Category: Weekly Reflections

In class this week we discussed how useful videos can be for learning – and took part in an editing lab.

Finding videos online (typically YouTube) has been one of my favourite study methods for years. I learn best when things are verbally explained to me (with supplementary visuals if possible) – and this is something I realized fairly early on. This means that I struggle a lot to understand material when I miss classes or even have to get up during a class. When I have to learn just by reading a textbook or other material – my understanding is not near where it can be when I hear it explained and broken down out loud. However, visuals help me solve this!

When I was in high school, I would find videos for everything. Even if I already understood the material, I would often still find videos to help me solidify it. Before nearly every test I would scour YouTube and other sources to find something to help. I watched Khan Academy, Crash Course, the Amoeba Sisters, and lots of other channels. When my Grade 12 English class studied Macbeth, I found a website with videos that restate the events in each scene by having people “interview” the different characters. During the Covid-19 pandemic I thrived in the classes that had videos with the teachers explaining different concepts. I loved being able to pause and rewatch them. Additionally, I still search for videos to help me with my University classes. Most recently, I had a midterm for EdPsych and I went and found YouTube videos that explained the different concepts to me.

Due to this and my experiences teaching different children – I know how helpful videos are for learning. I am very grateful to have had so much access to them – and to have realized how helpful they are for me early on. I know that when I start teaching I will find videos often and recommend this as a possible learning tool.

I really enjoyed having the chance to go onto iMovie and play around with its different features. Although I have used it before, I appreciated the extra practice and I ended up learning about features I wasn’t aware of previously (the greenscreen being a big one).

Going forward I will use this information to help my students learn. I am excited to create my own videos and show the ones I know to be helpful. They are such a valuable tool and I cannot wait to pass this knowledge on.

Jesse’s website: https://www.mediatedreality.com/

This week our class had Jesse Miller come in as a guest speaker. Jesse does presentations in schools all over BC about digital citizenship (he came to my elementary school when I was in grade 6!). He talked to us about technology and how quickly it is advancing. As he pointed out – most people were and continue to be unprepared for these growing changes. He described things I wasn’t aware of – such as the programming of self-driving cars being the subtle byproduct of internet security checks. Additionally, Jesse told us that it is our job to teach children to use media responsibly – with the 4Cs of Digital Literacy. These 4Cs are: critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration.

This presentation was very informative and interesting to listen to. It is incredibly important for us as future educators to learn as much as we can about new technology – because it is such a prominent aspect of our and our future student’s lives. These new advancements, AI being a big one, are not going to go away. No matter how comfortable of uncomfortable we are with this – we still need to help prepare our students to go out into the world and use the internet in a responsible and beneficial way. Jesse’s lecture was informative – and a good reminder that there is so much to learn about the internet and technology.

During L2P last semester, my partner and I had the privilege of teaching a grade 8 class a lesson about ChatGPT and spotting AI. Without realizing it at the time, we did succeed in working in the 4Cs. We encouraged critical thinking by showing different ‘tweets’ and helping the students evaluate whether or not they were written by AI – and brought in a collaboration aspect by having them work together to help them assess. Additionally, creativity was harnessed through a worksheet we gave them where we prompted them to create different questions to ask ChatGPT. This also brought in communication because we then asked them to refine their questions and see how they could make their conversations with AI more effective.

Going forward, I would like to continue doing activities like this when I go into classrooms. I will refer back to the 4Cs – because I think that when they are combined the lesses reach peek productivity.

Summary

Last week we were asked to watch “Most Likely to Succeed” (2015) – a documentary that highlights an inquiry based high school (“High Tech High”). This school is located in the United States and, unlike traditional American high schools, encourages students to take control of their own learning with guidance from teachers. They place emphasis on stepping away from standardized testing, and instead allow their students to harness their passions and work creatively and collaboratively. The documentary showcases an end of term exhibition that this school had where the students presented their passion projects, and the processes of creating them, to their families and peers.

Additionally, this documentary displayed the effects of standardized testing, most notably the SAT, on students and parents. The Untied States centres their education system around standardized testing – and these tests are what allow students to get accepted into top colleges. Due to this system, students and their families place the importance of these tests above their own learning.
The documentary shows that when asked whether they would rather learn important skills and harness their creativity and passions or get a good grade on a test – high school students choose the latter.

This documentary also highlights a conversation between a mother and a teacher at High Tech High where the mother states that although she loves the way this school runs she worries that it will not prepare her child to take the SAT and transition into a college. This system of standardized testing and the inflated importance of test scores is concerning – and the documentary questions whether or not it is properly preparing students to move into a world with growing technology that can take tests better than any human.

My Personal Thoughts:

This documentary made important critiques of our current school system. As I watched it, I found myself becoming frustrated with the way that schools place so much importance on tests. I think that the way this school encourages students to follow their passions is amazing – but I do not believe that it is properly preparing them for the system that they are in. The students who would choose getting a good grade on a test over furthering their own learning and passions make complete sense to me, and I was surprised to see that their teacher didn’t understand their answer. From an early age children are ingrained with the belief that grades are what matters – rather than learning for the sake of learning. It is so frustrating because I find it hard to believe that anyone involved in furthering this system would honestly agree that this is how it should be – yet this is the system that we are in. Although standardized testing isn’t as big in Canada, the same philosophy of ‘get good grades, go to a good college, have a good life’ still stands. When I was in high school good grades were what I cared about and I believe that this led me to miss out on things that I could have learned – but instead just memorized.

However, while I do not believe that this type of school works in our current society, I still believe that we can take ideas from it and bring them into schools. When I was in grade 7 I did a year long passion project – and it gave me the chance to learn about something I cared about alongside all of the memorizing and tests. I am glad to have watched this documentary because it has inspired me to incorporate passion projects into my own classroom one day. Giving students a venue to be creative and work together is extremely important and inquiry projects are a good way to do this. I am inspired and motivated to learn more about facilitating inquiry projects in elementary classrooms.