Category: EdTech (Page 3 of 4)

Mine of the craft

November 4, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 2 Comments

Today we had a creative workshop all about Mindcraft. We had a couple of little Minecraft geniuses from Colquitz Middle School come with their teacher to teach us the basics of the computer game. We learned the different ways teachers use Minecraft as a cross-curriculum platform to teach. They use the creative modes to allow children to express their artistic vision and help children show their creativity in architecture, pictures, and designs. The teachers also use the game as a resource for science, physics, and social studies, using the environmental aspects and resourcefulness mindset of the game. Kids can learn about the ecosystem, conservation, what humans need to have and access to survive and overall can work on their teamwork skills with their classmates.

This was my first hands-on experience with Minecraft. On my Wednesday visits, I have watched my class in their schools MAClab using Minecraft as a fun educational tool where they all share one Minecraft world and create their own spaces. In our Minecraft workshop, we were allowed to experiment with the variety of different modes Minecraft has including the creative world and the survival world. I had no idea what I was doing the whole time so I required the help of the middle school children and Teya to maneuver me around the world of pixellated land.

Below are some screenshots of what I saw and experienced while gaming on Minecraft:

This is the first photo of me in Minecraft, my name is kirbabyteytey (hence the combination of Teya and I’s name)

This is my first super cool house made out of pink wool, the inspiration for my house was to be built around trees and also have a beautiful skylight (not purposeful since I didn’t know how to make a roof). The image on the left you can tell is filled with hundreds of animals, this was not my creative choice, however, it made my home feel more comforting and loving.

The highlight of my gaming today was when Teya made and showed me what “The Nether” is. It is a magical blue glowing portal that takes you into a firey, lava-filled world.

5th meal attempt

November 3, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 0 Comments

This wrap was by far the best creation I have made yet! The recipe was accurate when it stated that in total the meal process would only take 10 minutes as you literally only had to stuff everything in a wrap and call it a day! I had to be pretty creative when I made this wrap since I was missing many ingredients and only really had modified versions of what I needed. For instance, I was supposed to use iceberg lettuce for the lettuce portion of the wrap but all I had was a salad mix which also had a very questionable expiry date. As far as the Fritos I didn’t know if I would enjoy having the additional crunch in the wrap and also did not wish to buy a random chip flavour that I did not know about, however, I decided to attempt it out and instead used just crushed tortilla chips, and surprisingly enough it tasted pretty incredible!

Below are images of the process of my “wrapping”:

This image is the beginning of my wrap, the pinkish sauce is made up of salsa and sour cream mixed together and the first layers on top are the salad mix and cut up avocado

This image shows the same as the top however with the addition of my sauteed chicken and the crushed tortilla chips spread overtopped with more salsa, sour cream dressing

This final image shows my finished wrap that is rolled up and stuffed to the very max

I am so happy with how this meal turned out and I ended up engulfing the wrap in probably about 5 minutes, I will 100% recreate this recipe using proper ingredients to see if it tastes even better.

Tech inquiry post

November 2, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 0 Comments

We have chosen to do our tech inquiry project on gamification. I am excited to learn more about this topic because in this day and age technology is becoming a vital aspect of students learning. I hope that if I learn to appreciate gamification more by learning more about its capabilities, I will be more likely to want to implement this kind of learning style in my future classroom.

The questions I have chosen to research involve the impact of gamification on student learning, more specifically the advantages of gamification in the classroom and the disadvantages. I am going to start my research by finding sources that can teach me a little bit more about gamification since my knowledge at this moment is very little.

Kinda feeling like a blueberry

October 28, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 0 Comments

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.

PSII

October 26, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 0 Comments

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.

4th meal attempt

October 26, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 0 Comments

So by far today marked an incredible milestone for me as this is the first recipe I made using more than just one type of spice… Ok so that may be a tad of a stretch but still, this fancy ramen recipe took me out of my comfort zone in the best way. The recipe implied that it would take in total around 30 minutes to complete and this was very accurate timing. I started with making the sauce and had to change some of the ingredients because of preferences for certain tastes. I was slightly concerned about the sauce at first but only because the ingredients were not mixing together and the consistency seemed to be very thin, the thinness may have been because of the absence of cornstarch. I had completely forgotten about the cornstarch and had already started mixing the ingredients together by the time I realized I needed it. After doing the research I learned that cornstarch is used as a binder and thickener and would have made the sauce be less of just a broth, however, the sauce did taste very good in the end. The cooking of the noodles, vegetables, and the chicken was just your usual boiling of water and sauteing however when mixed all together you could see the sauce marinating into the chicken and soaking into the veggies and noodles. The taste, in the end, was honestly the best part of my day, the fancy ramen tasted better than real ramen! I will for sure make this recipe again because of its simplicity, amazing taste and because I now have so many of the spices I need to make the noodles!

3rd meal attempt

October 17, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 0 Comments

So tonight I decided that I was in the mood for some sweets and what better sweets to eat than chocolate chip cookies! I was staying over at my boyfriend’s house and I convinced him that we needed to eat cookies (and you know make more blog posts). The recipe I had chosen was a fairly simple cookie recipe apart from the fact that it called for an obscene amount of flour…. 3 cups to me seemed like far too much and would make the dough rather dry and the cookies very hard. We added the cups of flour 1 at a time as the recipe requested mixing the dough after every addition of flour. By the 2nd cup, it was clear that the third cup would have been a poor idea so we finished off my adding 1/4 more of a cup instead. The recipe stated the cookies needed 10 minutes in the oven but we found that 12 minutes was that perfect cookie time when they are still soft coming out but harden over time. The taste test was very successful and all 4 of his roommates continued to eat all 33 cookies throughout the night. This was my first time making cookies while at university for the past 3 years, I don’t think I would make them regularly as I do try to watch my diet however they were a delicious treat.

Lambrick Tech Class

October 16, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 4 Comments

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.

Safety 1st

October 7, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 0 Comments

Today in class we had a guest presenter named Jesse Miller who taught us about social media and mobile technology. Jesse Miller is a keynote speaker and founder of “Mediated Reality” which is an education company that focuses on the new generation of education and technology. I found this presentation to be a real eye-opener to myself as I realize I have not thought about my online identity as much as I should, considering I am entering a profession where professionalism means much more and can have greater consequences if not met than the usual 9-5 job. Jesse informed us that if we are under the age of 21 we are the first generation that has the whole footprint of our lives on the internet. It is our parents who posted the pictures of us when we were younger (without our consent) that are now readily available for the entire world to access. It’s not even just old photos are parents posted it is us using public or private wifi and the websites we go on and the apps we used being tract by the IT who can access every photo, every URL… EVERYTHING.

Second meal attempt

October 5, 2019 / kirbyjarvis / 0 Comments

I chose to make the sweet kale salad next because it is a pretty basic recipe that literally only involves mixing things together and cutting. I was slightly skeptical about the choice of vegetables in the salad even though I know the same vegetables are in the Costco one, specifically the Brussels sprouts. I have never been a fan of Brussels sprouts and especially raw ones however; I realized that once the dressing is on, the sprouts would taste very similar to the ones from the Costco salad mix. To start the salad I had to buy most of the ingredients especially since I don’t usually have the dressing ingredients needed on hand. I switched some of the ingredients for ones I feel more inclined to, instead of the balsamic champagne I chose the white wine vinegar and instead of the sugar I chose to use honey, also I switched the milk for unsweetened almond milk because I sometimes react to dairy in a negative way. The recipe was very simple to follow as the dressing only needed to be all added together. I did find it more difficult to do the initial prepping of the vegetables, especially the recommend broccoli sticks that had to be matched cut, HOWEVER, after watching one specific YouTube video that explained the process (was supposed to be for zucchini but it still worked) I figured it out! When I finally completed the salad and sat down to eat it I was actually surprised by how it turned out, it was yummy! I did had avocado slices to garnish because I was concerned for how filling the salad would be and it ended up doing the job. The salad wasn’t quite similar to the Costco one and I found that the dressing seemed to be more watery than my inspiration however since I made it myself I knew what ingredients went into the process I am proud to say I will be making this salad again.