Category: Weekly Reflections

That’s it, guys. We made it to the end of the year, and in our last class together, we got to see some really cool presentations from our peers, talked about some very interesting subjects and showed some great tools that we have at our disposal as teachers to use in our classrooms. Some of my personal favourite Ed tech tools that were introduced to us was the tool Goosechase. I especially loved that it is something that can be used in a lot of different classes and it can be a great way to get students up and moving and also get them engaged in the material in class or, give them a break from the material in class. I think it’s fun for people of all ages as it’s something that I’ve ever done with some of my peers in our 20s, and we’ve still been able to get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

While I think it’s awesome that we got to look at these topics and tools, there’s one thing that really stood out to me in the presentations, and that was the presentation on the topic of cyberbullying. This is a topic that I think many of us may have faced when we were younger; I should know that I did. I grew up on the Internet in an age where anonymity was not as prevalent as it is today on TikTok, where you could really just say anything through a username, and no one would know what it was. However, we did have something called ask.fm, which I never had because I didn’t like the idea of a website where anyone could ask you a question anonymously, and you could answer it publicly on a profile that anyone could see. As expected, the website opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for bullying and was incredibly dangerous.

For examples of the kinds of things people were saying on the website, check out this article :

https://www.hightechdad.com/2013/06/05/parents-be-warned-ask-fm-is-a-dangerous-deadly-social-site-for-teens-tweens/

The idea of being able to bully someone online and then never know who it is or be able to follow a username back to you was absolutely terrifying to me as a student who was already bullied enough as it was in class. Yet, people still managed to bully me through this site by asking other people questions about me or making really horrific claims about me. I didn’t find out about these claims until multiple days later when someone told me. But of all the situations of bullying in my school experience, this is one of the ones that sticks out to me the most because it was scary not knowing who was talking about me, and it was upsetting. I also had a lot of people accusing me of making these comments about myself just to stir up drama. It was really frustrating, and it trickled from the online platforms into my real-life school environment and, in a lot of ways, made me feel like more of a social pariah than I already had felt.

I’m grateful that one of the groups talked about this issue because it’s only becoming more prevalent in our classrooms today. I think it’s super important that we, as teachers, address the issues that come with anonymity on social media and on the Internet. It should be part of our job to try to teach our students the dangers of cyberbullying and why it can be just as damaging, if not more damaging, than being in the room with someone.

In my future classrooms, I hope that we can address this topic with maturity and an open dialogue with my students. I hope that we can work together towards creating a classroom environment that doesn’t bully each other and also is aware of the impacts of cyberbullying. I also want to be able to create a culture in my classroom where students who feel like they’re being bullied either online or in person can come to me and tell me if something is going on.

Last week, we talked about AI in schools. In my reflection, I talked a little bit about AI and the concerns that we have as educators about how to evaluate our students’ work. I want to touch on that and what I said there and then elaborate on it a little bit here to kind of look at strategies that we can use as educators to try and 8 plagiarisms through AI and ways that we can still get our students to think critically instead of turning just to AI to write their assignments for them.

If you wish to read what I said in this instance follow this link.

One of the things I said in my reflection was that I think we need to start looking at new ways to assess our students and start thinking about how to integrate AI into our assignments rather than continue doing what we’ve always done and just hoping for the best. However, I think it’s also incredibly important that we’re still allowing our students to critically engage with the material and synthesize things for themselves rather than simply looking to ChatGPT to give them all the answers that they need. If students are not able, especially in social studies or English classes (my teachable subjects, so I have a bias), to think critically and engage with the material themselves, they risk running into issues of plagiarism with AI, where they are no longer engaging with the material themselves but rather finding ways around engagement through ChatGPT. Personally, I think one of the best ways to make sure that students are still thinking critically and engaging with the material is to try and focus assignments on the material that the AI may not know. For example, I might reference things that specifically happened in class or ask students to reference material or topics that were discussed in class, which may not include things that AI has knowledge of, such as what is happening in the lives of students or current political events that the AI is not yet aware of. I may also ask them to include personal details that are unique to them or ask them to reflect on their assignments or on the material that we’re talking about in class.

What this does, first and foremost is that it helps my students to actually think about the material that we talked about in class to hopefully help them develop into strong critical thinkers later in life. It also helps me to know that they’re doing their work themselves and not relying on AI to give them their answers.

While some students may still find a way around this and use ChatGPT anyway, I think that this still requires them to be engaged in the material because they will have to give the AI more specific prompts and, depending on how the AI responds, can indicate to me as a teacher if they’ve understood the material enough to explain it to and AI processor to write them their assignment. I think by adding these very specific and personal touches to assignments based on the events going on within a classroom, or within the lives of students themselves, it’s taking the power away from AI services to just spew out knowledge that it got from the Internet, and puts it into the students hands allowing them to critically reflect on material and gain deeper understandings of the material.

This week we talked about the impact that covid-19 had on the education system, and how it forced classrooms to shift to an online learning model. This online learning model opened up the doors to new opportunities for various types of synchronous and asynchronous learning. While this model allowed for a new flexibility of learning, it also came with many drawbacks such as a lack of social connection, or a lack of a familiar structure.

I was lucky, because I avoided “Zoom school” through my degree. I started my degree in 2015 and paused in 2018, not returning until 2021, after the pandemic had shut down classes,  and the world had started to adjust to a new system of learning. But as a result, I developed a unique perspective of only seeing the before and after of exclusively online learning, rather than during. I saw a pre and post covid world of education and how the university had changed its structure of lecturing, and assessing work. I was very lucky because I was not one of the online learning Guinea Pigs, but rather, someone who got the hybrid learning in the years after. Here are some of the main things that I noticed:

1. Access to material changed

Before covid, if you were sick, you had to reach out to another student to learn what information you had missed in class. You needed to collect their notes, or meet up with the professor in their office hours to catch up. However, after covid, the University became more understanding of students missing class. A majority of Professors realized that they could make their lectures accessible to students who had to miss their lectures via Zoom recording, or even just posting their lecture slides online.

1. Assessment had changed

The shift to online classes mean the end to in-person exams as we know them. Because students could no longer sit in a room and write an exam that was guarenteed to be written completley from memory, the assessment methods had to change, and those changes stuck even in the years following the return to in person classes. From the time that I return to my degree to it’s completion, I took 24 courses, and only ONE of those had an in-person, question-based exam, three had in-person final essays, and the other 20 had a variation of either a take home exam, which was essentially an essay prompt that you had between 3 days and a week to complete, or, simply a final essay due during the exam period.

Overall, I think it was definitely something that I had to get used to when I came back to school. While I initially hated the shift from in-person exams to online essay based exams, I think that it actually helped my grades and allowed me to have a stronger grasp of the material, especially in things like History and English degrees. It allowed me to actually engage in the material and ask questions, rather than memorize simple facts that would leave my head just a month after the exam was over. In addition, having access to lecture slides and recordings has been an amazing development for me. While at times it gave me a weak excuse for why I was skipping class, it was also an amazing resource for studying, and allowed me to stay home from class if I wasn’t feeling great, without the stress of what I could be missing. I think it was a much needed shift in how we think about accessibility in the classrooms, which ties perfectly into next weeks topic…

(that is a joke)

This week, we looked at simple graphic design using websites like Microsoft Designer and Canva. These tools are incredibly useful as they allow you to create a variety of graphics for free and very accessible to even a beginner. I am quite familiar with Canva and have used it many times for other courses and jobs, so to create the banner you see above I used Microsoft Designer, a tool that I had no prior knowledge of going into this class. This tool is very similar to Canva, however it uses AI to generate the design you want, and can include AI generated images that you prompt. For this banner for example, I gave multiple prompts for images about art supplies, and chose my favourite images to include in the graphic. Next I typed into the prompt “Create a WordPress blog header for my art blog” into the prompt for the graphic design, and the site then generated multiple graphics for me to choose from. Some of the designs included a title or subtitle on the graphic, however I chose one that just included the images.

I also created a more “fun” graphic advertising for a nightclub based in the Starwars universe. For this one, I asked the site to generate images of Darth Vader indulging in various activities seen that can be done in a nightclub, and included the prompt “Create an infographic for the best nightclub in a galaxy far far away.”

This is a really interesting tool that is useful in a classroom setting. As a teacher, we don’t always have the time to create awe-inspiring graphics each day for class, but with tools like this, we can do something equally as interesting, but in half the time. One downside, however, is that this tool is incredibly distracting, as you can see from my Darth Vader graphic that is oh so obviously on topic.

This week’s class focused on the concepts of learning design, looking at different technology integration models, such as the SAMR Model, the TPAK Framework, and Constructive Alignment. Each of these models outlines ways that we can integrate technology into our classrooms and provide us as future teachers with resources to help prevent cognitive overload in our students. I found the constructive alignment chart to be especially helpful as it helped me to see the bigger picture of a lesson or project outline.

Something else we talked about this week was the idea of cognitive overload and dual cognition in the context of multimedia. The concept of cognitive overload is where I would like to focus for the remainder of today’s post.

This video we watched in class is around 18 minutes long; however, it conveys the idea of cognitive load well if you want to watch a more in-depth video explaining these concepts.

Ray explains cognitive overload using an analogy of a glass of water; the water is the information that we are “pouring in” to the student, and the glass is the student’s working memory. “The more the glass fills up, the more strain on our cognitive resources,” says Ray. When the glass fills up all the way, the water simply pours out and the glass cannot hold the water any longer.

What I really liked about this video is how it highlighted how we, as teachers, can hopefully use multimedia without causing cognitive overload in our students. Although it seems like common sense, I had not thought about this concept, nor had I thought about the ways that multimedia could cause such an overload, especially since the bulk of our courses so far had highlighted the importance of multimedia in education. This video provided an excellent resource for me that I will continue to think about as I eventually start teaching students.

This week in class, we discussed the importance of FIPPA: the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. FIPPA is an Act implemented by the British Columbia Government, which regulates protected data and data sharing. As future teachers, it is important to recognize how this Act affects us and our actions in the classroom.

It is our responsibility to protect our student’s information. And we must understand how to do that.

I was aware of the general rules around social media and privacy: don’t post a photo of students without their informed consent. However, before this class, I had not thought about data storage and how something as commonly used as Google Classroom could infringe on the privacy of my students. We learned that data from Google is stored in the US rather than Canada, and as a result, the US government has access to our student’s personal information if we disclose it on Google Classroom. To comply with FIPPA, any teacher in BC must ensure their students are anonymous if they wish to use Google Classroom. I found this really interesting to learn as just a few days prior, I spoke with a teacher who was raving about the practicality of using Google Classroom with their full names plainly visible.

He stated that most of his colleagues used the tool as well.

Reflecting on this interaction, I wonder how many teachers need to be made aware of the above information and how our own knowledge and awareness will shift surrounding new technologies or apps and FIPPA in the future.