Category: Reflections (page 1 of 1)

In this weeks class we talked about distributed learning. From my understanding distributed learning is what the majority of Canadian university students are doing right now, i.e. doing school online and from home. In breakout rooms during class we discussed the positives and negative of online schooling, I will attach a screenshot below. For me, online learning has its ups and downs – I get to spend more time with my pets, wear sweatpants, eat during class, and I don’t have to commute to UVic. But there are still quite a few negatives that sour my online experience – same place/same thing everyday, teachers/classes that can’t adapt to online learning, and no time for relaxation. While the previously mentioned are my personal feelings towards online schooling it was good to hear that my peers were having similar experiences.

This week we had the chance to listen to and talk with Tracy Humphreys. Mrs. Humphreys is the founder and chair of BCEdAccess, which is a volunteer-run organization that helps students with disabilities and their families. I found this discussion to be extremely interesting because I am very passionate about inclusive education. I believe that for all students to thrive, to achieve their personal satisfactory education goals, and to become contributing members of society schools/teachers need to have a better understanding of the benefits of inclusive education and the role in which technology plays. Something that stood out the most to me about Mrs. Humphreys talk was how students are still being taken out of the classroom as a result of their disabilities. That is something that I will explicitly not be doing in my future classroom as I believe that is not beneficial to anybody, especially not the student being removed. After completing this Bachelor of Education program I am hoping to be accepted to the Masters of Special Education at UBC where I will learn the best ways to make my future classroom inclusive to all and how to support all of my students.

I found this class extremely useful, as I believe that teaching in today’s day and age teachers need to be able to know how to use technology as a tool in their classroom. Especially if something similar to COVID-19 were to happen again and all teaching is made virtual. I know that when I am on YouTube either listening to instructions or watching a knitting video I often need to slow the video down or speed it up, which I have found to be extremely useful. Something that was brought up during this class that I thought was the most useful was screen casting, I believe that this could be an extremely useful tool when emailing instructions to parents, prepping for substitute teachers, or just using in the classroom with students. Below I have attached a screen share of my selfing finding a dog training video on YouTube!

In this weeks class we had guest speaker Jesse Miller tell us about our Digital Footprints, and how important it is to be aware of it. Prior to this class I have already learnt about digital footprints, where images might end up and who may end up seeing them. My parents brought me up to be extremely cautious with what I put on line and have taught me how to make all of my social media accosts extremely private and secure. When I google myself (or if someone else were to google my full name) the only result is the famous Volleyball player Gabrielle Reece. The only places that you can find my name connected to anything personal is an archived newspaper article that features all of the students from my graduating class, the Big Brothers Big Sisters 2017-2018 annual report, and, if you look hard enough, a poetry book that my grade five class published.

When thinking of social media in the classroom, the only time that I could imagine using it is creating a private blog of some sorts for the parents to know what the class will be up to that week, or showing off some of the projects the class has completed.

In this class we delved into the topic of photo editing, although I know how to use photoshop quite proficiently I found this class extremely interesting and we were told of different platforms that we could use as an alternative to adobe photoshop. I often use either Photoshop or Procreate for any photo editing that I wish to do so I was quite out of my element when we then proceeded to edit the iconic sitting Bernie image onto various backgrounds using powerpoint. As mentioned, I found this difficult because I have never used powerpoint before. While I am not the biggest fan of using the Powerpoint platform I understand that it is a great way to create items to use in the classroom. I found it very interesting to see what my peers created with their sitting Bernie images, while I was excited to see so many of my peers thrive with the powerpoint photo editing I was also quite glad to see that I was not the only one who was having a little bit of a difficult time.