For this exercise, I interviewed a colleague at Pickering College, an independent K-12 school with about 450 students. “Jackie” has been teaching Math for over 17 years and is currently teaching academic and enhanced Math in Grades 10-12. She is also the Math Department Head, so she has played a main role in the recent update of the school’s K-12 Math Program. The interview was conducted face-to-face on January 23, 2018 in one of the small meeting rooms and audio recorded using an iPad. My goal for the session was to determine any commonalities in the technologies that she thought were effective in her classroom, and explore the implications for future technologies.<\/p>\n
Real-Time<\/strong><\/p>\n Several of the technologies that Jackie highlighted in the interview emphasized the benefit of real-time “data” to improve instruction. For instance, Microsoft OneNote is currently being used not only as a virtual notebook, but also to understand student thinking and give “direct feedback” when necessary. Game based quizzing platforms like Kahoot not only makes learning engaging for students, but also enables Jackie to quickly “know who understands” concepts without singling out each student for an answer.\u00a0 Classroom activities in Desmos gives Jackie the ability to “see them (students) complete each screen in real-time” which helps her understand which students are struggling and need additional guidance.<\/p>\n Speed<\/strong><\/p>\n Another common thread that Jackie emphasized throughout the interview was the ability of certain technologies to quickly engage student minds and eliminate misconceptions. For instance, an application like Geogebra helps teachers to show shapes and graphs “from almost any angle” thus improving the visualization of concepts. Similarly, Desmos makes the “teaching of ideas more smooth and less tedious” by simplifying the creation and manipulation of graphs which enables the user to focus on understanding the concepts. From a technical perspective, the consistency of the well established 1-to-1 laptop program enables teachers\/students to get on task; it also gives teachers the confidence to try new applications.<\/p>\n Location<\/strong><\/p>\n The last common thread from the interview was the use of technology platforms to extend learning beyond the traditional classroom. For instance, Jackie uses Microsoft OneNote to deliver units and entire online courses with the addition of Khan Academy, Edpuzzle, and other applications. From a curricular perspective, “the Math curriculum in Ontario for High School is very pre-calculus based and sometimes that takes up so much effort that we are losing interesting things that students would be able to engage with.” Within the newly developed Senior School Enhanced Math Program, the plan is to integrate STEM to increase the breadth of learning and go outside the expectations of the Ontario curriculum.<\/p>\n This interview continues to develop certain questions in my head about the future of educational technology. It is certain that computers have to the ability to be faster and more accurate at many tasks. In the past 5 years, my school has integrated a couple Math practice applications that boast intelligent real-time<\/strong> analysis, to guide students with precise differentiation and speed<\/strong>, in a fully online platform that can be accessed from any location<\/strong> with an Internet connection. Will these types of AI (artificial intelligence) driven systems fundamentally change learning and redefine the purpose of teachers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For this exercise, I interviewed a colleague at Pickering College, an independent K-12 school with about 450 students. “Jackie” has been teaching Math for over 17 years and is currently teaching academic and enhanced Math in Grades 10-12. She is also the Math Department Head, so she has played a main role in the recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42803,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1669387],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42803"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4691"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4701,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691\/revisions\/4701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}