I started my teaching career 17 years ago, with my Special Education degree I was given the opportunity to be the first hired resource/learning support teacher for a K-8 school. For 8 years, I managed education assistants allocations, implemented a division wide IPP system, developed program plans for students with severe mental and cognitive disabilities, organized and lead school recourse meetings for teacher support and collaborated with many paraprofessionals. Then the 7-year itch happened and I needed a career change, either change schools or change grades. For the next 6 years, I did 3 teacher exchanges to Australia (not consecutively) in mainstream classrooms, as well I was granted a leave and took 6 months to travel the world with my family. Now back in Canada and with my experiences teaching and traveling abroad, I see how technology brings the world a bit closer together and the opportunities it has for students to learn or convey their authentic learning.
As a resource teacher, I started to experiment with computer-assisted technology to help students to be successful learners or communicators. It was too early in my career to have the luxury of the iPad to help students. Instead, these individual “expensive” devices helped students dictate their ideas or thoughts, as well students pointed to icons/Boardmaker pictures for the device to speak for them. It was exciting to witness students have a voice or to have the ability to communicate alternative ways. From the time of my exchanges to the present, I have become more fascinated with technology, I have been experimenting with different programs and taking more opportunities to attend Edtech conferences. Last October, I attended the Vernon Google Summit and came back inspired again to learn more and to bring innovating tools into the classroom. I got my Google Educator Level 1 and been asked to run professional development sessions on Google Classroom and G Suite. During my teacher exchanges and for my classroom in Canada, I have used WordPress (division School Blogs access). It was an excellent forum to communicate what is going in the classroom and highlights our accomplishments, unfortunately, parents were not checking the site. Now, it is all about Tweeting, even our division Mascot is tweeting! My classroom now has iPads for Stop motion/Adobe Spark videos or for coding robots/coding apps. We use the laptops for collaboration with Google Classroom, for digital literacy, Mathletics, Google Digital Portfolios, etc. Speaking of Mathletics, I recently was recognized as a Mathletics Lead Educator (Canada), for the work I have done as a curriculum liaison and program enhancements facilitator.
Presently, most of my technology work is with hands-on learning devices that give opportunities for students to convey learning through the means of devices or robots. I have some experience working with a handful of LMS-Learning Management Systems, such as WordPress and our School Portal-Powerschool(Student Information System). In my school division, Moodle is somewhat used in the upper grades, but Google Classroom is highly used by many grades in my school division. Google Classroom allows students to collaborate their ideas and be able to contributors under one umbrella. I recently learned that BC FIOPA laws have restrictions what students can post, but here in Alberta, FIOP is a bit more relaxed when it comes to posting student content. I have chosen to develop a better understanding of Moodle, as my own children’s teachers have used it and saw the benefits it has with collaboration and accessing learning materials. For instance, per the Google Apps Education Edition Agreement, Google Apps is an extension of the classroom and we do not ask parent consent for students to access Google Apps. If students/schools are posting information outside of Google Doc where the general public may have access to the information or 3rd party applications are collecting personal information then parent consent is required (RVS Media and Technolgy Consent form).
As well, my long term career goal is to move up to the higher grades and I have feel that this an excellent opportunity to learn and experiment with this platform. My division has a partnership with Desire to Learn (D2L) which it is mainly used for Alberta Distance Learning Centre, it features an online portfolio platform and learning repository.
A good friend of mine used this slide at his keynote presentation and I believe it depicts actually the learning process/flight path I will have for this course. I am looking forward to the opportunity to collaborate and learn from a group of like-minded cohorts. In conclusion, I hope they don’t mind taking the same flight path of learning with me.
George Couros @gcourus