Albert Bandura and Bobo Doll sprites with Pixelorama
I am not a sketchnoter. That is not to say that I do not use pictures (doodles) in my notes, but I typically do not draw anything unless the lesson is incredibly boring or the content objectionable. I am pleased to say that there have been no doodles in my notes for EDCI 336!
This week, we watched the first batch of group presentations and also heard about Citizenship Online, Privacy, Safety, Bullying & Consent.
The pods to which I was assigned before Friday’s class were:
My takeaways from these were that both digital and analog projects are useful depending on the context, film and stop-motion animation are useful for the engagement and that Slido was a resource that might be more trouble than it is worth for classroom use. I was impressed with Drew’s curated collection of films for classroom use, which he had organised according to the subjects in which they would be likely to be useful. I also liked the creative way in which Pod 4 presented their material.
This is mostly about online safety and online conduct. I conducted a Google search of my name and I was pleased to find that I am largely absent from the internet. There were few exceptions. I have a Facebook account, but it is private and I haven’t posted anything to it in years. My name appeared associated with UVic on ResearchGate and LinkedIn, but I have no posts. I have an X account, but I don’t follow anyone, don’t accept followers and I don’t post. I was surprised to find someone with a similar name to mine: Lindsey Leavitt Brown on Instagram @justanotherlindsey. While I used (early 2010s) to be more active online, these days I use Discord and WhatsApp and only sparingly.
For my children, we limit their screen time to a maximum of 30 minutes per day and they are only allowed to watch Korean content. They are not allowed to select the videos and they must watch it where we can see them. Regarding mobile phones, we may buy them a basic phone with which to call home, but we have decided that they may not have a smartphone until they are 18 and only if they buy it themselves. When I am teaching, I do not intend to make having a smartphone a prerequisite to success and I expect my children’s teachers not to make Chromebooks or phones essential either. My own parenting decisions notwithstanding, I can see that teaching students safe practice online is important where they have much broader access to social media.
I liked the Is My Phone Listening to Me? game: https://richmccue.github.io/learning-games/phone_listening_quiz.html
I scored 12/14. I probably would have done better, but I was reading too quickly and misread “legally” for “illegally.” Dumb mistake.
Today, we did an EdCamp. This is where each of us proposed a topic that we would like to discuss, posting it to a board. We then voted by individually choosing three topics that most interested us. The 5 topics that received the most votes were selected for discussion and assigned to breakout rooms, after which we joined the breakout room of our choice and had a discussion.
I thought this was a very good way of having productive discussions, because it rather nearly guarantees there will be a topic that interests everyone and to which everyone will be comfortable contributing.
The discussion I joined was “Student Motivation and Reluctant Learners” which included the two main questions:
These are the notes from that discussion:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YcimEdzF8MMtRQGxPMNP9jrH_39U2zLLfO8TfTj6BXU/edit?tab=t.0
Some of the reasons for a lack of motivation that were mentioned were the absence of higher education as a goal for some, the prevalence of smartphones both in and outside of class and lack of proper scaffolding. The lack of scaffolding stems from the gulf between the high expectations we have of students in secondary education and their actual ability and knowledge. We also considered the students are bored because of our boring lessons. My question related to this point was: “Would you watch a YouTube video of your lesson?”
When I was in Korea during the Covid pandemic, I had already been teaching at middle school for two years. As part of the remote learning, I had to make videos of all my lessons so that the students could access them on the school website. Making the lessons into videos showed me how boring my lessons were and forced me to make changes in order to make a lesson the students would actually watch. I radically rewrote all my material and I was much more effective and the students were much more engaged. They need to want to watch and take part.
This was a good experience and I would prefer this way of doing things whenever I have to take part in group discussions professionally.
This week, we looked at making the content we produce more accessible. We also were introduced to a tool that allowed us to see how accessible our content is. This is the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. I used this tool on last week’s Reflection post, and found that I had received a 3.9 out of 10 as an Accessibility Impact score (AIM).
This picture is a screenshot of the WAVE report of last week’s Reflection post. It shows that I have a whole heap of deficiencies – bollocks!
This provided me with information that would be more useful if I knew how to change the colours of the hyperlink text. I tried; I failed. This also shows me that YouTube videos are not very accessible because the automatic captions are inaccurate. That may be true, but because editing captions is a lot of work for little reward, YouTube auto-captions must suffice.
SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition and it is a tool for assessing new technologies do for education. The Triple E framework of Engage, Enhance and Extend is a way of determining the educational usefulness of a technology. Previously, I have used intuition and observation to see how useful I think a technology may be, but I can see this as a more scientific way to assess this.
©Public Domain. This picture shows two members of the Wehrmacht, an Oberkanonier and an Obergefreiter (senior gunner and lance bombardier) smoking cigarettes with a captured French African soldier (Zouave?) as they sit on a bench in 1940. This photograph comes from an album in my private collection that belonged to Obergefreiter Karl-Heinz Löblich, who died on 6 November 1942 at Chataldon, Northern Ossetia. This album is meaningful to me whose grandfather served as a captain in the Royal Artillery. http://www.denkmalprojekt.org/2010/uichteritz_wk1u2_sa.htm
The biggest failing that I see in presentations is that they often contain slides that are loaded with text and with visuals that are either absent or do not advance the message that is being presented. Last year, I endured a presentation by a guest speaker and it was the model of a poorly designed presentation. All the slides used an unchanging and monotonous Canva template and were filled with text that nobody read. It certainly didn’t help that the presenter delivered her talk in the dullest and flattest tone she could manage. I don’t remember anything from that presentation and I excused myself from the second half.
In the case I mentioned above, I believe that some teachers do not understand how to present what they are teaching in such a way as to make their audience receive it. We have not had a course that taught us about class management or how to put together and deliver a good presentation. It has been mentioned in passing in some of the courses, but never as the focus of the lesson. Teachers may also feel that finding relevant and useful visuals is more difficult than simply pasting their material onto a slide and then burbling away at their students. As for accessibility aids not being employed more generally, I believe that many people are not aware of the things that reduce the ability of students to access their content.
Today, we looked at ways of keeping track of digital resources and curating content. The resource I am most likely to use is Google Keep, because it is part of the Google suite of apps that I already use. That being said, I tend to use Google Calendar for scheduling and the Notes app on my phone for keeping track random information, so Google Keep and similar software serve to fill a need that I do not have.
Currently, I frequently use Google Drive to hold materials that I have created. I started using this when I was in Korea and was sharing lessons a games that I had created. I posted links to them in the (now defunct) waygook.org forum for fellow ESL teachers to download. I have used Microsoft Copilot for this recently, but I find that the sharing of files is not as easy.
Google Classroom is certainly a tool that I would like to use. It is something that I shall have to look at more closely during reading break. I believe that it will be most useful to me for posting assignments and keeping parents informed. I am a little worried that it might be seen by others as a way for them to have round-the-clock access to me.
This is how Gemini improved what I wrote:
Today’s session focused on various methods for tracking digital resources and curating educational content. While exploring several platforms, I found Google Keep to be the most practical option due to its seamless integration with the Google Workspace apps I currently employ. However, since I already utilize Google Calendar for scheduling and a native mobile application for miscellaneous notes, Google Keep occupies a niche that—for my current workflow—is already largely addressed.
Presently, I rely heavily on Google Drive to manage and store my instructional materials. This practice originated during my time teaching in Korea, where I shared lesson plans and educational games with the ESL community via the waygook.org forum. While I have recently experimented with Microsoft Copilot for similar tasks, I have found its file-sharing capabilities to be less intuitive than those offered by the Google ecosystem.
I am keen to integrate Google Classroom into my professional practice and intend to explore its features more thoroughly during the upcoming reading break. I anticipate it will be an invaluable tool for:
Despite these advantages, I do harbour some reservations regarding work-life boundaries. I am concerned that adopting such a platform might inadvertently create an expectation of “round-the-clock” availability to students and their families.
Here it is in Old English:
Hæbbun wē tōdæg scēawode hū mann mæg his hord gegaderian and his bōccræftas wel healdan.
Þone cræft þe ic mæst lufie is Google Keep, for þæm þe hē is dæl þæra tōla þe ic ǣr gearwode.
Swā þēah, ic brūce mīnes dægrīmes tō tīde weordunge, and ic wrīte mīne lytlan ǣrendgewritu on mīnum sēolfontācnunge; for þon ne þearf ic þone nīwan cræft tō þissum þingum.
Nū brūce ic Google Drive oft, þǣr ic mīne lār-timber healde.
Ic angann þis tō dōnne þā ic wæs on Corealande, and ic dælde mīne lāra and mīne plegan mid ōðrum gōdum mægestrum on þæm brādum folc-stede Waygook.
On þissum dagum hæbbe ic Microsoft Copilot fandode, ac mē þyncþ þæt þā gerynu nē synt swā ēaþe tō dælenne swā on þæm gōdan Google.
Google Classroom is sōðlīce tōl þone ic wille lurnian.
Ic sceal þæt gēorne scēawian on mīnre ræding-reste.
Ic gelīefe þæt hit biþ mē swīðe gōd tō rædenne þā weorc þāra cilda and tō cȳðenne þone mægeþ-rǣd þæm fæderum and mōdrum.
Ac mē is sum lytel drēdrǣd on mōde: þæt mænigfeald fole wēne þæt hīe mægen mē findan and mid mē sprecan on ǣlcre tīde, gē on dæge gē on nihte.
Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash. Showing the punts at Quayside in Cambridge. These boats were my training for public speaking. These particular boats are lighter than the slightly larger “Baby Behemoths” that we also used at Scudamore’s.
Class Summary
Today, we discussed the documentary Most Likely to Succeed (2015) in breakout rooms. We also talked about privacy and the FIPPA, using creative commons and how to incorporate images in our posts and credit them, and about our projects with our learning pods.
Blog Prompts:
Education should be adapted to prepare students for life in today’s world. Today’s world is constantly changing and change of how and what we teach students is necessary for their success. Wholesale, revolutionary change of how education is practised, however, is dangerous because of the risk of introducing untested and ineffective ways of teaching. The first students to be subjected to a new method may be let down by it. It is better to make incremental changes, discarding what is no longer effective and modifying useful practice to improve it. Additionally, as discussed in our break-out room, innovation is good, but not at the expense of core skills.
2. What obstacles to educators face when they try to change pedagogy?
Changing pedagogy is likely to meet resistance from parents and from teachers who are accustomed to the old way of teaching. Parents, who expect a letter grade rather than the proficiency scale, are frustrated when they are told that the letter grade is not the same thing. When their child comes home with a “proficient” grade, they understand it as a B and are frustrated when they see that their child has achieved a high score on their tests and assignments.
For teachers, discarding old ways of teaching that have worked well for them in the past, reworking whole units in order to make them conform to a new way and introducing methods that have not been proven or whose results are different from previous methods is a lot of work; a lot of work for something which may be discarded in turn when its efficacy is disproved. Incremental change is thus better than revolutionary change so that each modification can be seen as an improvement and not an upending of the system.
It is also likely that if a big change is seen to be political, it will meet resistance from those who are ideologically opposed to it. They will not see it as a way to more effectively teach and learn, but as a government-imposed brainwashing project. Incremental change is better.
3. Why is Privacy important in our classrooms?
Privacy is important in our classrooms because we are teaching minors. Any pictures published could be used by adult predators or by the students’ peers for bullying. Likewise, students’ work could be used to gather information on the students by outside actors to harm them. The students may also be inhibited if they know that everything they do is going to be released to the public. If embarrassing material (immature behaviour and opinions, and uncurated presentation, &c.) is released, it could follow them beyond the classroom and into later life. A dodgy statement made in jest could later ruin their career.
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