Shout out to the fringe pop punk/rap collaboration fans if you understand that reference.

But for real, my reviewers were probably too nice. When I take a look at what they have done, and what some of you others have done, I feel infinitely inferior. I don’t know if this was against the rules or not, but I looked at the other modules posted on the reviewer page as a little bit of a reference/learning opportunity. If you had a notification for some rando joining your course… that was me! Ask forgiveness instead of permission right? Again, a lot of you have incredible work and you should be proud.

The reason I’m being hard on myself, and sometimes this is healthy and unhealthy, but I fully know that I could make this better and step more outside of my comfort zone. At the same time, I wanted to make something practical, functional, and related to what I currently teach at Campbell Collegiate. I think I I accomplished this, but if I had to use fancy teacher assessment words I’d say, “he is meeting expectations” hey is that a bad thing though? Maybe I should have gotten out of my comfort zone and tried a Canvas or Moodle type program. Seeing the rabbit hole that some of you dived down truly makes me think some of you are the Mad Hatters of our class. I’m just Alice. Ordinary. But again, is that always bad? Enough reference to that fever dream of a cartoon or the live action which borderlines as hallucinogenic.

What I have works. If I had more time and less going on, maybe I would have been more active in a new approach. Alright no more excuses. Most of the feedback I received mentioned ease of use, clearly laid out, and effective/creative assessment opportunities. As a reminder mine is a blended approach and I showcased in a video how it would look and operate in a class where my students are in the classroom with me. Instead of it being a sole program they would use all by their selves, it was more like a crutch that we would lean on together to be able to aid in our learnings. I did have the opportunity to actually try it out with my students, and they quite enjoyed it! A couple things I modified on the fly, but it went well. When I told them I added questions to the video (H5P) they were amazed and asked how they could do it. I showed them on a later day. Maybe I can get the grade 9s to fund the Lumi creator so I don’t have to pay a subscription fee in the future.

In practice it was solid, and we have actually already completed the second module (which will be up on my classroom before the due date, fingers crossed) and some of the other feedback/questions I had from my reviewers is starting to take affect/be realized. A comment I had was how assessment would be conducted, even for those at home. This probably wasn’t communicated well enough in my video, shell, or proposal. My bad. Google classroom allows the ability to show students their marks and leave comments. Students can complete the assessments right in the classroom, well not all of them actually. The one reading response can be. Feedback can be given their and they can see a mark, which I would then have to transfer over to EDSBY. Luckily, that one is formative so an actual mark wouldn’t apply, but at the same time I am supposed to put formative assessments in my gradebook too, well actually I get mixed messages on that from different admin, but besides that there would be some annoying transfer of data manually.

The other assessments, a Venn Diagram and a future project in the second model would have to be shared with me. When in class that is what precisely we did. I then left comments either directly on the digital piece they shared, or left comments in their gradebook. I made a note of it on our EDSBY, too for all to see. The note stated how to hand something in and where they could find the feedback. One thing I did change with the Venn Diagram is we all actually used the same canva. I copied and posted the slide 10 different times and each group took a slide an edited it. Students could see others work and I could see everybody working on the same screen at the same time. If only there was a way to make it so certain groups cold only edit one slide. If a kid wanted to, they could have messed with the other groups and deleted their work. Luckily that didn’t happen. So my fall back for assessments, and certainly for those at home, is to make sure in discussions in person and posted on our EDSBY or google streams the method for submitting work. That doesn’t seem like that hard of a fix for me and certainly something I will be more clear about in the future.

Accessibility is a topic I may need to address in the future if I was to fully utilize a blended approach. I already have experience with visually impaired students, as I currently have one in another class and have to adapt a lot of my digital material. He has his own special device that he puts over a computer and then he can go about his business. His eyesight is low and certain colors cannot be seen. If he didn’t have his machine, I think there would be so many issues and he wouldn’t be able to participate. Google classroom does have some accessibility features, but they are very generic and not as diverse. With me also using many different programs on top of of classroom, I genuinely don’t think it could work if the student was solo. My blended approach, which has the students in the classroom, could potentially work as I have other students in the room that could partner up and help them. They also have a designated educational assistant to help. The more independent a student can be though, I believe the better. This notion is also backed up by our VI (visually impaired) specialist teacher. I think in the future I’d need to consider so much more. When I made this, I was really only considering my current class, but at the same time, they all also have differences and maybe more accessibility would help them too. Moving forward into the future, I’m going to keep this in my head and see what I can do to keep equity in mind for my future students.

Here’s to the second module and all the hard work you’ve all done!

Hetterley