Author Archives: Emily Klatt

How I contributed to the learning of others

One of the most incredible things about being an education student is having the privilege and opportunity to learn from so many of my thoughtful, intelligent peers. Likewise, it’s such a privilege to contribute to the learning of my peers in even a small way. My ultimate goal  with this class was to serve my community well in its overall learning.

So: how did I contribute to the learning of others? It feels weird and self-promoting to write about something like this, but I’ll try my best. 

I believe the main way I contributed to the learning of others was by sharing my thoughts even if I felt silly doing so. As in, I’m not afraid to ask stupid questions or go on a tangent. As in, I frequently contributed quality thoughts during whole class and small group discussions. However you want to phrase it, I was very active in group discussions and in the group chat during class. This may not be the most “online” type of interaction, but its the one I do best.

The second way I contributed to learning of others was through blog comments. I tried to comment as much as I could while still providing meaningful and genuine thoughts. I promise I had screenshots of several comments but I can’t find them on my computer nor can I figure out how to search for them via wordpress. Please believe me, I tried, but I have ten minutes to submit this assignment.

The biggest limitation I had in terms of contributing to the learning of others was in regards to the “course community”, AKA the class Discord server. I really did intend to check it out, but it just wasn’t a natural or easy method of communication for me. It seems like in previous years the class utilized X (formerly Twitter) as an aspect of the course community. I am a big Twitter user for better or worse, and I know this is a platform I would have excelled at. This is interesting commentary on how platform can make a difference in our frequency and quality of interactions with our online communities.

ChatGPNo Thank You

For my general thoughts about generative AI, please see a screenshot of these tweets:

I keep my twitter account private for Professional Reasons, although the Dean of the Faculty of Education and the STF library do follow me!

I’ve long been skeptical of ChatGPT, but it wasn’t until I actually tried it that my preconceived notions were confirmed. I haven’t found anything it can do for me, personally or professionally, that I can’t do better or more quickly myself with the help of Google. It’s incredibly dark to me to see people writing about how AI can create “ no fewer than 28,349 ways … [to] help me be better at my job”.

Some tout generative AI as an alternative to search engines. And yet the free version of ChatGPT does not seem to provide direct links to the resources it draws on for responses. So in order to assess the quality of information provided by ChatGPT I would still need to Google the prompt anyways. Hmm.

Here’s an example of how ChatGPT free gave me similar answers as Google, minus links to actual useful sources, and not created by real people.

Does ChatGPT give a fuller lesson plan than the first few hits of my google search? Sure, but I know I could find what I’m looking for with five more minutes of searching. Or I could flesh out the lesson plan myself, which is part of what I’m trained to do as a teacher. I’m not trying to be mean, but using AI to create all your lesson plans feels a bit like a cop out. What’s the point of all this teacher training and going into debt if a machine can do a huge chunk of my job for me? 

I don’t have a good answer, but neither does ChatGPT.

So long and thanks for all the fish (and watercolours)

The title of this post is a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. 

I digress.

We’ve arrived at our final learning project post! The time has just flown by (or been wiled away through procrastination), and I’m excited to share the end result of my learning journey. 

I chose watercolour painting because I wanted to make some Valentine’s Day cards for my friends like I usually do. It ended up turning into a daily ritual that I’m very happy to have found.

In many ways, this learning project is an extension of learning I was already doing in a casual way: following watercolour tutorials on social media, tending to my Valentine project once a year. What EDTC really did was encourage me to make this occasional adventure into a regular habit, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

Did my painting get better? Not necessarily. Here’s a painting from a year ago and one I did last week. You be the judge.

Watercolour painting of a robin next to her nest amd three blue eggs, nestled in a tree branch in early spring

From March 2023

From April 2023

 

You know what did get better, though? My understanding of online learning. This post does a good job of outlining my thoughts on online learning vs book learning. As an arts ed teacher, I’m always looking for ways to expand upon my teacher toolkit. My EDTC 300 learning project has expanded my repertoire of digital learning resources in a meaningful and ongoing way.

A learning project crossover episode!

I don’t know about you, but I love myself a good crossover episode. I got to create my very own last week when I created a watercolour project as a personal arts response for another one of my classes, EAE 201.

I painted a field guide of sorts featuring eight native Saskatchewan plant species. It was inspired by an exhibit currently at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, All That You Change Changes You by Francophone Saskatchewan artist Laura St. Pierre. Partially based on the speculative fiction novel Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, St. Pierre’s show explores themes of growth, stewardship, and the end of the world. I highly recommend going to see if you can can!

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Reflections on digital/media literacy

The best preparation I received for teaching digital literacy to students was working in journalism. Before becoming a teacher, I had a previous life/career as a writer, editor, and fact-checker for a couple of news outlets. Journalism taught me how to examine bias, evaluate sources, and most importantly, to question everything (especially authority). In this post I’ll using digital literacy and media literacy interchangeably because in 2024 they’re almost nearly the same thing.

A younger Emily flexing her journalism muscles for the University of Saskatchewan student newspaper.

Just because journalist taught me to have good digital literacy skills does not mean that all journalists have good media literacy skills. There are some journalists who are bad at their jobs. Despite this, I do think educators could learn a lot from journalism about the foundations of media literacy. I also think this type of collaboration could help inspire students to pursue journlism or media work themselves.

I’m glad to see some educational resources about media literacy have been developed in collaboration with journalists and media organizations like the Media Literacy Booster Pack from the Newseum, Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post Truth’ World from the New York Times, and 10 Types of Misleading News from PBS. Someday I would love to combine my two professional fields and help to develop my own resource for schools about media literacy.

“Be Kind Online”, or what I didn’t learn about cyber safety in school

As either the youngest millennial, the oldest member of Gen Z, or something called a “zillenial”, I came of age during the first decade of smartphones and social media. There was Facebook and Skype, but also flip phones; some of us had wifi and some of us still had dial-up until after Obama became President; the internet was still a place you went instead of a place you lived. Basically, it was the wild west of cyber safety education, and boy did it show.

When it came to online risks, the perpetrators were depicted as either incredibly alien or incredibly familiar: an anonymous middle-aged man lurking in a chat room pretending to be a 13 year old in order to lure in vulnerable teens or your bitter ex boyfriend or ex best friend sharing intimate photos of you with the entire school. Either way, perpetrators were almost always individuals rather than groups, companies, or societal institutions. I recall (at the time) little to no blame being levied towards tech giants and social media platform for lack of content moderation, or towards media that normalized and encouraged the sexualization of children and teens. 

The solutions offered were equally individualistic, where directed towards the victims or perpetrators of online bullying and harassment. Girls were told not to take and send intimate photos to their partners or post them online; boys were told not to share a girl’s pictures with others. We were all told to know the warning signs you might be talking to a child predator, to think twice about how our Facebook profiles might impact our future careers, and above all to “be kind online” to one another. 

This messaging felt ineffective even then. I knew at 14 that a 60 minute presentation from the police at an assembly wasn’t stop online bullying, but now as an adult I know *why* it wouldn’t stop online bullying: the problem is so much bigger than individuals, especially when many of those individuals children and teens. It’s a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution.

As far as current resources go, I like how “cyber safety” has at least been reframed as digital citizenship. This makes it clear that our online lives are not separate from the other aspects of our lives and puts it in the bigger picture. I reviewed  “A Policy Planning Guide for School Divisions and Schools to Implement Citizenship Education from Kindergarten to Grade 12″ (which Katia apparently helped write!) and I think it has some good strategies. However, I have some concerns about the age of the document and how relevant it still is for students. It was published in 2015, nearly ten years ago and the year after I graduated from high school. I’ve seen the huge changes that have occurred within technology since then, and I imagine the educational approaches need to change as well. I hope the Ministry of Education is in the process of updating this document for today’s kids.

Technology in the classroom: tool or terror?

If a teacher shouts to a classroom full of students all using their cellphones, are any of them paying enough attention to hear it? This might be the new “if tree falls in the forest”-style question of our times. Or it might just be a pithy-sounding way to begin this blog post. Either way, it’s time to talk about the role of technology in classroom!

When I say “technology in the classroom”, I should probably specify “digital technology” or “the internet”, because we’ve been using forms of technology in the classroom since classrooms have existed. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica dictionary, “technology” is defined as “the use of science in industry, engineering, etc., to invent useful things or to solve problems” and the things created as a result. Technology is anything we’ve invented that’s useful somehow. Pencils are technology. Pants are technology. Cow tools are probably technology, although we humans are not privy to knowing their specific use.

File:Cow Tools cartoon.png

Cow Tools, a 1982 cartoon from The Far Side by Gary Larson. Image via Wikimedia Commons under fair use.

My point is, technology is a broad category and we should probably all be on the same page about what we’re referring to when we have discussions about “technology in the classroom”.
What we’re really talking about in this class is digital technology. Digital Child defines digital technology as “tools, systems and devices that can generate, create, store or process data. The data processing and logic capabilities of digital technologies are enabled through microprocesses that are programmed to perform various functions”. This is still frustratingly kind of broad. Give me examples, internet! Oh hey – it just did! The internet is digital technology. So are computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. There we go.

Now that we’ve agreed on what we’re talking about, let’s talk about it. We’re past the point of wondering if digital technology should be present in education – what we need to be asking instead is how digital technology should be present in education. Because it’s here whether we like it or not, both its benefits and its harms.

It’s interesting how the same technology can be applied in both great and absolutely terrible ways in the classroom. Let’s take VR headsets, for example. Here’s a video from CBC showing how VR can be utilized as a tool to enhance in-person education experiences: petting woolly mammoths! Exploring space! Fun stuff!

And then there’s this article from the New Yorker talking about how a charter school in Florida that’s replaced not just a real classroom, but even face-to-face digital learning with the Metaverse. Describing a 10 year old student’s day:

“She wears the headset on and off for about three hours, removing it to read a book, eat a sandwich, and hot-glue some sort of tinfoil art. Her classmates are scattered across different towns, and her teachers live all over the country. In the video, the little girl doesn’t have a single in-person interaction.”

This sounds…not great? Maybe even kind of bad? Or really bad? I don’t know. What do you think?

EDTC 300 SmackDown: Books vs the Internet!

Last week I did something for my online learning project that probably sounds contradictory: I bought a physical book about watercolour painting. Specifically, I bought this one: 15 Minute Art Watercolour: Learn to Paint in Six Steps or Less by Jola Sopek.

Betrayed the internet by purchasing a book

Throughout this learning project, I’ve become very immersed in the world of digital art education. That’s the point of this assignment: to learn something online, and I’ve been doing that fairly successfully. As I learned online, however, I became curious about how learning watercolour painting online might be different than learning it from more traditional resources like print books, and vice versa. Is one more effective than the other? Enjoyable? Accessible? I thought it would be interesting to investigate these questions, so I picked up a book and a paintbrush and went to town. Keep reading for my thoughts about the ultimate EDTC 300 SmackDown: Books vs the Internet!

Is the internet the win-internet?

Here are some things I really like about learning watercolour online:

  • Variety: There’s an almost infinite variety of resources available to learn from – anything you want to learn how to paint, there’s probably someone online who can teach you how.
  • Visuals: As watercolour is a visual medium, it’s helpful to actually watch someone paint so you can imitate brushstrokes, amount of paint used, etc. rather than going off a written description.
  • Speed: With a few clicks and a Google search, I can find learning resources in seconds, which is definitely convenient.
  • Cost: Unlike in-person art lessons or the book that I bought, many online resources are available for free (and I am very broke).

Now here’s some stuff I don’t like about learning online::

  • Overwhelming: While variety is good, sometimes the sheer amount of online content makes it difficult to know which resources to choose.
  • Distractions: Sure, there are watercolour tutorials online. You know what else there is? Literally everything. When I go to find a painting lesson on my phone, I often get distracted by all the other things that are also on my phone, which takes away from learning time.
  • Comparison: It’s hard not to compare yourself to others when comparison is basically the defining feature of social media.
  • Batteries: I am lazy and often forget to plug in my electronics before the batteries die, meaning there are times when I go to paint and discover I need to wait for my computer to charge instead.

The Benefits of Books

I’ll be honest: I am a book girly at heart. Given the choice between an ebook and a battered paperback, I will choose the paperback. Every. Single. Time. Digital resources are great, but sometimes they feel overwhelming to me. This might be exacerbated because I have ADHD and am prone to being overwhelmed in general, but the internet is just A Lot. Everything’s connected, there’s always another distraction, link, video, meme.

Here are the good things about book learnin’:

  • Calm: Learning from a book was much calmer and less distracting than learning online. It was nice to disconnect and just spend some time doing art without looking at a screen.
  • Review: It was also nice to easily go back and review instructions without having to hit pause, rewind, and play a million times like I would need to do with a video. Having static reference images made it easier to pick out details of a technique or image.
  • Comparison: No one to compare myself to other than the person who made the art in the book, instead of the entire internet.
  • Music: I could play music in the background while I worked instead of the audio on a video tutorial.
  • Permanence: Because I bought the watercolour book, it’s something that I can keep in my library forever (baring a fire or something) and reference whenever I want.

And the bad:

  • Cost: Unless you borrow a book from the library, books cost money. 15 Minute Art Watercolour cost me like $40, which isn’t cheap.
  • Spills: Watercolours usually involve, well…water, which can spill and ruin a paper book.
  • Classroom: As an arts ed major, I’m always thinking about how I could use my own learning resources in a professional capacity. Books can be less useful in a classroom setting than a video. Videos are easier to share with students and aren’t bound by the same reproduction limitations as print resources.

And the new heavyweight champion of the watercolour world is…

I know I promised you a smackdown, but the real answer is: no one wins! Or maybe, everyone wins! Depends on your point of view. My honest thoughts are: online resources and print resources both have their pros and cons, but mostly I’m grateful to live in 2024 where I can easily access both. You get the best of both worlds, just like Hannah Montana said you could.