed my way. I have to adapt and, as a result, seek enlightenment. As a teacher, I have worked in classrooms where students have access to the latest and best technologies, with no clear understanding of how to use them to learn. They are used as crutches rather than tools – what was bread and circuses to ancient Rome has become smartphones and apps for us.

But surely the power of new technologies have been harnessed and used to good effect in classroom settings by exceptional teachers? And what of the shortcomings of new technology? Dr. Mari K. Swingle warns us of our brains “speeding up, but not in a good way” (Swingle, 2015). Our addiction to technology has resulted in elevated states of arousal as we like, love, share, and swipe content, often multitasking while we do it. Swingle warns of this resulting in our inability to sustain focus on the normal: observation, contemplation, and connections. If good teachers care for their students, then they should also care about the things that matter to their students. This is why my inquiry is important. New technology is here to stay and it is up to teachers to tap into this wellspring of learning opportunities to create meaningful learning experiences from within our student’s minds. If we fail to do this, then our students will unplug from society and from each other. This is where community becomes important to my research. I want my students to understand technology as a powerful collaborative tool which they can harness to help them learn. There is the saying that two heads are better than one, so why not add five, ten, or thirty, I ask?

Until next time,
Alex M.

In this post, I will try to bring the ideas I presented in parts I and II of Technology: Revolutionary or Redundant? together and relate it to why my inquiry matters to the teaching profession.

For me, the two major takeaways from both videos were that teaching as a profession is not immune to change – indeed, technologies have always played a prominent role facilitating change in education. Whether we are speaking of wax tablets of iPads, new technologies broaden the range of approaches teachers can use to engage their students in learning. CPG Grey’s prophesying of the coming of Digital Aristotle for Everyone as the revolutionary tool has helped me to acknowledge that education as we know it in our post-industrial world, existed in many different forms in the past. The second takeaway was the realization that, while technology changes within education, two elements that have remained constant in education are the human relationships we establish and maintain and the creation of meaningful learning experiences in the classroom. What we have learned over the many years is that humans are social creatures, whose learning is only enhanced when they think together – two heads really are better than one. The role of the classroom teacher, then, is to facilitate and guide their students towards learning.

Now that I have a home base from which I can expand my inquiry, my next steps are to explore how we can use new technologies (and which ones to use) to create meaningful learning experiences in our student’s minds. It is my hope that I will be able to create a strong base with which to begin my research by first interviewing active teachers. Another resource I will begin looking into are the articles on education found on theguardian.com.

Until next time,
Alex M.

In this post I will reflect upon the popular Youtube video I mentioned in my previous post, This will Revolutionize Education by Veritasium.

You can find the Veritasium video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c&t=4s

The video starts by charting the history of technology in education and how previous generations assumed that the technologies of their time will revolutionize education. Examples provided in the video were: the motion picture machine, radio, computers, and compact discs. In our own time, we are seeing increasing use of smart boards, smartphones, tablets, and M.O.O.C.S. (massive open online courses). The question posed in the video is if we can see technology revolutionizing other aspects of our lives, why not education? Perhaps we can blame a large bureaucracy with invested interests in maintaining the status quo? Veritasium pointed to research that showed how the mediums we use to teach – how we engage our students – does not indicate that student learning is improving. What this showed, was that teachers are not limited by the experiences we can give to students. What limits learning is what happens in student minds. This means that no technology is superior to another. The wax tablets used to learn in the Middle Ages were just as effective and revolutionary to education as the tablets we use today. I personally found one key flaw with his analysis, namely, that new technologies, unlike past technologies, have made education and learning more accessible than ever before. People’s oppprtunity to learn is inhibited less today than it was fifty years ago. However this flaw wasn’t taken into consideration in presenting Veritasium’s views, because they are focusing on the experience of learning as a mental process as opposed to receiving information.

So the key question is, how can we use technology to promote meaningful thought processes? In other words, what experiences promote the kind of thinking that is required for learning? My personal conversation with teachers have shown me that key to critical thinking in Social Studies and English classes is that we must train students to ask the kinds of questions that cannot be easily searched on Google. In order to do that, we must first train ourselves to ask higher order questions so that we can pass on this skill to our students. But, argues Veritasium, if you think that the primary role of a teacher is to transmit information, then you would be right to believe that we have outlived our purpose. This, however, is not the case. The real purpose of our being as professionals, is to guide the social process of learning.

This was the part that made sense to me. They were the words on the tip of my tongue which I could not find, because I did not think to look at what was right in front of me. What do you remember about your classroom experiences? For me, it was the student/teacher interactions every day. What mattered was knowing my teachers cared about my learning and that I was surrounded by a community of learners. I can’t remember the content I learned, because it was the experiences themselves that made me who I am today as an educator. I remembered being inspired, challenged, and excited by my teachers and I almost forgot that this was precisely why I became a teacher myself.

A key worry of mine, was whether or not my career as a classroom teacher was on the chopping block. If factory workers could lose their jobs to automation, I thought, why couldn’t teachers lose their jobs to a Digital Aristotle for Everyone? Simply put, it’s because we are nurturing the next generation of humanity. If humans are to develop as intelligent and socially responsible citizens, what better environment to learn than in a classroom of learners, guided by a caring teacher?

Until next time,
Alex M.