Category: EdTech (Page 1 of 2)

This week we had the opportunity to visit the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry or PSII ( ‘sigh’) in Victoria, B.C..  This is an independent school founded by Jeff Hopkins that has now been operational in Victoria for 7 years and currently has 95 high school students enrolled and 7 teachers on staff.  Inquiry is the basis of the student’s education and through their own personalized inquiry questions they work through the B.C. curriculum in a holistic and interdisciplinary way.  Gone are the 50 minutes blocks of individual subject transmission style instruction and lesson plans designed for……. well who exactly?

I left this session completely inspired to try to learn more about inquiry based learning and how I might incorporate it into my own teaching practice. Teachers are more likely to work lesson plans around student interest and real world experience in the earlier grades, but as the students progress, this form of teaching is lost and replaced with a focus on individual subjects and standardized testing.  Jeff’s argument is that this model doesn’t prepare students for the real world where soft skills including critical thinking, collaboration and negotiation are valued far above what you can regurgitate of your Math 11 or Biology 12 text book.

In the cafe style, thinking, working and collaboration main room of PSII, I saw students engaged in what they were doing and this was the most inspiring sight.  One thing I have noticed in observing middle school classrooms in the public school setting is that this engagement is easier said than done and that a key component to student engagement in the classroom seems to be the content relevancy to student interest’s and student life and the perceived usefulness of what is being learned in terms of navigating the ‘real world’ after graduation.  What better way to ensure lesson plans are relevant to students than for the students themselves to have a say in what those lesson plans are?  It seems obvious now that if students have some agency over what they are learning then all those things that we have come to know that increase student success and knowledge retention including discussion, engagement, curiosity and intrinsic motivation will be present before the actual learning even starts to take place.  If as teachers our goals include helping learners to be dependent on themselves and encouraging student self determination to increase intrinsic motivation then isn’t it our duty to try to figure out how to incorporate inquiry based learning into at least portions of our daily teaching practice?

Jesse Miller of Mediated Reality came to speak to EDCI 336 on October 4, 2019, to talk with us about aspects of social media we might want to consider as beginning teachers.

Jesse asked us to consider what private means?  When you post something  online you have to think about where it might end up.  For example, screen shots can be taken of anything and distributed widely even if the information originated on someone’s private page.  Private texts can even be distributed this way.  Because of this we need to think about our digital identity.  Are we differentiating between social, professional and personal communication networks?  And how are we keeping our professional network separate from our personal and social networks?  Jesse suggested that there are 3 audiences for social media use by educators…

• public/parents
• staff
• students

… and that we should be wary of crossing boundaries between these audiences.  Think about who should be your friends on social media.  Drawing the line at students and their families seems like a good place to start.

Jesse also mentioned the importance of understanding the school expectations and policies of the employer.  Many businesses have not caught up legally around issues of employees posting images in and of  their place of work.

Parts of this lecture that resonated with me personally were around one’s public digital identity and the fact that anything one puts online should be done with thoughtful intention.  I think too many times people post  without any thought at all or post from an emotionally charged place.  As uncomfortable as I am with social media culture, I can see the value in being aware of it and having knowledge of it.   As a teacher I need to be aware of the social networking environments my students are trying to navigate within so I can understand and help them with that.