October 2020 – Ed Tech Exploration

Providing Social, Emotional, Behavioral, and Special Education Services

Thanks to Alysha Rosly for sharing their work on Unsplash!

For this week’s free online professional development for preservice teachers, I took a course from the University of Colorado! Providing Social, Emotional, Behavioral, and Special Education Services in School is a twelve hour course on Coursera that focuses on how schools can support students with their social-emotional learning, as well as their mental health. While I think some of this course might have been more geared for school administrators, I still found the information really interesting and relevant to teachers. The course covered everything from bullying and suicide prevention to behaviour improvement plans.

One aspect of the course that stuck with me is how it emphasized how schools can not only provide mental health services and support to students who were in crisis or at risk. Mental health support can be implemented schoolwide. While the course was created with the United States education system in mind, almost all of it can be implemented in a British Columbian classroom. If you do not have the time or desire to complete the course but are still interested in the material, this is one of the readings I think is most helpful. It covers how to teach coping skills (such as how to deal with fear, sadness, stress, and grief) to students!

Class Reflection: Video

This week we learned about using Screencastify and incorporating h5p into videos to create interactive quizzes. We also completed a video editing worship or audio workshop, depending on whether or not we felt comfortable video editing. A few of us previously attended this workshop to create introduction videos for one of our other courses and found it really helpful! I wasn’t happy with what I created after this workshop, so I’ve attached what I made in the first one!

Personal Introduction- Amber

As a future English Language Arts teacher, I think it would be interesting to see what students could do for novel review using video editing or h5p.

Rather than checking students’ comprehension of a section of a novel by using a quiz or test, we could encourage them to use technology! Students could demonstrate their knowledge by creating a vlog as a character in the novel, describing what has been happening in their life so far. To incorporate h5p, students could select quiz questions about what they’ve said.

See you next week!

Psychological First Aid

Thanks to Kristine Wook for sharing their work on Unsplash!

The first free online resource for pre-service teachers I completed was a course called Psychological First Aid. John Hopkins University and Coursera partnered up to create this short course (the estimated completion time is seven hours) on Psychological First Aid. It’s free to audit or as the yearly free course offered by Coursera to university students who sign up with their academic email address. Coursera advertises that after course completion, attendees will be able to:

– Discuss key concepts related to PFA

– Listen reflectively

– Differentiate benign, non-incapacitating psychological/ behavioral crisis reactions from more severe, potentially incapacitating, crisis reactions

– Prioritize (triage) psychological/ behavioral crisis reactions

– Mitigate acute distress and dysfunction, as appropriate

– Recognize when to facilitate access to further mental health support

– Practice self-care

I think this course would definitely be of use to me while teaching in B.C in the future. We never want our students to experience a crisis, but it’s important to be able to help them as much as we can if they ever are. On a more daily basis, I think this course is helpful for teaching how to listen reflectively, know when to direct a student to further mental health support, and how to practice self-care if we are in a situation where someone needs psychological first aid.

Setting Criteria

Thanks to Georgie Cobbs for sharing their work on Unsplash!

One of my worst fears is getting into a classroom and realizing I’m not as prepared as I thought. The more I learn, the more I realize I’m lacking in certain areas. To combat this, I want to give myself some kind of solution and comfort. I can’t know everything about everything, but I have the power to learn a little about many things. For my inquiry project, I want to look at free professional development resources for teachers and evaluate how useful they can be for pre-service teachers. There are many free resources available, so to narrow my scope I chose to focus on online courses offered by universities or well-known companies, such as Apple or Microsoft.

When choosing a course, I want to consider:

What do I already know? Will this benefit me and my future students?
How is this relevant to teaching and learning in B.C?
What does this course offer?

After completing a course, I want to consider:

How is this relevant to teaching and learning in B.C?
What did this course offer me?
How can I integrate this into my future classroom?

Inquiry Project Introduction

Thanks to Markus Winkler for sharing their work on Unsplash!

Hi! Welcome to my Inquiry Project blog! For my topic, I’ve decided to cover free professional development resources for pre-service teachers. Many of my colleagues have mentioned dealing with imposter syndrome or that they’re failing in some aspect of our program. All of us have unique challenges to overcome, and I think the best way to combat our fears is with knowledge!

By looking at additional resources to prepare ourselves for the classroom, I think we will be able to overcome many of our fears! I want to look at how effective these resources are: will they prove useful to B.C teaching candidates? While most, if not all, of these resources will not be B.C-specific, I believe that many would work well with our curriculum and professional standards. Not everything that works in another country will work here, but I think investigating if other approaches could work here is worthwhile.

Digital Footprints

Thanks to dole777 for sharing their work on Unsplash!

We learned about our digital footprints this week! Our class found it really interesting; the speaker who came definitely had a long Q&A section. After our homework and Jesse Miller’s talk with us, I think all of us will have decided to incorporate discussions on digital footprints with our future students.

Whether we like it or not, employers often do search up job candidates online, and students should be aware of this. Common Sense Media has digital literacy lesson plans which are divided by grade level. Media Smarts also has lesson plans, as well as digital literacy standards by province/ territory.

As important as it is to warn learners about the potential consequences of what they’re posting online, it’s also important to remind them how it can benefit them. A LinkedIn profile that shows their achievements and their volunteerism would be beneficial for scholarships and job applications. Artistic students might find use in creating a digital portfolio to showcase their artwork. Teaching students about digital literacy can also focus on the positives of a digital footprint!

Do We Need to Modernize Education?

Our current public education model was modelled after factories, but our aim is no longer to create a factory worker. Instead, we want to create global citizens who think compassionately, creatively, and critically. Shouldn’t our education system reflect this? In 2016, British Columbia’s Ministry of Education moved towards this by implementing a new curriculum aimed to “modernize education.” Although it is not perfect, it is a positive step forward. British Columbia is not the only province that believes there needs to be some kind of reform to the curriculum.

While everyone has different ideas of what reimagining education would look like, even when education is reimagined, such as in British Columbia’s case with the implementation of a new curriculum, what we imagine is not always put in place. We can focus on personalizing education and integrating project based learning in the curriculum, but does that make a difference if teachers do not integrate these ideas into their classes? Education does not only need to be reimagined on a systemic level, but teachers are responsible for this in their classrooms every day. I think it’s important for us to remember this when we consider our future classrooms. We want our students to know we respect them and that we see them as people, not empty knowledge receptacles. We need to show them that by respecting their voice and listening to it, especially when it comes to their educational goals.

Reflection #1

NOTE: This reflection was written during week one, however, it was not posted now due to technical difficulties.

Hi! Welcome to my blog! This will be the first in a series of weekly reflections that discuss some of the technologies and pedagogies covered in EDCI 336!

We‘ve just started, so I will be reflecting on what I hope to learn in this class.

Rather than set a goal of learning how to use a specific tool, my goal is to evaluate the technologies we are exposed to in class, how they can be accessible or inaccessible to different learners, and how I can possibly integrate these tools in an English Language Arts classroom. For me, setting a goal like “learn how to make video projects in iMovie” would not be an effective goal for me because it seems incomplete. I wouldn’t feel a sense of achievement, instead I would be wondering: what next? How will I integrate this into a classroom? What will I do with this? In this scenario, a more appropriate goal for myself would be to consider how iMovie could or could not be used (considering disabilities, student interest, and whether the school had devices that run on Mac OS), and to come up with a classroom activity students could complete.