What an adventure this semester has been! I have learned so much about blended learning, about tools for my courses, about learning management systems, and about what the future of education could look like with blended learning at the forefront. Thank you all for the support and the knowledge I have learnt from each one of you.
For our Summary of Learning, Brad and I decided to work together and create this video! We wanted to focus on the whole journey because that is the most important part and after all, if you don’t enjoy the journey, what’s the point? I hope you all enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it. Also, thank you to some colleagues that helped us out with production! To say we had fun is an understatement! I hope to see you all in the future, whether it is via twitter, or in more courses! Best of luck to you all! 🙂
Well, another course in the books – almost anyways! To say that I have learned a lot this semester is an understatement. I think the most important thing I can take away from this course though is my mindset towards blended learning in the classroom. I have changed the way I view myself as an educator and I am constantly questioning and considering how I can make my courses more accessible for students as well as more manageable. How can I help my students become better learners in this ever-changing world? And how can I help them “re-find” their creativity and allow them to challenge what education looks like?
As I stated in my previous blog, I did not consider myself a “blended” educator before starting this course, even though most of my material has been accessible to students through Google Classroom for the past year. I didn’t think this made me a “blended” educator until other teachers in my school and even my admin mentioned to me what a great idea this was.
I also ran into the curious problem of students not attending class due to some health related issues, BUT completing all work and communicating with me via Google Classroom and Remind. This happened for the first time last semester and I was immediately frustrated by it. I discussed it with my admin who asked the simple question: “are they meeting the outcomes?” I thought about it and while the student was missing out on what I thought as valuable instruction, conversation and socialization in my classroom, they were completing the required assignments, and therefore meeting the outcomes. It wasn’t as enriched as I wanted it to be, and I was left with a feeling of disappointment for the student. I wanted them to do better, because I knew they could have excelled in the course if they had only come to class, but this was their choice, and this was how they met the criteria to ultimately graduate.
I have the same issue occurring this semester with the exact same circumstances. This student just doesn’t want to be here (at school) because they would rather do the work in their own space. This semester, I had a conversation with the student right away because I understood where this was probably going to end up going. There are some extenuating circumstances to the reasoning of this student not coming to class, and I cannot help but admire them for the tenacity to complete a core class (ELA B30) completely on their own. I should also mention that their knowledge on the subject matter we discuss in class exceeds some of the other students without even being there for the conversations, as well as they have yet to miss a deadline and remain in contact if there are ever any questions. This whole circumstance leaves me stumped and in a predicament about blended learning as well as how to control attendance. Do I cut off their access to Google Classroom? Stop posting all the material and subject matter so they have to attend? Do I introduce the idea of “flexible attendance” to all my students? Any opinions are welcome!
This example touches on a lot of the questions from this week’s class and really has me pondering the future of education. What is it going to look like? The way I am viewing it, mostly due to this course and the ideologies we have learned, is that education should
be flexible and there are a variety of ways for students to meet the outcomes necessary to graduate into a world that is filled with other types of technology and opportunities. My AP Calculus class is working their butts off to write an exam in May, but I cannot get some of them to invest their own time into the course. I want this course to be blended and I want them to be able to learn on their own. These students, after all, are the ones bound for university and need to learn these skills like time management and independent study. I then look at my ELA courses, where I want to focus more on what we do in class, and the opposite is occurring. I think it might be time to focus more on what my students need and directing it that way instead of where I want them to go. We all know letting go of control as a teacher can be a scary idea! This is one way this course has helped me. It is helping me find where I need to direct my attention and knowledge when it comes to blended learning. Helping me recognize opportunities to incorporate it more seamlessly instead of forcing it.
Another important concept from last week’s discussion is the idea of teaching empathy and citizenship. I don’t think schools will ever be replaced completely by technology for these reasons. Our world would not be a good place is everyone was stuck indoors, on their computers, learning by themselves. Students need discussion, they need socialization, and they need to learn important concepts like citizenship to be successful in our world. I think it is really important to teach digital citizenship, and 21st century competencies, but those things don’t mean much if we don’t teach people how to be good humans first.
After reading Amy’s blog post this week, I reflected on why I became a teacher, and it was to build relationships and connections with students so that I can help them figure out their teenage years and beyond. If students don’t come to class, don’t socialize with each other, learn how to have important and appropriate conversations with others besides their best friends and families, I think our world will look very different. Students learn coping skills, how to interact with people they don’t get along with, how to deal with controversy and conflict, and figure out things about themselves they never would unless they were placed in an environment like a school from a young age. These discussions and conversations with students are the reason I became a teacher! I love watching the “ah-ha” moments, and the impromptu life lessons that appear in the middle of the lesson, and the laughter that comes with some of these discussions. I would miss these so much if education became purely online, and those are the reasons I think it never will be. Those moments are lessons are too important to miss out on.
To close, I have really learned a lot through this course. I’ve picked up some tips and tricks to enhance my blended classrooms and figured out how to incorporate it more seamlessly into my everyday teaching using things like Flipgrid, goFormative and Socrative. I have also learned to make adjustments to my classrooms to accommodate more types of learners that before a blended platform would have simply been written off. I’m excited to see where these new ideas I have learned this semester take my future classes and where education will go in general. The most important thing though, will always be making connections and figuring out how to reach more students, creating more opportunities to showcase how they learn and what they need to learn.
To say that technology enhances or does not enhance learning is a complicated question. We live in the day and age of technology, and as educators, it is our responsibility to teach for the future and that future includes technology. I think a big part of having technology in the classroom enhances learning. This year alone, I have found myself relying more and more on it to help my students learn effectively. For example, with my Calculus class, I was relying heavily on Khan Academy to help supplement my students’ learning.
It was my first time teaching it, so there was a lot of “learning together” going on. I was also using graphing calculators and apps to help my students visualize first, and then internalize what certain graphs look like so when it came time for the big exam in May, they wouldn’t even need to look at a calculator to know the behaviors of certain functions.
One of the biggest factors to integrating technology in the classroom that we debated on Monday was cost. It costs a lot of money to integrate a new set of laptops, or a new program, or a new app. I’m lucky at Prairie South that we do not have the 1:1 rule that many of the Regina teachers were discussing on Monday. However, the tech accessibility at Central is limited. We have three working computer labs, and at this point, they are all
being used as classrooms for majority of the day so booking into one is nearly impossible! We also have two sets of chrome books, which are awesome….but slow. The Wi-Fi is not the most reliable in the school which can render the chrome books almost useless in the hour of time we get to use them. As a result, I definitely do not use tech in my classroom as frequently as I’d like.
However, I am pro-tech in the classroom as there are so many benefits to using it! Vawn Himmelsbach at TopHat.com stated these 6 pros to using tech in the classroom:
Using technology in the classroom allows you to experiment more in pedagogy and get instant feedback.
Technology in the classroom helps ensure full participation.
There are countless resources for enhancing education and making learning more fun and effective.
Technology can automate a lot of your tedious tasks.
With technology in the classroom, your students have instant access to fresh information that can supplement their learning experience.
We live in a digital world, and technology is a life skill.
The last one is the most important one to me. Knowing that my students live in a world of technology, teaching digital citizenship is the crucial to their success in the bigger world. With so much access to technology, I love teaching my students how to research properly, how to think critically about what they are reading online, and how to search for things effectively. I encourage them to use sites like Khan Academy (I actually linked it to my Google Classroom this semester, and used their AP Calculus prep course to help my students study for the exam), SparkNotes and No Fear Shakespeare (for when my students miss a reading or just need more help understanding the language) to help enhance their understanding of course content.
My favourite is being able to teach the teenagers in my classroom those important life lessons when it comes to cellphone usage. We discussed a lot on Monday about appropriate use of cellphones and how to structure it. I allow cellphones in my classroom, and I often have students working on projects, connecting to my Google Classroom, or reading on their phones. However, I am not naïve that they are “only” doing school work. We discussed the idea of multi-tasking and whether it is a good thing or a bad thing for students.
The fact that I teach high school influences my opinion and I believe that they need to learn how to multi-task effectively because as teachers and adults, we are expected to multi-task daily. Of course, I reprimand students for being on their cellphones while I am delivering a lesson, but when it comes time to their individual work time, I allow them to figure out a balance that works for them. As long as they are on task most of the time, cellphones are allowed — otherwise, they lose the privilege. They need to learn for themselves when is the appropriate and inappropriate times for their usage. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty stated, “it seems inevitable that some sort of hand-held wireless device will eventually become part of education systems across the country” in the Maclean’s article: Don’t give students more tools of mass distraction, so why not embrace this change? If we fight it, what are we really doing? We are hindering our students’ abilities to be able to use their mini-computers in effective ways, rather than as just a social connection tool. Would you not rather teach students about all the tools and information that is out there and give them access, as well as teach them how to effectively use it to create something big?
Students learn from teachers more effectively and will remember a story, or an experience much more than something they read once on a device. So why wouldn’t you want to us this knowledge and power to teach students the “how-to”, the “why”, and teach them to ask questions about the tech world and what they see, and the social do’s and don’ts of society, instead of leaving them to discover it on their own?
The Secret Life Of a High School Teacher 