All About Me

Hello!

It’s been a long time since I blogged, so it might take me a bit to get back into it.

A bit about me to start – my name is Brittany, and I’m a high school ELA teacher with Saskatoon Public Schools. I received a B.A. in English from the U of S, and took part in the B.E.A.D. program at the U of R when I couldn’t figure out what else to do with an English degree. Of the 14 years I’ve been teaching, my first year was in Whitewood, and I taught a little bit of everything: ELA, history, psychology, law, Grade 4 Social Studies, and I was part-time teacher-librarian. It was an experience! I then moved back to Saskatoon, and was on the sub list and working part-time and temporary contracts for the next three years. I picked up my ELA accreditation, and after I received a permanent contract, I was out for a couple of years on maternity leave (I have two girls – 8 and 6), and now here I am tackling the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Master’s program, with my first class just under my belt. Not going to lie, it felt pretty good to prove to myself that I still had it in me when I completed that first course!

My relationship with technology is pretty basic, I’d say. I’m comfortable with what I know, and while I dabbled a bit with different programs when I was younger (Photoshop and GIMP, I played a bit with creating pages on Geocities, and was a regular visitor to Lissa Explains it All), now it’s mostly just keeping up with what I have to or want to use. I did keep a blog once upon a time, when I did an exchange semester to Australia, at the University of Canberra. It was my way of keeping in touch with family and friends, and I quite enjoyed it. Haven’t blogged since, though. I have social media accounts, Facebook and Instagram, but pretty locked down. Again, mostly just to keep in touch with family and friends, or to follow some hobby pages. At work, we just switched to Edsby last year, so I spent the year getting comfortable with it, and switching over to that platform from Google Classroom. I am all about streamlining – if I don’t have to use multiple platforms, I’m not going to. I like to keep it simple.

Having said that, in working with my students on different assignments, we do use technology quite a bit. As much as we can manage, sharing four laptop carts of 30 computers each in a school over 1600 students. So nothing too exciting in ELA – docs and slides, online research, email and what not. I create posters using Canva, and have taught my students a bit about that, when time permits. I’d love to branch out a bit more, into videos and podcasts, but I find that, as technologically addicted as they are to their cell phones and social media, they don’t really understand a lot of what I consider to be pretty basic programs! And I don’t have the needed access to spend too much time teaching them how to use different programs, which cramps our style.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to exploring the issues associated with educational technology! This is my first elective, and I jumped at the chance to join a course taught by Dr. Alec Couros. I remember attending seminars where he was presenting – I think I even introduced him once, as a part of one of my undergrad courses! – and I always enjoyed what he had to say, as well as the way in which he presented information. So here’s hoping we all have a wonderful semester, and good luck to all of you who are about to tackle semester one finals >_< (yes – I need to up my image game…next week goals…)