From My Perspective: What have I done
Providing Visual representations of Canadian Places and People
Currently, I teach Canadian Studies in China and this can be very difficult for students who have never been outside their country. The course I am teaching is designed to give them a foundation for Canadian culture, history and geography. I remember when I was in Social Studies in high school, the content was very hard to relate to. The textbook gave me lines after lines of new names of people and places that I have barely heard of. If they were important enough, a picture was included on the page to support my learning. I remember feeling detached from the content because it wasn’t truly active learning. Our school didn’t have enough resources to give us the visual opportunities the Internet provides today. Therefore, I decided to use our computer lab and blogs for our Canadian Studies class. I prepared a lesson adapted from a page from their textbook (modeling the use of the digital experience), but i would ask them to look up images of these new names and places they were learning and respond with a personal connection on their blogs. This truly helped students to get a sense of the content and gave them the background to understand our discussions in class. The assessment would be on their ability to navigate through the lesson but also their ability to respond to images and text in a digital manner. In addition, each lesson would end with a question asking the students to reflect on their learning that day. This was posted on the blog as a record for the teacher and students.
Blogs Between Grades
It is a great opportunity when you have 2 METers at the same school. My colleague and I teach the language courses across Grade 9s-12. Both of us has taken on the opportunity to use the computer labs and create blogs for our students. They routinely post their essays, reflections and assignments on the blogs after they complete it in the classroom. This opens up space for other students to comment and learn from each other. The Grade 12s have blogs that Grade 10s read and this creates a sense of community between different grades. Since we each have our own teacher blogs, we also model digital citizenship through our own comments for each other. The ability of technology to document the process will be very useful when we need to do future professional workshops for our other fellow teachers or for us to reflect on at the end of the year. This technological initiative is not perfect yet because there are still a lot of issues we need to contemplate. The NETS gives us a place to start and will be very helpful in guiding future initiatives.
Reflection
As an internationally accepted standard for both teachers and students, the National Education Technology Standards (NETS) are intimidating at first glance for both teachers and students alike. When the assignment asked us to align ourselves in light of these standards, I would honestly say I was not comfortable with the notion. When I read the standards, an ideal vision of what a digital-age teaching professional (should be and could be) was contrasted in my mind with the struggles and difficulties I personally experience in my daily life as a teacher whether in the form of budgets, time or other reasons. It made me realize an effective digital-age classroom truly takes a lot of support and professional guidance to fully implement the expectations of the educational objectives proposed. As an individual, I can take courses like ETEC 565 to support my own professional growth, but the support of the institution cannot be underestimated. Looking at the NETS website, I realized what a good support network could do for educators. It is truly a challenge for teachers today. Not only do they have to deal with the curriculum from a content perspective but now they have to become digital-age teaching professionals. That is a very daunting job title that brings along a truckload of responsibilities. Being the responsible educators we are, where do we start? I guess Lesson 2’s readings would be somewhere. Ignorance would be bliss but it is definitely not going to get us anywhere. Awareness is probably the flight-path I am going to take for this course.
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