Category: EdTech (Page 2 of 4)

Today was the first day of our Eduational Technology Inquiry class presentations.

Keiro presented her inquiry into Stop Motion Animation

• She played  a video showing a simple class project where students moved post-its around on the floor to create a video. It looked like the kids were having a lot of fun, taking turns, moving their bodies
• For her project, she had problems with one program (iStopMotion?), but used the Stop-Motion app to take all of her photos with a tripod and a special phone grip
• She put the animation together in photoshop to add drawing
• The “twinning” button helps make the motion smoother
• The pros for using this in the classroom are that you could use it for every subject (We are going to integrate it with our art lesson plan I think)
  • One idea she suggested was taking photos in gym class and getting the kids moving around a lot take motion photos
• The cons she discussed were that you can be really limited by technology sometimes, and it is quite time consuming
• Her tips are to use a remote camera button
• And check out giphy.com for awesome gifs!

Katrina, Brie and Taylor presented their inquiry into Digital Literacy. This include:

• Information literacy – what is fake vs authentic, who is benefitting from information and what bias is there
• Ethical use – copyright issues
• Protecting yourself online
• Digital footprint
• Handling digital communication
• Cyber bullying
• Some interesting resources they covered are:
  • Navigating Digital Information Series
    • Fact checking, later reading, evaluating evidence
  • Media Literacy Series
    • History, influence & persuasion, advertising, media ownership
• Best practices are:
  • Student choice & voice
  • More creation than consumption
  • Multi-modalities
  • Collaboration – learn and make mistakes with your peers
  • Ensure accessibility for all learners
  • Crowd-accelerated learning
  • Social media & peer-to-peer social learning
  • Focus on core competencies
• Talk to parents
  • Don’t assume understanding and awareness – parents may not be aware of their child’s online use and footprint
  • Different families have different rules
  • This is part of the B.C. curriculum
  • Communication is key, with a cool idea about a digital family night in class or for the whole school
  • Balance the risks and benefits – validate parents’ concerns, provide reassuring info
• Address sex ed in digital literacy
  • Kids are learning about sex online, which is both good and bad
  • There is misinformation but also can be more inclusive for people who’s questions are not answered by information about heterosexual relationships
  • Websites don’t replace good quality in class info, so it’s not a way to cop out.
• And a revisit of the House Hippo!

And we presented our inquiry into Google Geographic Products. The slides  for our presentation are here: Ed Tech Maps

And you can find more information here:

Google Maps Basics

Google My Maps

Google Street View

Cool things to do on Google Earth

Google Sky, Mars, and Moon

Google Earth vs Google Maps

Also check out this post about StoryMap JS. You can use this in somewhat similar ways to My Maps, but it’s a different user interface and slightly different functionality and look.

In class this week we talked about graphics – how to make, edit and use them:

• Graphics are either pixel or vector based. I haven’t thought about this stuff in so long, but my background in mapping and remote sensing was where I initially learned about these terms. Sometimes I forget that I do have quite a bit of experience dealing with graphics, it was always just on the side so I didn’t really know I was learning it
• The most commonly used programs for creating and editing graphics are Adobe Photoshop (pixels) and Illustrator (vector)
  • I’ve used these without any instruction and muddled my way through. There’s definitely a lot to learn.
  • They are expensive to buy (thank goodness for a student price 5 years ago), and now have annual subscriptions which increase the price as well
  • Most school districts don’t have access to these, so using them in our future classes is likely not possible
• There are lots of other options. Some are also proprietary, others are open source or browser based. There’s also freeware, where you can use it initially for free but some functions are off limits with paying
• A few I jotted down and will check out later were GIMP, Vectr, and Pixlr
• BUT Michael mainly wanted to show us some of the capabilities of using Microsoft Powerpoint for editing (and creating) graphics
  • Widely accessible, not nearly as expensive
  • Familiar to most people
  • The early Microsoft take over of the office product suite really was incredible in how it still continues to dominate despite most of our class using apple products for everything else
• So, in using Powerpoint, anything on the slides can be exported as a graphic, and it won’t be the size and shape of a slide, but the actual graphics you are interested in
  • You can save as all different kinds of file types
  • All the slides in a deck can be saved as individual images (I need to find out if there’s an automated way to do this because that would be great. Do they append the names?)
  • There are different artistic effects and formatting tools
  • You can add text, and use cropping and flipping/rotation to alter images
  • Smart Art can do a lot for you, or at least give some ideas

So I tried it out and made this image, which I’m going to use in a post soon to get into the weeds a bit about what really makes Middle Eastern food what it is….. a spice and ingredient round up! Stay tuned.

Last week our class visited the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry – an independent school in Victoria that focusses on integrating the curriculum, emergent learning, and critical and creative thinking. The founder, Jeff Hopkins spoke about the school’s philosophy at TEDxVictoria in 2014.

My notes after watching this talk:

• Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a flame.
• Distinction between getting information and actually knowing it
• If education system doesn’t shift, from “knowing about” to “knowing”, making changes for the better in our world could be difficult
• Ingredients in knowing:
  • Initial questions -> looking deeper -> new questions
  • Reason to learn -> emergent learning
• Need opportunities for deep personal inquiry, hard to do with groups of 30 kids
• Right now – subject silos, but we need to move to more personal competencies
  • some have been revised in new curriculum, some not
• (Talk is mostly focussed on secondary school rather than elementary)
• Suggests reorganizing learning – critical thinking, creative thinking, ecological literacy, mathematical literacy
  • Combine with high level learning objectives
  • This is happening at PSII right now, he has proposed this to the B.C. Ministry of Education

I was really looking forward to the tour, but unfortunately my son was sick that day and I was unable to go. I talked with my classmates after the tour and these were their notes:

• The learners were eloquent, respectful and mature
• They talked about how their learning focussed on independence, time management, collaboration and respect
• There are 95 students in the school, and tuition is $7,200 per year (way lower than I would expect for a private school, but I don’t know much about the funding models for these)
• I didn’t realize there are no more provincial exams in B.C. anymore, just curricular competencies that students need to meet
• Some students found that their large inquiry project did not fulfill all of their curricular requirements so they had to do certain make up courses to fulfill these
  • Sometimes this was in the form of additional smaller inquiry projects
• The school doesn’t work for all learners, parents or teachers
• They spend time giving the students a grounding in what inquiry is, something that our teaching program has really lacked even though we currently have 3 inquiry projects assigned to us
• Jeff Hopkins described the inquiry model as an Indigenous way of knowing – the questions the students ask are important to them, their families and their communities
• Students have the opportunity to sit in on UVic courses – I believe either in part or in full?

I may try to make up the tour on my own, my classmates were impressed and inspired by the way learning is happening at PSII