Category: Reflections

January Reflection

February 1, 2021 / ctrades

“Puzzle Pieces” by Daniel P. Fleming is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

January goal: develop the introductory module and design the overall look of the website.

I started by creating a mini 10-page booklet of all the ‘requirements’ for my project according to my research. I also had 3 spreadsheets covering content, core competencies, and curricular competencies according to the BC Ministry guidelines. The BC big ideas were included on the content spreadsheet. As for IB MYP Key and Related Concepts and Statements of Inquiry, I am hoping to create those as I go along developing every task. Although MYP units should be 20 to 25 hours long, many of these unit tasks would not require that amount of work as I felt it would be unreasonable for 13 to 15 year old students to work for that long without reaching an endpoint. To keep motivation high and self-regulation easy, I thought I should aim for each task to take 3-8 hours, including shorter learning engagements including videos, articles, skill practice and other formative elements leading towards the summative task. That should be long enough to get some depth but short enough for students to see the end as achievable.

Starting to lay out the website, I affirmed that one of the reasons so many good resources require signing in or paying is that it is a huge job to create a good resource. It is not only the curating and creating of content, it also is the design of the physical website. In this case, there are so many elements needing linking to be transparent about BC ministry requirements, topics, and levels of mathematic proficiency according to Bloom’s taxonomy. I decided to use tags rather than develop a map of coverage. These tags are important for a teacher looking at the resource to see if it meets the BC requirements or for ideas to use in their own classroom, but the tags are unimportant for the student using the resource. I created tag pages which listed the requirements and the tag associated with it so that in the future, the tag could be linked to the page showing all the posts associated with a search for that tag.

I had an image in my mind of what I wanted the website to look like, but I also did not want to spend hours on creating it. I explored some of the plugins included in the WordPress site on The Open EdTech Collaborative site, opened.ca. Originally, I thought the main page for each area of mathematics explored would list all the information like a table of contents but in mind map form. With just the simple introductory module that I was using as a test, I realized the mind map for other modules would look terribly busy and therefore be a deterrent for students. I decided a post for each task would be a better design.

home page with 7 entries

Images for the first 4 modules’ headers were chosen or taken and I experimented with layout for the introductory module. Although I planned on posts, I decided it would be better if the home page had the introduction elements. For some glitchy reason, the theme I chose wasn’t allowing accordions for this page, so I managed to add some CSS and code them in. I also decided that if I couldn’t sort out how to have a sidebar listing all the posts for only one module, that the sidebar would at least be pretty with the images chosen for the headers. Hopefully, in the future I would be able to create a submenu list of the posts when you hovered over the sidebar image.

homepage with 1st accordion open

Next step, actually get Module 1, Numerical Reasoning done.

Communicator in Online Communities

May 27, 2020 / ctrades

Photo by Allie on Unsplash

Well, of course I have to do SOMETHING new when I can’t do any IB (International Baccalaureate) Face-to-Face workshops! Lucky for me, I was accepted to be trained as an online workshop facilitator.

One of our concerns as a Masters of Educational Technology cohort of online learners was how to build community. I am pleased that our third module of four in my IB training is on just that – community and communication. As the material is copyrighted, I am only sharing a brief quote from the workshop:

“Building a sense of community in an online workshop is an essential first step. Learners feel more comfortable, safer and at ease among a group of peers than with a group of strangers. Building a sense of team and community facilitates the transfer of ownership to the group and, as a consequence, a sense of accountability.”

I was SO excited to read this! Yes, SO EXCITED that I had to stop reading and start a blog about it. You may have read my frustration with some of my earlier online experiences, but this training shows how IB have developed their courses with intention. Two lines further into this module, and we were provided with an outside non-copyrighted source from the University of Waterloo on netiquette for online courses! University of Waterloo has always been a source of great remote learning, even back in the 80s when I was finishing my second degree and taking correspondence (yes, snail mail) courses from them.

Now, I cannot share the set of strategies they suggested because of copyright infringement, but I researched their suggestions and found some shareable resources like this one from E-Learning, one from Purdue University and another based on synchronous discussions from University of Waterloo!

They also talked about universal design and introduced it through this video:

They go on to talk about motivation, which tends to dwindle after the first week. They focus on how feedback is a positive enforcement to encourage motivation, and how small/short learning engagements also foster motivation.

Well, I have to start my first short learning engagement (small group reflection on a strategy to empower and engage online asynchronous participants in a community in 60 seconds or less each on FlipGrid). Hope you found this post helpful!

Online Learning Extravaganza!

May 13, 2020 / ctrades

Photo by Allie on Unsplash

So what do you do when you are semi-retired and get to take two months off from your Master of Educational Technology programme? Well, the plan was to lead a couple of workshops outside of the country and help supervise International Baccalaureate (IB) exams at my old school, but the coronavirus pandemic put a stop to that! So instead, I am learning about G Suite for Education and am taking a course to become an online workshop facilitator for IB. I am also just finishing a course to improve my understanding of indigenous perspectives and, although it was mostly lecture style, it was interesting. Last week, I passed my Google Certified Educator Level 1 Exam, this week I passed my assessment for suitability to be a Google Trainer, and later this week I will take my Google Certified Educator Level 2 Exam – wish me luck!

Part of getting certified as a Google Trainer requires evidence of training at least five people or groups in GSuite over the last year. Well, all my school evidence disappeared with my access to my school account and all my IB evidence has proprietary information that I am unable to share. I decided to contact the Heads of Department at my school, looking for guinea pigs willing teachers who needed some help. Originally, I was just going to contact individual teachers, but I thought that might be imposing as they would feel obligated to get involved and they are already coping with many emails and courses being delivered totally online. Instead, I asked Department Heads to pass on the message so no one would feel obligated. Yes, they have a tech department for support at school, but there is SO much to do with a Grade 6-12 school offering their FULL program online, that I expect there will be holes that can be filled. Within 24 hours, I had three people with questions. Perfect! I can learn more about the GSuite, learn more about current online apps for my Master’s project and help out people I care about. Not all of the questions so far will be suitable as evidence for my Google Trainer examples, but that doesn’t matter. I am learning and hopefully easing the stress on some of the teachers who need support amid this emergency pivot to online education.

Social Distancing

April 4, 2020 / ctrades

This thread helped me recognize something about myself. When the crap hits the fan, I go into ‘hyperspeedproductivity’ to deal with the fallout and the causes. In my school administration job, I would hopefully have anticipated the situation through creative planning. This is probably why I was encouraged to take the type of administration position I had, even though I never had any intention of ever becoming an administrator. I recognize that I am not normal in my reaction to unexpected situations, but I believe I developed this because of being involved in the arts and starting to teach piano and singing lessons at age 14. You never knew what was going to happen when performing and it all had to come out smelling like roses in the end. And at the end of two weeks of social distancing and ten days after the announcement that schools would close, I hit the crash.

So, recap.

What did I do when we were told to hunker down and social distance and I have no school classes to prepare for? I signed up for two other courses to support my final MedTech project development. One is a Google Educator Level 1 Certification because a friend is offering it for free with her support when needed. It may be the answer to how I can host my final project without it being a cost to me monetarily (though I am still a little concerned about the privacy). The other one is on Indigenous histories and contemporary issues in Canada from an indigenous perspective.

These choices help with escapism from the Coronavirus news, have an indoor focus since I can’t spend much time outside with this being my prime allergy season therefore tricky for my asthma (and my inhaler appears to be in short supply so I was caught short for a week), and they are something positive to do when I need to back off from the social/physical distancing math inquiry project I am creating for this course and my final project.

It is timely that we were required to read Buchanan’s “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”. Unfortunately, I think my inquiry project is a wicked problem; the real-life component doesn’t really have a solution as the data may not be accurate due to a number of considerations and we still do not have a full understanding of the coronavirus that is requiring the social/physical distancing. Plus, new models and data is being released daily. Maybe that will make the final guided inquiry problem interesting for students to consider after they look at the basic math they need to apply. Hopefully, because it is wicked, it will also be a lasting and useful math exercise.

I attempted to organize the inquiry as a controlled investigation with opportunities to reflect on the real-life applications through research and information literacy. (Levels of inquiry referred to match Trevor Mackenzie’s Levels of inquiry.) My hope is that students will then move on to guided inquiry within the topic, showing their ability to be creative. There is so much math that can be explored through this lens, including using digital citizenship skills by debunking the profuse fake news that uses inaccurate math or displays it poorly. I also included a link to Hans Rosling’s Ted Talk on statistics as inspiration for innovation in showing the math they discovered.

The designing of the task (above) took way longer than I expected because it kept growing and changing. I have created inquiry tasks before, and reading Galileo’s website resonated, but because I am not creating for a specific class of students, the process took quite long. By trying to be extremely inclusive, it is almost spiraling out of control. As the Galileo website suggests under ‘What is inquiry?’ article, the problem is authentic, has applications well beyond the school, requires the use of digital technologies (and literacies which are outlined) and encourages active exploration and connecting with experts. The open inquiry suggested has academic rigour potential for multiple grade levels, and I have suggested assessment methods for the teachers I sent it to (if they want to use it as assessment). I left out the opportunity to communicate with other students as that will be left up to the teacher. The task is really meant to be used as a jumping off point for an International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme criterion B (Investigating Patterns) assessment after the controlled inquiry section (which would take place under ‘test’ conditions) and then the final guided project would be a criterion C (Communicating) and criterion D (Applying Mathematics in Real-Life Contexts) assessment task. These criteria have three to five strands each which delineate eight levels of achievement.

Then, the crash.

I didn’t want to do ANYTHING but my first marked blog was due. Darn.

Our professor recognized the unique situation we were in and extended the deadline on our blog post (which I had planned to be this one). Therefore, this blog reflects two weeks of ‘work’. I spent a few days doing diddly and then set myself a deadline to share the assignment out (and therefore stop daily ‘improvements’). I got going and finished the Social Distancing Inquiry Task (or as finished as any of these types of inquiries get). In the development of the task, I used EZGif again and Google Draw for the first time. I still want to go in and edit the task, but I am leaving the editing for others so they have some ownership. I am keeping a list of items I may want to add for future times when I will use it.

Plans to convert the task to something anyone could use without having it in a proprietary software like Microsoft Powerpoint or Google Slides didn’t pan out. Supposedly, Slides should open if a student has a Google anything, but if they don’t, Apache OpenOffice Impress should open the slides as an open source freeware option. Even the conversion to Slides lost some of the functionality of Powerpoint, so I still have to check opening the Slides in Impress, but I will leave that for another week. It will be linked to my final project, so at that time, I will ‘license’ it as part of that open educational resource.

For now, please try out the task or pass it on to someone who may want to use/edit it! It works best for the student in presentation mode.

Resources:

Apache OpenOffice Impress

Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking Design Issues: MIT Press, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 5-21, retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/jrankin/www/engin_as_lib_art/Design_thinking.pdf

EZGif

From the Ashes – CBC Canada Reads

Galileo (2019). Designing Learning. Retrieved from https://galileo.org/designing-learning/ (Inquiry and Design Thinking)

Google Educator course into – https://teachercenter.withgoogle.com/fundamentals/course

Google Draw

Indigenous course – https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada/home/welcome

Microsoft Powerpoint

Unsuccessful free powerpoint to video converters – https://www.ispringsolutions.com/blog/top-10-powerpoint-to-video-converters

https://elearningindustry.com/turn-your-presentation-into-an-interactive-elearning-course–

https://www.zamzar.com/convert/ppt-to-html5/