Tag Archives: create make innovate

by | May 30, 2024 · 1:14 pm

Playdough for Everyone

Playdough is a tactile educational tool that can be used as a way to incorporate creativity and kinesthetic learning into lessons. It is inexpensive and easy to make using available kitchen ingredients (flour, salt, water & oil).

Playdough can be used throughout the curriculum for all ages: it can be an effective form of experiential learning from the development of fine motor skills in preschool children (Rukmini et al., 2022) all the way to post-secondary students learning neuroscience anatomy (Gopal & Bhooshan, 2021). Further, having students engage in hands-on learning increases engagement and can lead to improved outcomes.

Although playdough can be purchased, it is relatively cheap and easy to make, and can last several months in the sealed bag or container before being disposed of in the compost. Here are two of my favorite recipes:

Ideas for Elementary & Middle Years Teachers:

  • Sensory math activities (playdough can be used as a manipulative). For example, matching numbers with small balls of playdough or squishing playdough balls during counting
  • Using playdough to model and learn about 2D and 3D shapes
  • Exploring fractions and equations using fractions
  • Telling or re-telling a story using playdough.
  • Students might even create play
  • Building structures or engineering (you could include other resources, such as toothpicks to create more complex structures)
  • Colour theory – students can blend small balls of colored playdough to create a colour wheel.
  • Spelling words by molding letters or by using letter cookies cutters or alphabet stamps
  • Using playdough to explore patterns (ex. colour, shape, size, etc.)
  • Learning about Earth and the solar system
    • Modelling the phases of the moon or exploring the moon’s surface and craters
  • Telling time using playdough to make the hands of the clock

Ideas for Secondary Teachers:

Higher Tech Ideas for K12 and beyond:

  • With Squishy Circuits students can learn about and create complex circuits while expressing their creativity. Concepts including conductivity, resistance, simple circuits, parallel and series circuits, short circuits and switches. The Professor responsible for Squishy Circuits at the University of St. Thomas shares recipes for both conductive and non-conductive dough.
  • Use Playdough to construct a ‘MakeyMakey’ piano or game controller. MakeyMakey is a basic micro-controller appropriate for all ages.
  • Model and sculpt characters and setting to tell a digital story
    • Stop Motion Animation is an excellent way to incorporate digital tools with hand-building and creative expression. Tools like Stop Motion Studio or iMovie can be used as they have ‘auto timing’ features that make stop motion more efficient. The example below shows how a very effective movie can be created using simple techniques.

References:

Rukmini, R., Mustaji, M., & Mariono, A. (2022). Effectiveness of a playdough game in stimulating fine motor skills and cognitive skill: Early childhood education. The International Journal of Early Childhood Learning, 29(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-7939/CGP/v29i01/1-12

Gopal, V., & Bhooshan, L. (2021). The feasibility of using playdough and household materials as an educational tool for self-learning of neurosurgical anatomy during COVID-19 lockdown. Anatomical Sciences Journal, 18(2), 92-99.

Guest post by Peer Mentor Lindsay Cunningham (Ph.D. student, EDCP), May 2024.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Activating Strategies, Active Learning, AppliedDesignSkillsTechnologies, Blog Posts, Curriculum, Inclusive Practices, Not Subject Specific, Planning, STEAM

Tagged as , , , ,

by | February 1, 2020 · 1:31 pm

CBC Curio.ca


CBC Curio.ca images are provided for download by CBC

Curio·ca is CBC’s educational streaming subscription service. Available on the site are stories from the English television news broadcast, The National, and its French counterpart, Le téléjournal, as well as segments from national and local radio news and feature episodes from regular television broadcasts. Curio.ca also hosts arts and entertainment programming, including performances from the Stratford Festival, CBC/Radio-Canada drama and comedy programs, and a range of children’s programming.

UBC students, faculty & staff Library users have access to Curio.ca’s thousands of television shows, radio programs, teacher guides, and K–12 curriculum connections. Available in both English and French, they cover a wide range of topics suitable for all ages. Although UBC doesn’t currently have access to the BBC and National Geographic content, Curio.ca remains a super resource for complementing and extending lesson activities and assignments.

As teachers, we are all aware of thinkers such as John Dewey and Jean Piaget, who advocated for approaches to learning that address what today we call “real-world problems” and “experiential learning.” Even though Curio.ca, itself, is not a hands-on activity per se, it does provide a diverse selection of supplementary programming resources – including news and feature reports on current events – that help contextualise, extend, and inspire lessons and assignments that teachers and students work with each day.

Not only can Curio.ca’s resources provide alternative ways to digest and appreciate information, they can also help to motivate students and teachers to approach education in ways that more readily pertain to or resonate with the world beyond the four walls of the classroom.

The best way to learn more about Curio.ca, especially as a new user, is to jump in and search through the diverse selection of archived programming. As it happens, navigating the Curio.ca site is similar to searching the Scarfe Digital Sandbox.

  • For UBC students, staff and faculty, visit curio via the Education Library for full access.
  • Search by Provincial Curriculum via the Ed Library CWL login. Here you can further filter the search by subject area, language (French or English) and more.
  • Searches are possible by age group, language (English or French), or curricular subject, and also by those resources most recently added.
  • The site’s toolbar headings and sub-headings arrange various “collections” of programming and resources into different “categories.” These identifiers overlap, which makes for more thorough searches that turn up specific results each time. Although this means that search results eventually repeat, the Curio catalogue goes back a long way – English content dates back to the 1960s and French back to the 1940s, which is nearly back to the beginning of CBC/Radio-Canada. The overlapping search results also help to highlight interdisciplinary connections between different programs.

For a look into our country’s cultural and media history, and for some rich lesson planning ideas, check out Canada’s on-line public news resource, CBC Curio.ca!

No
Chalk Fonts

@

var $j = jQuery.noConflict(); $j(document).ready(function(){removeAttribution(); removeTwitter();}); function removeAttribution(){var x=document.getElementsByClassName(“attributeBoolean”)[0].innerHTML; var y=document.getElementsByClassName(“postAttribution”)[0]; if (x == “No”){y.style.display=”none”;}} function removeTwitter(){var x=document.getElementsByClassName(“twitterBoolean”)[0].innerHTML; var y=document.getElementsByClassName(“twitterAttribution”)[0]; if (x == “”){y.style.display=”none”;}}

Leave a Comment

Filed under Not Subject Specific, Resources, Video & Video Tutorials

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | December 5, 2019 · 12:22 pm

Circuitry Explorations: Tech Ed Stations

Play-based, hands-on learning activities appeal to our creativity and our curiosity. When combined with specific prompts and tasks, they encourage children by providing greater success and a more rewarding experiences (McLean & Harlow, 2017) as they learn about the world around them.

When you combine a 9V battery with a handful of playdough and a few strategically placed mini-LED bulbs, anyone can safely learn the basics of circuitry. Before long, those same people might just take the lead, and soon enough they’re speaking knowledgeably about current, polarity, and conductivity and asking great questions of their own! More advanced students can extend their learning by co-constructing their understandings of series and parallel circuits, switches and more. Design challenges can support students creating toys and electrical devices or imagine the learning that might happen when high school chemistry students are challenged to create new recipes to increase conductivity or resistence and improve the texture, colour or consistency of the dough (McLean & Harlow, p. 128).

This week with the Technology Education Secondary cohort, we played as students and considered as teachers, how stations and play based learning might help to activate the students’ prior knowledge, engage students in constructing their understandings and provide an engaging hook and scaffolded learning opportunity for developing more complex understandings of circuits.

Using inexpensive familiar materials, teachers can prepare simple, fun, yet challenging hands-on activities for their students that can also provide a footing for learning down the road. By using the squishy circuits first, students play with concepts using materials that can be re-used multiple times. Following this play, they might then design and build a circuit using a given length of copper tape thus using design thinking skills, electrical know-how and mathematics.

In our session, we explored five stations. TCs were encouraged to consider how and what they were learning and relate this learning to curriculum including core competencies.

  1. Squishy Circuits (1 set available for loan from Ed Library – all you really need is playdough, batteries and LEDs – and a battery tester to provide students opportunity to troubleshoot)
  2. Makey Makey (1 available for loan from Ed Library)
  3. Paper Circuits
  4. Micro:Bits (2 kits of 10 available for loan from the Ed library)
  5. K-8 Robot (6 available for loan from Ed Library… remember to also borrow the microbits kit!)

Slides from our session:

https://prezi.com/view/OiwUhUMmhcS2gB7yyanU/

Honey, M. & Kanter, D. (2013). Introduction. In M. Honey & D. Kanter (Eds.), Design, make, play (pp. 1–6). New York, NY: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203108352.

McLean, M., & Harlow, D. (2017, June). Designing inclusive STEM activities: A comparison of playful interactive experiences across gender. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 567–574). New York, NY: ACM, https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3084326

Leave a Comment

Filed under AppliedDesignSkillsTechnologies, Blog Posts, Science, Technology

Tagged as , , , ,

by | November 12, 2019 · 3:12 pm

Design-Based Learning: STEM and Simple Machines

Watching children play, particularly very young children, we can see they behave scientifically.

Children observe and collect. They wonder and deduce, and they’re methodical. They collaborate – sometimes! – and when they’re puzzled, they experiment and make adjustments.

At whatever age STEM learning occurs, though, make no mistake: it is real STEM learning, not mere child’s play (McClure, 2017). The earlier that children begin STEM activities, the sooner they begin to hone what Katehi, Pearson, and Feder (2009) call engineering habits of mind: systems thinking, creativity, optimism, communication, collaboration, supported persistence, and attention to ethical thinking. And, obviously, these habits of mind apply to more than just STEM work.

“In the minds of these children, too, there was a complex inner process – one that is hard to see, which often results in adults underestimating young children’s current capacities” (McClure, 2017, p. 84)

Teachers can make good habits, too, while teaching STEM-related material, which again can apply beyond STEM lessons: designing and facilitating experiential learning tasks, for instance, or asking questions of students vs providing them with answers, or collaborating with colleagues and the local community. Before long, students and teachers are spotting STEM links all over the curriculum. For instance, classroom engineering activities become a practical way for students to see abstractions like mathematics in action while a look at simple machines prompts the chance to notice just how commonly we rely on them every single day.

Along with reinforcing habits of mind, sustained STEM learning also influences students’ longer-term post-secondary and professional decisions. As we look for ways to make STEM careers more inclusive and accessible to all, researchers have found that women who were made more aware of career opportunities during their school years were more likely to select engineering as a post-secondary degree major (Tyler-Wood et al., 2012; Frehill, 1997).

“A STEM identity is developed by active participation in the environment” (Subramaniam et al., 2012, p. 176)

Learn from the educators at UBC Engineering’s Geering Up Program about how to design your own design challenge using this resource they’ve shared with us!

Create, Make, Innovate: Getting Hands-on with Learning Design

Recap of Create, Make, Innovate! session, held on Tuesday, November 12th, 2019 in the Scarfe foyer: It all about simple machines: wheel-and-axle, wedges, inclined planes, pulleys, levers, and screws.

Free Clip Art by >\\sas from clker.com

Using a variety of basic tools, e.g. scissors, screwdriver, a small X-acto knife, you and your students can design and build simple machines of your own, with inexpensive everyday materials like dowels and planks of wood, cardboard tubing, pipe cleaners, buttons with twist ties, string or twine, and a spring scale. By planning ahead and adjusting after experimentation, they will be able to tackle straightforward design challenges that illustrate physical concepts in action, like force, work, friction, mechanical advantage, and the law of conservation of energy, just to name a few.

Simple machines are found literally everywhere, and they are a super way to introduce students to physics and engineering.

Free Photo by vũ tuấn from Unsplash

A basic model approach to engineering really does read like children at play: observe, design, build, experiment, adjust. For hands-on classroom activities, it’s hard to find something more stimulating, more instructive, or more fun than simple machines and engineering. And because simple machines have no power source and require someone or something to make them work, what better source of energy than curious students and their teachers!

Resources

British Columbia’s K–12 curriculum features a subject discipline called Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies (ADST), which “builds on students’ natural curiosity, inventiveness, and desire to create and work in practical ways” in order to “… provide firm foundations for lifelong learning.” As early as Kindergarten, students can take a role in learning how to apply ADST principles such as cross-disciplinary thinking, collaboration, and contextualised problem-solving.

On the Scarfe Digital Sandbox, you’ll find some terrific STEM resources, like PhET, which is particularly about Engineering, including simple machines, and also Arduino, specific to electronics, another fun STEM topic we explored back in September.

Check out the Boston Museum of Science website, where the month of November 2019 is Women and Girls in STEM Month. You can explore the Museum’s wide array of engineering lesson ideas and activities, which are suitable for all ages.

In-class, project-based learning has proven effective for student learning as compared to out-of-class projects, which are less significant. (Hansen & Gonzalez, 2014)

Read about some very young engineers and their simple machines in this article from the Early Childhood Research and Practice (ECRP) open-source e-journal, published by Loyola University in Chicago.

Acknowledgement: post author, Scott Robertson; editor, Yvonne Dawydiak

Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, hands-on learning – that’s the spirit of Create, Make, Innovate! We want to promote enthusiasm for sharing and learning across age groups and across subject disciplines.

Make, Create, Innovate sessions took place during the Fall 2019 in the foyer of the Neville B. Scarfe building and were hosted by Scott Robertson, a project assistant on a small TLEF grant with Dr. Lorrie Miller, Dr. Marina-Milner Bolotin and Yvonne Dawydiak, Teacher Education.

If you have an idea or an inspiration for a resource or future session, please let us know! scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca

References

Frehill, L. (1997, Spring). Education and occupational sex segregation: The decision to major in Engineering. The Sociological Quarterly, 38(2), 225–249.

Katehi, L., Pearson, G., & Feder, M. (Eds.). (2009). Engineering in K-12 education: Understanding the status and improving the prospects. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/read/12635/chapter/1

McClure, E. (2017, November). More than a foundation: Young children are capable STEM learners. YC Young Children, 72(5), 83–89.

Subramaniam, M., Ahn, J., Fleischmann, K., & Druin, A. (2012, April). Reimagining the role of school libraries in STEM education: Creating hybrid spaces for exploration. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 82(2), 161–182.

Tyler-Wood, T., Ellison, A., Lim, O., & Periathiruvadi, S. (2012, February). Bringing up girls in Science (BUGS): The effectiveness of an afterschool environmental Science program for increasing female students’ interest in Science careers. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 21(1), 46–55.

Featured Photo Credit: “Stainless Steel Bolt With Lock” – Free Photo from Pexels

Leave a Comment

Filed under AppliedDesignSkillsTechnologies, Engineering, Math, Science

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

by | October 22, 2019 · 4:19 pm

Design-Based Learning (DBL) and Challenge Learning

“… we learn by doing.”

So observed Aristotle in his study on how we should live, The Nicomachean Ethics, a work that is named – so scholars think – out of fondness for Aristotle’s father and son, both of whom were named Nicomachus.

While obviously not a new concept to educators, the principle of learning-by-doing has been applied in one particular framework, credited to UCLA professor Doreen Nelson, called Design-Based Learning (DBL). Also sometimes called Project- or Problem-Based Learning (PBL), DBL / PBL encourages students to think about how to address a problem in its context, specifically by thinking with the end in mind. As a formal methodology in contemporary education, DBL / PBL gained wider recognition during the 1990s, particularly as the oncoming millennium posed the perceived need for students to learn what popularly became known as 21st century skills.

DBL / PBL methods encourage experiential learning as a way to overcome student disengagement (Kim, Suh, & Song, 2015; Washor & Mojkowski, 2014), such as increasing the enrolment of women in the field of Information Technology (Jessup & Sumner, 2005). DBL / PBL enables students and their teachers to make use of prior learning to address authentic experiences and so-called real-world problem-solving (Wang, Derry, & Ge, 2017) as compared to the more sheltered lessons and linear hypotheticals of the traditional classroom.

Read more about Doreen Nelson in this article and stay in touch with the latest developments on her DBL website.

Typically, as students grow they also discover their own unique predilections, whether these arise from their personal passions or as a result of working alongside their peers. By facilitating and fostering its participants’ capabilities, DBL / PBL methods ideally turn out a multidisciplinary cohort that possesses diverse skills and interests as well as the maturity to envision and tackle a wide variety of challenges.

Visit the Design based learning: STEM & Simple Machines blog post for a resource shared by UBC Engineering Geering Up Educators.

Create, Make, Innovate: Getting Hands-on with Learning Design

Recap of the session in the Scarfe Foyer – Fall 2019:

This week, Create, Make, Innovate! was pleased to be part of the Educational Technology Support (ETS) unit’s TEC Expo, held on Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019 in the Scarfe foyer.

ETS describes the Technology Enhanced Classroom (TEC) exposition as “designed to showcase and celebrate creative and innovative uses of technology in face-to-face, blended, and online classrooms within the Faculty of Education.” Teacher candidates (TCs) roamed a gallery of exhibit tables spread across the foyer, mingling with the presenters and with faculty and staff from a number of departments around campus. On display were topics and technologies ranging from coding and physics to biology and geology, each designed in its own manner to engage students inside the classroom while inspiring them in ways beyond.

At the Create, Make, Innovate! table, TCs faced hands-on design challenges, which they could try to solve using only the materials provided. One challenge was to build the tallest possible free-standing tower, using items such as drinking cups or pipe cleaners. (Believe it or not, this challenge could even be posed using sheets of newspaper!) One successful tower of cups lasted nearly an hour before finally toppling over after a nudge on the table!

A wooden catapult by Specific Love Creations (YouTube screenshot: “How to make a Catapult for Kids” – posted Nov 20, 2013)

A second challenge was to construct a device or conveyance of some kind that could transfer a small object – like a cotton ball or a Lego character – from one shoreline to another across an imaginary body of water, which were simple paper cut-outs laid atop the display table. One clever catapult, made from wooden craft sticks and elastic bands, nearly launched a cotton ball all the way across! *thanks for the inspiration for this activity from U of Calgary’s Doucette Library WestCast 2019 presentation.

Other ideas for the shoreline-to-shoreline challenge could be constructing a zipline or a bridge, again using only those items available, as provided by the teacher. Although something like a bridge might seem straightforward, like all engineering projects it definitely also requires careful forethought. The results can be pretty amazing – they might even win their designers top prize in a contest! In our session this week, however, we wanted all our materials to be reusable, so we avoided using glue or building a more permanent structure (although these can be amazing, too, not to mention sturdy!)

Read more below about how to make a catapult of your own, as well as some other clever ideas that can challenge students and stir their creative thinking.

A craft staple: the popsicle stick! Free photo available for download at Canva

Resources

British Columbia’s K–12 curriculum features a subject discipline called Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies (ADST), which “builds on students’ natural curiosity, inventiveness, and desire to create and work in practical ways” in order to “… provide firm foundations for lifelong learning.” As early as Kindergarten, students can take a role in learning how to apply ADST principles such as cross-disciplinary thinking, collaboration, and contextualised problem-solving.

One quick design challenge is a toy catapult made simply from a handful of wooden craft sticks and three elastic bands. This catapult is an amusing way for students to observe Newton’s Laws of Motion and the force of gravity while appreciating properties like potential and kinetic energy and concepts like leverage. Likewise, other simple machines, as basic as a door wedge or a threaded screw, can serve as readily understandable physical models for young children.

For older students, biomimicry can offer fascinating design challenges as well as readily perceived connections to the natural environment. Critical making is another avenue that directs older students toward linkages between innovative digital technologies and broader society, in ways that are mindful of those designs and their consequences.

Acknowledgement: post author, Scott Robertson; editor, Yvonne Dawydiak

Special thanks to ETS UBC for including us in your event!

Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, hands-on learning – that’s the spirit of Create, Make, Innovate! We want to promote enthusiasm for sharing and learning across age groups and across subject disciplines.

Make, Create, Innovate sessions took place during the Fall 2019 in the foyer of the Neville B. Scarfe building and were hosted by Scott Robertson, a project assistant on a small TLEF grant with Dr. Lorrie Miller, Dr. Marina-Milner Bolotin and Yvonne Dawydiak, Teacher Education.

If you have an idea or an inspiration for a resource or future session, please let us know! scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca

References

Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean Ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books.

Jessup, E. & Sumner, T. (2005). Design-based learning and the participation of women in IT. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 26(1), 141-147.

Kim, P., Suh, E., & Song, D. (2015). Development of a design-based learning curriculum through design-based research for a technology-enabled science classroom. Educational Technology Research and Development, 63(4), 575–602.

Wang, M., Derry, S., & Ge, X. (2017). Fostering deep learning in problem-solving contexts with the support of technology. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 20(4), 162–165.

Washor, E. & Mojkowski, C. (2014). Student disengagement: It’s deeper than you think. The Phi Delta Kappan, 95(8), 8–10.

Featured Photo Credit: Maria Georgieva at pexels.com

Leave a Comment

Filed under AppliedDesignSkillsTechnologies, Science, The Arts

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | October 15, 2019 · 3:56 pm

CBC Curio.ca

A Virtual Third Place: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation / Société Radio-Canada.

On November 2, 1936, Canada’s federal government under Prime Minister Richard Bennett created the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation / Société Radio-Canada, a Crown-owned media corporation.

The CBC commenced radio broadcasts later that year, followed by television broadcasts in 1952. The decision to institute a public broadcasting service was twofold: firstly, to counter the influence of American broadcasts, a motive that remains to this day, and secondly, to help Canadians stay informed and in touch across the country’s vast geography. By way of transmission on radio waves accessible to Canadians using electrical devices, this country established a technological public space, something we would call in today’s vernacular a “virtual” third place – read more about “the third place” below.

L’évolution de l’identité visuelle de CBC / ICI Radio-Canada de 1940 à nos jours.
Photo: Radio-Canada

Since its inception, CBC/Radio-Canada has been a leading provider of national and international news and cultural, educational, and informational programming, including long-running series such as The Nature of Things, Quirks and Quarks, Ideas, Marketplace, and the fifth estate. In recent years, as new technologies have influenced the way people access programming, changes to formatting and delivery have been necessary to maintain the CBC’s audience numbers (McGuire, 2009). Those changes include the addition of a web-based resource called CBC Curio.ca.

Curio.ca is CBC’s educational streaming subscription service. Available on the site are stories from the English television news broadcast, The National, and its French counterpart, Le téléjournal, as well as segments from national and local radio news and feature episodes from regular television broadcasts. Curio.ca also hosts arts and entertainment programming, including performances from the Stratford Festival, CBC/Radio-Canada drama and comedy programs, and a range of children’s programming.

UBC students, faculty, staff, and on-site Library users have access to Curio.ca’s thousands of television shows and radio programs as well as teacher guides and K–12 curriculum connections. Available in both English and French, the programs and teacher guides cover a wide range of topics suitable for all ages. Although UBC doesn’t currently have access to the BBC and National Geographic content, Curio.ca remains a superb resource for complementing and extending lesson activities and assignments.

“Information flows freely and rapidly across borders, creating instant access to international news events. For global literacy to become integral to the [school] experience, [educators] must discover ways to make it relevant in the classroom.” (Petrausch, 2005, p. 5)

Create, Make, Innovate: Getting Hands-on with Learning Design

Recap of the session in the Scarfe Foyer in the Fall of 2019:

At this week’s Create, Make, Innovate! activity session, on Tuesday, October 15th, 2019, teacher candidates (TCs) explored the on-line planning resource, CBC Curio.ca.

Thanks to some interactive facilitation by Graduate Academic Assistant, Jennifer Abel, and Education Librarian, Wendy Traas, TCs were led through some guided browsing of the Curio.ca collection. Using the site’s quick navigation search tool, they were able to see and assess for themselves the various programming resources and curricular guides that are available. These guides make use of existing provincial curricula, making them more immediately applicable than a more generic teacher guide might be.

Downloadable image available from https://www.cbc.ca/curiopromokit/creative-assets

Navigating through the Curio.ca resources is similar to searching the Scarfe Digital Sandbox. A diverse selection of programming can be searched by category, age group, language (English or French), or subject. Toolbar headings and sub-headings arrange various “collections” of programming and resources into different “categories.” These identifiers overlap, which makes for more thorough searches that turn up specific results each time. Although this means that search results eventually grow repetitive, the Curio catalogue goes back a long way – English content dates back to the 1960s and French back to the 1940s, which is nearly back to the beginning of CBC/Radio-Canada!

“Curio.ca gives teachers and students streaming access to the best in educational video and audio from CBC and Radio-Canada. You’ll find documentaries from television and radio, news reports, and more…”

– from CBC Curio.ca

Resources

One issue-driven collection in the Curio.ca resources is called “Fake News and Misinformation,” which offers a series of sub-topics, e.g. Bias and Reliability, Disinformation and Lies, Safeguarding Social Media, each with its own catalogue of short, informative video features and news reports. By selecting several videos, perhaps in concert with an historical article from The New York Review of Books, an international study on addressing the spread of misinformation, and a report from the Pew Research Center, a Secondary teacher or a group of teachers could have the makings of a robust unit plan, addressing concerns as well as responses to the issue of fake news.

In a related story, there’s potential for an interdisciplinary investigation by “combining the expertise of both the social sciences and computer science” into an automated analysis that can help “news aggregators to detect and visualize the occurrence of potential media bias in real time” (Hamborg, Donnay, & Gipp, 2018).

Finally, based on Wilhite’s (2015) fascinating interdisciplinary study of how reporting style itself influences news audiences, students and teachers might even decide to practise applying their evaluative skills while using the Curio.ca site, itself.

For a look into our country’s cultural and media history, or for some rich lesson planning ideas, check out Canada’s very own trustworthy on-line public news resource, CBC Curio.ca.

More about “The Third Place”

Have you ever heard of Ray Oldenburg and the Third Place?

No, it’s not a music venue or public house although you’re on the right track.

Oldenburg was an American sociologist who proposed the idea that we spend our lives in cultural “places,” the “first” being home, the “second” being work, and the “third” – no less significant – comprising various public venues where we come together and share company. Today, these might be plazas and high streets, where cafés, pubs, markets, salons, and all variety of hangouts and community centres line the sidewalks. According to Oldenburg, this third place and its togetherness are vital to sustaining a healthy democracy.

Cultural practice of the Third Place concept traces a long, absorbing history. In Ancient Greece, the agora was a city-state’s literal “gathering place,” where spiritual, cultural, political, and even military circles conjoined. Much later, in the 15th century, Islamic culture introduced a smaller but equally potent space, the coffee-house, which spread from the Arabian peninsula to Istanbul and beyond, to places as far away as Venice, Oxford, and London. Among its many social functions, the coffee-house became an interdisciplinary centre, a hub for cultural debates, news reports, and the general exchange of information between people from uncommon walks of life and status, all taking place in an atmosphere far less formal than a university, trade centre, or government house (White, 2018).

“A Coffee House in the Time of Charles II
From a wood cut of 1674” (Ukers, 1922, p. 60)

Today, a common comparison of the coffee-house is made to social media. The analogy is apt: Pew Research Center recently reported that “those who use social media… are more regularly exposed to people who have different backgrounds and more connected with friends they don’t see in person.” Pew also reported that, at the outset of the 21st century, “digital platforms [played] a larger role in news consumption, and… [seemed] to be more than making up for modest declines in the audience for traditional [primarily physical print] platforms” (p. 1). Furthermore, the influence of social media and search engines had made peoples’ news gathering and consumption habits more intermittent.

Certainly, apps and platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook play with Oldenburg’s concept of the Third Place in ways that denizens of the coffee-house might have appreciated today yet could not have imagined in their time. For its dearth of in-person contact, arguably its fundamental feature, social media’s once-removed stance is also critiqued as an insidious pitfall. Where a coffee-houser had as much assurance as we do that what they learned might be true, they were linked neither instantaneously nor indiscriminately to all other coffee-housers simultaneously but sat face to face across from only those with whom they spoke. Such is the potential of the Third Place on-line today, that our interaction with social media might actually serve to undermine us, unless we take active and careful precaution.

Read more from Royal Roads University about how young people engage with politics via social media, and about the role that social media plays in politics within smaller communities.

Acknowledgement: post author, Scott Robertson; editor, Yvonne Dawydiak

Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, hands-on learning – that’s the spirit of Create, Make, Innovate! We want to promote enthusiasm for sharing and learning across age groups and across subject disciplines.

Make, Create, Innovate sessions took place during the Fall 2019 in the foyer of the Neville B. Scarfe building and were hosted by Scott Robertson, a project assistant on a small TLEF grant with Dr. Lorrie Miller, Dr. Marina-Milner Bolotin and Yvonne Dawydiak, Teacher Education.

If you have an idea or an inspiration for a resource or future session, please let us know! scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca

References

Hamborg, F., Donnay, K., & Gipp, B. (2018, November). Automated identification of media bias in news articles: An interdisciplinary literature review. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-018-0261-y

McGuire, Jennifer. (2009). “Biggest change in history of CBC News: What it means to you”. Cbc.ca. Last updated October 26, 2009. Retrieved October 2, 2019 from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/biggest-change-in-history-of-cbc-news-what-it-means-to-you-1.864143

Petrausch, R. J. (2005). Five strategic imperatives for interdisciplinary study in mass communications / media studies in the U.S. and U.K. International College Teaching Methods & Styles Journal, 1(3), 1–10.

Ukers, W. H. (1922). All about coffee. New York, NY: The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company. https://archive.org/stream/allaboutcoffee00ukeruoft#mode/1up

White, M. (2018, June 21). Newspapers, gossip, and coffee-house culture. Retrieved from https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/newspapers-gossip-and-coffee-house-culture

Wilhite, C. J. (2015). Mass news media and American culture: An interdisciplinary approach. Behavior and Social Issues, 24, 88–110. doi: 10.5210/bsi.v.24i0.5004

Many thanks to Jennifer Abel for helping contribute to this week’s blog entry as well as facilitating the activity session!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Not Subject Specific

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | October 1, 2019 · 4:17 pm

Upcycling and Repurposed / Recycled Art

Planning lessons and units on the basis of a theme or concept helps teachers to adapt a more interdisciplinary approach. This enables students to understand the chosen theme or concept through different disciplinary lenses.

For instance, within the broader concept of environmental sustainability, students might study Math in order to “understand extremely small numbers… which allows them to interpret pollution data” while, simultaneously, they study Biology to “understand the risks of pollution to human health,” Language Arts to understand “the messages of corporate advertisers,” and History to “recognise that [such global] change has occurred for centuries” (McKeown, 2007, p. 151).

In the overlap of these and other subject disciplines, perhaps as students might be asked to solve a problem, they would also likely encounter the dilemma of contradictory alternatives and be forced to reconcile their decisions in the face of difficult trade-offs (McKeown, 2007; Warren & Flinchbaugh, 2003; Heller, 1997).

Create, Make, Innovate: Getting Hands-on with Learning Design

Recap of the session in the Scarfe Foyer in Fall 2019:

At this week’s Create, Make, Innovate! activity session, held Tuesday, October 1st, 2019 in the Scarfe foyer, teacher candidates (TCs) learned a quick and simple way to try upcycling for themselves.

Using only a pair of scissors and some clever ingenuity, TCs tried their hand at turning an old t-shirt into a tote bag. Watch this short video and try to make your own!

Having a chat while working with their hands during this activity can help participants stay engaged and mindful about the concepts they’re learning, like upcycling or repurposing (… or another related concept, refusing, which is a preceding alternative to the more familiar “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” – more on that below).

After only 15-20 minutes, they’ll be walking away with a practical skill and some fun memories, not to mention a brand new tote bag!

“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”

For nearly fifty years, this three-word refrain has helped remind us that our use and disposal of manufactured products has a direct effect upon the natural environment. Somewhat revolutionary for its time, the phrase was borne of a sentiment that has since grown to become the global movement we know today as environmental sustainability. In more recent years, a fourth alliteration has been added: “Refuse.”

The idea behind refusing is to avoid disposable plastics in our day-to-day living – things such as item packaging, drinking straws, and shopping bags – by declining them as much as possible in favour of alternatives. So, as much as it was about recycling – or should we say “upcycling”? – old t-shirts, today’s Create, Make, Innovate session was also about refusing. It was about encouraging people to decline a plastic shopping bag in the future since they would now have a handy tote bag to use instead.

Refusal reflects two key considerations: first, refusal sounds a notably more urgent tone as human manufacturing and waste subject our planet to ever greater amounts of near-indestructible plastics. Second, by implying (like the other three “Re-” words) that each of us has a choice, refusal subtly obliges all of us to think about our actions and accept responsibility for the way we treat the planet. Just as we can choose to pollute, we can choose to refuse.

Read more about plastics and recyclables in the news…

Resources

Alongside recycling and upcycling has arisen a closely related initiative called repurposing. The gist of all these is to find new utility for otherwise disposable items, thereby at least delaying if not preventing their addition to a landfill. In trying to provide alternatives to the trash can, some people have taken the repurposing and upcycling of potential trash to creative, even artistic heights.

For example, Rebecca Jane Houston, a sculptor and installation artist from Toronto, created a giant sculpture using 12,000 plastic bottles. In Calgary, storeowner Solita Work finds, makes, and sells repurposed items as a way to promote and practise zero-waste. Here in Vancouver, community artist Sharon Kallis draws upon First Nations traditions to help people in her Strathcona community repurpose and reuse plants and garden waste. Her project has grown to the extent that Kallis now grows crops as much for their future repurposing as for their more common usages.

Check out these “3-R,” “4-R,” and even “5-R” alternatives offered by various governments agencies…

… as well as by charitable and not-for-profit organisations…

Acknowledgement: post author, Scott Robertson; editor, Yvonne Dawydiak

Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, hands-on learning – that’s the spirit of Create, Make, Innovate! We want to promote enthusiasm for sharing and learning across age groups and across subject disciplines.

Make, Create, Innovate sessions took place during the Fall 2019 in the foyer of the Neville B. Scarfe building and were hosted by Scott Robertson, a project assistant on a small TLEF grant with Dr. Lorrie Miller, Dr. Marina-Milner Bolotin and Yvonne Dawydiak, Teacher Education.

If you have an idea or an inspiration for a resource or future session, please let us know! scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca

References

Heller, M. (1997). Reading and writing about the environment: Visions of the year 2000. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 40(5), 332–341. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/40026248

McKeown, R. (2007). Education for sustainable development and the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: An overview. Internationale Schulbuchforschung, 29(2), 147–158. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/43056776

Warren, L., & Flinchbaugh, M. (2003). Engaging Students in Meaningful, Integrative Environmental Lessons. Middle School Journal, 34(3), 47–50. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/23043900

Feature Photo Credit: Keagan Henman on Unsplash

Leave a Comment

Filed under AppliedDesignSkillsTechnologies, The Arts

Tagged as , , , ,