I decided to create a digital story for my Planning 10 class to introduces them to the Careers and Education unit. During this unit the students are giving the opportunity to research and review various careers and the education that is needed in order to be successful. Although in grade 10 it is difficult for the students to start thinking about where they would like to be in 5-10 years by providing them tools to evaluate the different career opportunities that exist they can start taking the necessary courses at highschool to help them prepare for the workforce, college, technical school or university. Many of the students have difficulty picking one career to research and so I let them know that during the course of their lives they will have ” on average approximatley three careers and eight jobs” (1)

I thought that by showing the students my education and career journey from highschool graduaton, working in construction, graduating university, working in the bank, switching jobs to a technology company, being laid off, becoming a teacher and founding  TSX-V (CRS) Cardiff Energy Corp.  this would be an excellent segway into this unit and allow to students to get to know me better and see the career and education journey I have take so far.

Enjoy:

I was a little overwhelmed after exploring and learning about all the various options presented on Alan Levine’s wiki. I found that may of the video options were interesting to me but only allowed users to create short 30 second videos for free. I decided that I wanted to use a technology program that would allow me to create a presentation and one that was free. I wanted the program to work in my schools computer lab so that my students could get to first see a presentation that was created using the program and then gain experience using a new program that had real world career and job applications outside of the classroom.

After struggling with which tool to use I decided to apply Bates and Poole’s Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. By using their Framework I decided that Prezi would be the best option for me.  As outlined in the article Pedagogy Strategy Learning in an Online World today’s 21^st century students were “born into a highly technological world. They inhabit, navigate and communicate within a society which is both technologically-rich and information rich.” (page, 3). Additionally, as outlined by Lamb (2007) “mashups involve the reuse, or remixing, of works of art, of content, and/or of data” I felt that Prezi’s dynamic, zooming, visual, text and video based presentation software fit nicely with this mashup concept and would appeal to my technology savy students.   In Planning 10 we are teaching our students life skills;  one of my main pedagogical aims in this class is to incorporate learning activities and skills that the students can apply outside of the classroom. Introducing the students to Prezi shows  them another way of putting a presentation together instead of simply using PowerPoint and expands their technology skill set.