WOW! I blinked and this semester was over. 

My colleagues in EDTC 300 have helped me immensely over the course of the semester – be it answering the discord questions that I asked, sharing interesting resources, or providing encouraging comments on my blog posts. Reflecting on my contribution throughout the last four months, I just hope I was able to be as helpful to them as they were to me!

Twitter Contributions

I was fairly active on Twitter and felt as though I contributed to my peer’s learning whenever I shared a post, as I felt as though every tweet they made benefited me as well! Here are a few ways I believe I contributed to my peer’s learning:

• Retweeting & Quoting tweets that I felt would be truly beneficial: I like to read about why my peers liked resource or tweet they shared so that I can understand why they thought it was important to pass along. In saying that, I did the same – for

  

  example, I Quoted a tweet about an Advice to My Younger Self bulletin board and explained why I would use this & thought it was so important. This specific tweet had replies from my peers thanking me for sharing & that they also thought it was a great idea.

• Replying to my peers: I replied to my peers with words of encouragement for what they were sharing, additional ideas, and personal experiences. Please see some examples below. Though I was proud of my twitter activity, I do wish I replied with more intent to my peers tweets. As I looked back before completing this post, I noticed that a lot of my replies were “I love this!”, “I will definitely use this in my classroom!”, “Thanks for sharing!”. If I had a do-over, I would ask more probing questions of my classmates or explain to why I would use this in my classroom.

  

  

  

  

• Sharing beneficial resources: During our “Twitter time” I shared quite a few different resources – but to highlight this I wanted to share one thread that I felt really connected to EDTC 300 as it discussed Digital Literacy!

  

• Sharing personal experiences & lesson ideas: I shared a few of my own lesson plan ideas (Vocab Go Fish!), my personal experience with resources (Broken Strings Infographic), and comments on how certain lessons played out! This contributed to my peers’ learning as they can check out free resources that were made OR reviewed by someone who is in the same boat as them – learning how to teach! Check out some of my personal experience sharing tweets below:

• Asking questions of my peers to encourage critical thinking: There were a few tweets that I made where I stated my opinion on a topic but then also questioned what my peers thought of it and their reasonings. Not only was this beneficial to me to hear more ideas on the topic but I do believe it also challenged my peers to think critically about it as well! My favourite example would be the example you see to the side:

  

   

Edusites Contributions

Ok – this is sad, and it is my own fault, Katia warned us of this. Listen to your professors, lesson learned! It is actually a combination of two things:

1. I did not keep track of my comments on my peers Edusites blogs. In our last class many other students were able to sort their comments so that they could see the comments they made on others blogs – I was not able to do this. Another peer said they were able to search their name & comments to see all of the comments they made – which would have been helpful BUT (see below)
2. I realized about 2.5 months into the semester that my comments were going through under “Anonymous”.. UGH.

Anyways – I will make do with what I can off memory with generalized comments and a little bit of back tracking for more specifics. One comment that I do remember was on a peer’s post about their yoga journey – I had explained a potential lesson plan idea for Yoga in a younger Physical Education class. This lesson was basically a story that was told and the yoga moves worked alongside with the story!

Similar to my replies on Twitter – I wish I would have asked stronger questions in my comments on Edusites blogs!

Now – this last item of contribution is my Learning Project. I felt as though I contributed to the learning of those who read them as I explained the pros and cons of different resources, cited and linked these resources so that they could use them if they were interested, and I created an environment where I let myself be vulnerable and show both my successes and my failures –  which I think is incredibly important.

I am thankful for the connections I made throughout this course & am positive that we will continue to strive towards professional development together – lending a hand when we can! 

Hi Everyone,

I can hardly believe that this semester has come and gone so quickly! Infographics are awesome, I am a sucker for them, which is why I was wanting to create a live infographic through Vyond but being that I have been fighting a nasty cold, which I am sure most of us are, time seemed to pass too quickly this week, my idea of experimenting with a new digital resource escaped me.

This semester I had noticed many of my peers using Canva for their presentations and they looked NICE, so I took note. With already being familiar with the Canva program but not doing much more than the odd infographic and worksheet, I thought I would take my shot at creating a presentation and recording it directly through Canva.

To listen and watch my presentation you can do so below and as I have listed this Youtube video as unlisted, you will not be able to find it by searching but can revisit here if you please!

My Learning Summary Presentation can be referenced through the Canva program itself. Again, I am leaving this course feeling as though I have a whole new toolbox full of skills. I feel confident in teaching digitally and being transparent with my students when need be, ensuring they know I don’t have all the answers to when it comes to learning and living digitally but that I will try my best. Though it is still intimidating and I am sure that there will be a learning curve, I know teaching digital citizenship, coding, digital identity and literacy are so important and I wish that I had the guidance I hope to give when I was a student.

Cheers & thanks for a wonderful semester!

In our Education Technology lecture this past week we learnt all about Digital Identity and the trace we can leave on the internet. We were assigned an interesting task this week – to get to know our classmates through a cybersleuth… can’t say I have every had an assignment like this before!

Follow me along my cybersleuth!

I got to know my partner, Jorden Robitaille in a very non-traditional way… but I am thinking this is not out the norm for the world we live in now. I follow and interact with Jorden on twitter so had already known from her bio that she is busy being a mom and student, which is incredible! I have really enjoyed being able to connect and follow along with her dancing journey as she teaches herself and her son to do some cool moves through online learning!

Taking my “creep” to the next level I turned to Google where I found Jorden’s blog (check it out by the way, click here!). From Jorden’s blog I learnt that she lives small town Sask now but was actually born in Quebec and moved here quite awhile ago – cool! On her blog you are able to follow along with her educational journey, she has created a strong professional presence online. Moving onwards with my deep dive into Jordan’s online persona, I learned she is not the only Jorde(a)n Robitaille out there… just a little bit different spellings! She even shares a name with a Canadian Idol contestant… if anyone remembers Canadian Idol lol.

To sum up my search, I didn’t find much personal information about Jorden online but I did get a good idea of what kind of person she is just from her professional pages.

Let’s talk about Digital Identity!

It is a scary thought that you can have this entire online persona and it is even scarier to know you might not be able to control how you are perceived through the internet. Madison Holler’s story on ESPN  really spoke to me and had me wondering about how people might perceive me through my posts on social media and If how I am perceiving my friends is really how they are doing.

So often I think to myself – “Wow. I haven’t talked to “so and so” forever, I should check in but I know they have been busy since they were posting on Instagram.”. Reading about Madison and how she was struggling yet living a different life via social media breaks my heart. We see other peoples best 10% of their lives online and make the assumption we are seeing their whole life and that it is wonderful, but we shouldn’t.

As per the screenshot from the story about Madison – we feel this pressure from social media that we aren’t doing enough or that

we simply aren’t enough because we only see people’s highlights. This then causes us to create a digital identity that does not accurately represent our actual identity – and unfortunately, it seems like a vicious cycle.

Digital Identity in my classroom!

I want to be transparent with my students in explaining the “Split Image” a digital identity can often cause and that things are never just as they seem. We post what we are proud of and what we want people to see, I understand that and I know that might not change. What I want to do is allow my students to build their toolkit to also understand that so that hopefully they don’t feel this pressure at some point in their lives.

What is Digital Literacy?

To be completely honest, up until the beginning of October, I had no idea what it was. If you would have probably said something along the lines of “IDK, reading e-books or something”. So before I get into the rest of this blog let’s go over some definitions of Digital Literacy so we all have a better idea moving forward.

9 Elements of Digital Citizenship tell us that “Digital literacy includes the discussion of media literacy and the ability to discern good information from poor, such as “fake news” from real news.”

The Ministry of Education and Child Care in British Columbia says digital literacy is “the interest, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital technology and communication tools to access, manage, integrate, analyze and evaluate information, construct new knowledge, create and communicate with others”.

To summarize the common ground from the definitions below I have come up with the following personal definition:

“Digital Literacy is the ability to locate and evaluate information within the digital world and come to an informed decision on whether it is fake news, or real news” 

What is Fake News?

Umm, lets start with maybe saying its news that is not true? But to be more specific, TRU Libraries says it well: fake news is a hoax that is meant to mislead in the hopes of a financial or political gain of those spreading it, with its’ purpose being that it spreads information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, which is used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

Let’s be honest – fake news doesn’t just exist in the digital world but, the more time we spend on technology, the more we are exposed to both fake and real news through digital platforms. In my personal experience, I see it multiple times a day on Facebook and other social media platforms.

How can/ should  it be taught in a middle years classroom?

YES! It absolutely should be taught in the classroom – I know if I am seeing fake news on my Snapchat, my Grade 6 students probably are too. This is the age where students are starting to get their own emails, phones, social media accounts, etc. where they will be exposed to all sorts of fake news, phishing emails, trolls and so on.

I think that the best way to approach this with students is to teach them how to find reliable news sources so they are starting their search on a strong note. By complimenting the first approach we should also teaching them how to identify fake news because chances are they are going to be exposed to that without even searching for it.

1. Finding reliable news: Get the news straight from the source, avoiding the “middle-man”. This could be from news websites, social media pages rather than from a blog post by a local high school teacher who was not involved in any capacity. Allow

   

   for news sources to get the news, check a few times a day rather than every 3-5minutes. Build a puzzle – if a direct source isn’t available, take the commonalities from multiple sources to piece together the story.

2. Teach our students what fake news can look like: Bring REAL examples to the classroom (like I said, they are everywhere so this shouldn’t be hard). Increase activities where students are encouraged to put on the detective hat. Though this was not in the article linked above, I think it is important to have classroom discussions around what sort of organizations would email you for information vs. those that wouldn’t – helping identify phishing emails.

In our EDTC 300 class we worked through some “Fake or Real” examples and they can be tricky! I think that this would be an awesome activity to do with a middle years classroom – it is not only eye opening but definitely fun and engaging.

Many outcomes in the Saskatchewan Curriculum has the word “Investigate” – for example see the screenshot to the left. I think that this is an invitation to have students conducting their own investigation through online sources – be it current or historic. It is important students can identify the difference between real or fake news for both academic and non-academic reasons – it is a life skill that I think the curriculum has encouraged us as teachers to build in our students.

NCTE Framework

When teaching Digital Literacy in my classroom I am positive I would be implementing many NCTE frameworks. To remain consistent with the earlier parts of this blog and how I would incorporate digital literacy into my classroom I believe that this would allow for my students to Consume, curate, and create actively across contexts. Especially in connection to my example with the curriculum I believe I would encourage students to analyze, examine, review, etc. of the information that they find digitally.

Hello Everyone!

“Hi class, today we are going to learn how to code!”  – this might be a phrase that could potentially cause anxiety as a student, I know I felt immediately overwhelmed when I seen coding on our Weekly Overview for EDTC300 – turns out, it doesn’t need to be as crazy and complex as we might think!

This week we were tasked with spending some time working on a coding project or learning more about coding, I decided I need to know a little bit more. I took my learning journey to Code.org, an online resource that provides interactive 1-hour tutorials (honestly, they were games) that help introduce coding! Since I know very little, quite honestly – nothing about coding, I decided to find an activity in the Beginner level but for those who want to challenge themselves, there was a Comfortable level as well.

There were many activities but ultimately I decided on SciGirls: Code Quest

It was a cool activity with the focus being to get the submarine, Subby, around the underwater world to collect data on organisms under there. To get Subby to a specific area or organism, we are tasked with the challenge to move Subby by using sequences. The little I do know about coding is that sequences are a big part of it (what that means, I am still not entirely sure).  These challenges start off simple with just a Forward option, slowly more get added in. I first was confused by the idea of using sequences, but again, as we moved through the activity it became much more apparent that using the sequences and the “short cuts” the activity provides allows for a more seamless process. Check out some of my sequences below:

This activity said it was appropriate for Grades 2-8, I found that it would be understood by students in Grades 4-6 best and still allowing them a bit of a challenge. I am excited to explore more of the activities on Code.org as I found the instructions to be very clear and the game itself to be very interactive. It allowed for a high ceiling but a low floor as well, this could meet students where they are now and work with them to build up – I think that is a great tool!

Why is coding in the classroom important?

Problem solving skills and again louder for those in the back, PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS!!!

I am sure that there are MANY other reasons to why coding in the classroom would be important but from my personal experience in this simple coding activity, the way I had to problem solve was incredible! I tried and failed on repeat, but this game allowed me to do so and increased my ability to problem solve and creative think my way through it.

We are living in a world where we are so reliant on technology – why not give our students the opportunity to strengthen not only their understanding of the inner-workings of some of these technologies but also improve their life skills as well?! Sounds like a win-win to me.

How does Digital Citizenship align with or fit into the Saskatchewan Curriculum?

Simple answer – it aligns in many ways.

Detailed answer – keep reading.

I believe that there is a time and a place for the digital world in a classroom and the more we rely on it in our society, the more it should be included in our teachings. Technology has opened a whole world of new potential skills to be learned, which again, means more things that can be taught in the walls of our classrooms!

While creating a lesson plan for another class, I had been going through the Grade 6 Social Studies curriculum and had noted the below, with the focus word being research:

I immediately assumed that outcome IN6.2(b),  the research of different cultures would be done through the use of technology – this may be because this is the norm that I have come to know and maybe because it is a much more effecicent type of research. I mean, we have the internet at the tips of our fingers and with some sort of tablet in majority of classrooms today – why not use it? As I mentioned earlier, as a society we rely on technology for things like this – so I think that there should be space to learn it in school, and learn how to do so correctly.

With keeping in mind that research on the internet can be a major information overload with both real and fake information, it is awfully important to help our students learn to decipher the difference. This leads me to my discussion on one of the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship –  Digital Fluency, helping our students build a foundation of tools on how to better navigate this information overload.

In my future classroom, I hope to have access to technology so that my students have the chance to explore the digital world and we can experiment with how it can best aid their learning. In particular I will teach Digital Fluency – this can be done in a few ways:

• Teaching students that the choices they make online should align with what they would decide “in real life”, meaning that I want to stress to students that though the digital world can provide a bit of anonymity – it does not mean there decisions will go without consequences, to themselves and others.
• There is good information and there is false information – it is important to know and understand the difference of what that might be and where you might find reliable information.