Author Archives: Amber Dumouchel

Overcoming Challenges to Cell Phones in Schools

In our small, rural, community school we have no set cell phone policy. Students are allowed to bring devices to school and use them during their free-time. However, they are not allowed to use the school’s wifi. There are no restrictions set on teachers though in the past I have felt judged for using it during meetings. I have just made it a point to talk to people about how I use good docs and evernote to record important things and have them sync across my devices. In the classroom setting, teachers make their own rules.

We are lucky in that we have enough shiny new macbook airs for each student to use one. Therefore I haven’t really gotten into the use of cellphones. The lack of wifi for students is also an issue and will most likely not be resolved as our internet is already quite slow (I tried to get them access last year and was not allowed). About ¾ of my high school classes have cell phones and the rest at least have an iPod. I have used them as digital readers and to run a few educational apps like duolingo. However I think that there is so much more that could be done if I could get around our infrastructure issues (maybe a petition for them to put in the fiber optic cables?). I also worry about the texting that goes on as it is near impossible to know if they are working on their cell phone or texting a friend. I am definitely the most technologically progressive teacher in our school so I think I would have to pave the way to more mobile technology in class. I am interested though. One great thing about the MET program is we get to reflect more analytically about our practice. I often feel inspired while doing an assignment or reflection. I think I will head off to school tomorrow and develop an assignment for Snapchat because my students love that right now. I want students to create a snapchat story to interpret a challenging scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ll try to do that this week and let you all know here how it goes 🙂
While there isn’t that much happening in my community, there has been some mobile learning happening within the territory. The communities in the Yukon come together for REM (Rural Experiential Model) and offer week long workshops for students. One offered this year was the Social Media experiment. They unblocked all of the social media and had a group of students acting as reporters, with their devices, visiting the different workshops. They also encouraged all the students there to tweet, facebook, and snapchap about the REM with their devices. The teacher’s goal was to prove that social media could be used for educational purposes. He wanted to create a case for schools to unblock social networks and encourage teachers to incorporate them into their lessons. While the networks haven’t been unblocked, I think the experiment was a success. Students worked very well with their devices and and the social media group created a final documentation of the event here: <https://sway.com/3iUeAdmd9vbieogQ>

Build the Website Lenora!

Lenora should create the website. The dial-up connection shouldn’t be an issue, people made websites back when everyone was on dial up. The issue with that being that she will have to find a way to work around that limitation. There are different ways she could go around making a site. She could use an online drag-and-drop program, which would be the easiest. If she chooses this method then she will not have to worry about buying a domain or sorting out working with an FTP client (this would simplify things tremendously) however, in her situation, this may not be the best choice as those sort of interfaces would require a faster internet connection. She could check herself out some website coding books from the library and write the page by hand to upload, which would be perfect on a slower connection. Unfortunately, this would represent a large time commitment, which seems like poor choice for Lenora. Therefore I feel that the best choice would be to buy or download a software program that would do the coding for her, like Google Web Designer. Depending on her hardware, she could bring her device to the school to download the program.

This type of web design program would allow her to work to design a site with minimal knowledge of coding and she wouldn’t have to use the internet until she uploaded to her server. Programs like these are usually fairly user friendly and she should be able to work through problems she might have.

When designing though, she really needs to think about what her goals are from the beginning. Cradleboard seems to be a one way transmission of knowledge, very simply constructed. Since this resource helped her, is this style something she wants to mimic? Or does she want something that is more two dimensional/ co-constructed? She says she wants to allow

offers of “support and suggestions from other Aboriginal educators and their allies in addressing the particulars of bullying behaviour in band schools”. I feel like the best way to do this would be to give the information she learned from her PD in static pages with categories, and also form some sort of discussion board where teachers can post about bullying issues at their schools and have a network of peer support to help them to come up with solutions.

In the end, I think that a website is the best way for Lenora to go as it offers all of the functionality that she will need and has the potential to be built off-line or through dial-up. I think that initially there will be a significant amount of time required of Lenora to figure out how to create her website through trial and error. There are many helpful resources online and she will be able to tap into her passion for the project when things get tough. Hopefully though, by planning for her end goals from the start, she will design a website that is user maintained and will significantly reduce her workload in the future. Perhaps as one last piece of advice, Lenora should do the bulk of the work over her summer holiday!

Assignment 1 – Personal Reflection

Designing our online delivery platform rubric was a good experience for me. After our slightly staggered start people worked together quite professionally. We completed the whole assignment asynchronously as we quickly discovered all of our schedules were very full and time zone differences complicated matters. Honestly I very much appreciated that. I find that when meeting synchronously there is a lot of time wasted with waiting for late arrivals and technical problems. People also tend to have a hard time agreeing to things when in a group setting. In our group we discussed a plan on the boards and decided very quickly what we wanted to do. Interestingly again, we didn’t assign roles. Jason started a doc and I remember starting the rubric. The next day work had been done on it. I worked awhile the next night and signed off to find the section completed. I’m not sure who finished it but I like that. I like that our assignment has been created together in such a way that no one claims ownership. In our scenario this what would have served our university best. That sort of collaboration brings out the best ideas and the cohesion without ego results in a more efficient process. I can only hope that future group projects will run so smoothly.

Suggestions for Benoît

Benoît surely has a difficult task ahead of him. He needs to make a decision, that not only needs to suit him and his abilities, but must also be able to fit his teaching style. Benoît’s background and motivation is going to be very important in making this decision. A big part of the choice is going to be how comfortable he is in using an LMS system to achieve his goals.

His experience is limited, he used WebCT to disseminate notes, which is a very simplistic use or the platform. He has also coded a website but again this is not very challenging and doesn’t necessarily apply to LMS.

Having support will be very important for him, however it doesn’t necessarily need to come from the help desk, which is slow anyway. Lots of people in his faculty are using Moodle over WebCT despite its lack of support. It would be key for Benoît to ask his colleagues about their choice, reasoning, and decision. Particularly he should find colleagues from similar backgrounds with little experience and really discuss how they are adapting and if they might be willing to help him should the need arise.

He needs to make this decision carefully it should be about understanding enough about the system to be able to use it to achieve what he wants in teaching so that the system itself doesn’t dictate the way he teaches. After talking with colleagues it would be helpful for him to try each system and get a feel for them before making his final decision.
Q: After discussing and sampling both systems, which one do you feel more comfortable with/ excited by?

This question is important because regardless of his decision, he is going to have to spend a significant amount of time learning to use it, creating a course on it and he will need to have a passion for what he is doing to motivate himself to finish.

Benoît has said that he could spend an five hours a week working on the course to go live the next semester. I really don’t feel able to say if this is enough without knowing more details. How long is left until the next semester? Is he simply going to be transferring existing materials? Or developing new parts to the course? How was his course organized before? Test based courses would be easier to transfer. How quickly does he adapt to using new technology? Is he good at working productively or does he become distracted? I think he needs to start transferring the course, being sure to ask these question, and see how long it takes him to accomplish the first couple of units, then a progress check could be used to see if he is on track for finishing in the set time.

Amber’s Flight Path

As an educator I I work in a k-12 school, but despite that, I connected with the Nel, Carstens, and Dreyer article “Edcucational Technologies: A classification and evaluation” about the challenges facing implementing technology at the tertiary level. The school I work at in a small, isolated, rural community has a respectable budget but not much desire to implement technology in education. When I arrived the school had a computer lab, two projectors and a smart board that is never used, due to the political climate, and had been sitting unplugged in a corner for years. I connected with this article because of it’s description of “Lone Ranger” teachers, and that while the use of technology is encouraged, there simply isn’t that network of support to aid in developing programs and combining its use. The variety of technologies available and the daunting process of sifting though and finding those that will best work for your classroom and school culture can be daunting. Nel, Carstens, and Dreyer provide a framework for assessing and selecting these technologies. As someone who has tried and discarded many programs a selection process would be very helpful. For me creating a flight path for this course is about making things easier to save time. I want to be able to better choose technologies, better assess work, and spend less time struggling with making technology work the way I need it to.

The National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers’ first standard, that teachers should facilitate student learning and creativity, I found to embody my strengths as a teacher. I have very small humanities class sizes (2-8 students) which allows me to have a different sort of teaching. For the most part our classes are discussions where we view media, connect with personal experiences and express that in a product. I generally suggest method for students to present their learning but am open to their suggestions. We live in an isolated community and technology allows us to be involved in issues that are important but not reflected locally. Technology allows for students to be engaged in a greater global dialogue through writing articles online, communicating with students in other schools, and posting comments or essays challenging opinions. In that way their field of influence becomes much broader. We primarily use moodle as a LMS for these classes and I am eager to explore it more through this course as it is my first year using the platform.

I do find that being more open to student choice and variety of expression make assignments more difficult to assess. Which is why the NETS’s second standard, design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments, struck me as something to work towards. For instance, my class is currently co-writing next year’s Christmas play on google docs. We brainstormed together and I modeled structure and format by writing the first scene. Everyone was assigned a scene or two to write and then worked to edit the other scenes. No names were used as I wanted it to be a collaborative creation rather than having them take ownership over parts of it. In the past I’ve had students give themselves grades and explain why they deserved them but I wonder if there couldn’t be a better way to assess a project like this? I would like to experiment with different methods of assessment and perhaps to develop a few that I can bring into my practice.

In reflecting on what I would like to take out of this class, assessment strategies in the digital world would definitely be my focus, however there are other things I would like to strengthen in my own practice. Chickering and Gamson describe seven principals for good practice. From those took away a few things I could improve upon. They state that go practice “develops reciprocity and cooperation among students.” This is something I try to do, as evidenced by the co-writing project I have mentioned. The internet provides wonderful opportunities for working together, forming bonds, which is an excellent skill for the workplace. Again though I wonder how to assess projects fairly when they are shared between several students and how to ensure a more fair distribution of work. In addition, I wonder how to make sure I am communicating high expectations, their 6th principal, when projects and their accompanying rubics are left purposefully vague to cover a wide range of platforms. How do you adequately assess the depth of insight as a descriptor?

In any case, I feel like in this world of changing technologies and ideas, we’re all learning together to see what works best in different communities and with different classroom dynamics. The degree to which I incorporate technology is of course reliant on the school climate and technological infrastructure. Since I’ve arrived in the school, we’ve managed to procure a 3d printer, laptops for every student, and I have a new smart board projector sitting in the office waiting to be set up! Our principal is very supportive if we take the initiative. By taking the initiative to use more technologically facilitate and inspired teaching we are also helping to encourage technology use in the school. I am always open to discussing and sharing techniques with other teachers and luckily in a small school, people are very aware of what is happening in other classrooms. I look forward to sharing the inspiration from this course with other faculty members in my school.