Category: EDTECH in the classroom

Today in tech class was a mixture of free work time and a giant check-in session of our inquiries. I realized at my meeting with Val that my blog was lowkey breaking many plagiarisms laws and that if I wanted to avoid going to court I would have to give these websites the recognition they deserved. After finishing the citing of the pictures and recipes I began to start the process of my tech inquiry. I am in a group with Teya and Cass and our inquiry is about gamification in education. We all are amateurs when it comes to this type of learning and I look forward to researching more on this subject and one day when I am in the school system to use this type of learning in my classroom. We have decided to use the presenting medium Prezi to allow our presentation to be more visually engaging for the class. We have chosen to split the questions up between the three of us and the questions I have chosen to conquer all fall under the umbrella question “how does gamification impact student learning” and more specifically what are the advantages and disadvantages of using it in the classroom.

For this weeks tech class, we decide to relocate our classroom to 808 Douglas Street in downtown Victoria. It was at this location where we found our classroom to be located at the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII) This school is not like your usual highschool, yes there are teenagers everywhere and teachers, however, the similarities stop at that. When we walked in our first sight was a large open area covered in desks each fitting around five students. On these desks, there were cute little plants each with their own names and sitting around the desks were students from early to late teens working. The working was what surprised me at first, now I know that sounds bad but it is not unusual to see a classroom filled with students distracted and barely working, that was not the case for PSII. These kids were hard at work doing all sorts of different learning from reading, computer programming, sewing, and even crocheting! Seeing all of this was very overwhelming for me, I kept thinking “where are the classes? “where are the teachers? “who is watching these kids? It wasn’t until we had a talk with principal Jeff Hopkins that it all the pieces started to fit together. PSII is an inquiry-based school, this means this school is almost 100% personalized learning whereas the students are able to pick their own interdisciplinary learning pathway that ends up meeting all the same curriculum competencies as the B.C curriculum. This form of learning allows the students the chance to truly learn about what they’re passionate about, allowing children to be more obliged to their learning.

Now I am not gonna lie walking around this school freaked me out quite a bit, but that is only because my generation has been conditioned to gear towards a certain kind of learning, one that is structured. Inquiry-based learning requires a lot of self-regulation when it comes to monitoring and continuing work. This requires self-made assessments, self check-list and in all a lot of determination. I think this school is a school of the future, one where specialized learning is looked up upon and not down, sadly there are still so many stereotypes when it comes to private schools alike PSII. “They’re alternative schools” and “It is those kids last option to graduate” however this is not the case, PSII is a school for the everyday student who wishes to explore their own learning and delve deeper into their subjects that summon them.

Today we spent our usual Wednesday visit at a new (yet older) location… that’s right we went to HIGHSCHOOL! To be more specific we made our way down to Lambrick Park secondary, a small yet lovely high school located just a 5-minute bike ride away from my house. When we arrived at the school we got the opportunity to pick any 4 classes we wished to attend during the course of the day, and suspiciously enough I chose a tech one. The title of the tech class was “Film Media” and was taught by the lovely  Ms. Martin, however, that day we had a special guest teacher named Mr. Pelton who is an expert in the screenplay writing world. In the class, I got to learn things I had no idea were even involved in the movie industry. Some of the more technical terms I learned about screenplay writing were the definitions and specifics of certain aspects of the actual screenplay script. The definitions below are the new words I learned and what corresponds to each one:

• Logline: The thesis of a screenplay, gives detail and adds to the title
• Slugline: This shows where the scene takes place (location). The slugline is always written in caps and shows 3 main types of info, whether or not the scene is taking place inside or outside, the location and at what time of day the scene occurs at (day or night)
• Action: This is the information of the screenplay before the actual dialogue begins, it is located underneath the slugline and depicts as much information possible with the fewest amount of words
• Fade in: The first two words in a screenplay located on the left top of page
• Fade out: The last words located only at the end to signify the end
• Dialogue: This is the rest of the screenplay. The dialogue should be as natural as possible considering how people actually talk in conversations.

In all this class was very informational driven and not very hands-onpractical work, I am still glad I sat on it because I learned so much about media and film I did not know existed.

It was a very rainy day today both outdoors and indoors (literal crying cause blogging is hard). Today we learned about different twitter outlets including the normal every day twitter and then tweet deck, which is a dashboard application for management of twitter pages and accounts. Learning about these different platforms has potentially inspired to get twitter so I can stay updated with my classes, I can get informed on B.C teachers issues, I can follow teachers and principles who inspire me and lastly I can create my own twitter name. Today I also chose my tech inquiry project topic which is going to be about gamification with Teya and Cass. Gamification spoke to me because I remember growing up using online learning games such as “All the right type” “Kahoot” “Coolmathgames” and “Dancemattyping” which make me curious to how they affected my learning and in all how they are used.

My free inquiry is going well and I can honestly say I have almost mastered the basics of the very complicated ways of Word press. My next goal for my blogging is to begin the next step of my inquiry which involves me actually planning and buying the ingredients for my recipes.