Brielle Lalonde

Students created drawings of the meaning of Lheidli T’enneh. Many students included the cutbacks and the colour of the rivers as well as buildings based on their personal experiences with both the Nechako and Fraser Rivers.

My one word for 2020 is local. I chose this word because it resonated with my teaching philosophy as well as in my personal life. My goal heading into my final practicum was to use local content in my teaching as much as possible in all subject areas. I think this was a very reasonable goal for myself and really will be something I focus on for much of my teaching career. Learning should take place in the local environment and be about the local environment as much as possible. I have seen firsthand how beneficial it is for student learning when they can relate to their learning and content on a personal level. For instance, students learned about beavers as part of science. I then brought up images of beaver dams and many students had connections to seeing beaver dams in and around Prince George. In another lesson we talked about the geography of Prince George and the Lheidli T’enneh people. Students learned about the history of the Lheidli T’enneh and the importance of both the Nechako and Fraser Rivers to the Lheidli T’enneh people. Students then drew a picture of the two rivers intersecting. The only criteria were that students had the two rivers intersecting on their picture, but most students also drew other landmarks that are unique to Prince George on their sheets that they used their own knowledge and experience with to draw. An example of this is that some students drew the cutbanks in their pictures, others coloured brown water as they noticed that was the colour of the river when they have seen it in person, and others included Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park in their pictures. Students were so excited to share their pictures and the personal connections they made along the way when creating them. Learning in a local context gives meaning to student learning and ultimately helps with student engagement. Local knowledge is also important for every community member to learn.

Other examples of local content that I included in my lessons was doing a culture unit with my students in Social Studies. This unit focused a lot on how each of us are unique, yet we may share some similarities with others in our classroom or in our greater community. Students participated in an activity where they created memory bags that remind them of home. Students were encouraged to think of what natural objects or things remind them of home. Some examples that students included in their memory bag that reminded them of home were trees and other plants and flowers that surround their house. One child drew the trails that surround his property where he goes walking and biking regularly. In science students participated in a sound walk where we listened to hear the different natural and artificial sounds in both our classroom, school, and outside of our school. After our sound walk, we talked about how the sounds we had written down are unique to being in a school and unique to where our school is located. An example of what we discussed is that the sounds in a school are different than what you might hear in an office building, such as a whistle blowing, or that the sounds outside of our school are unique to the area in which our school is situated in as we did not hear many cars since our school is on a quiet street. Students then talked about some of the sounds they might hear at their houses. This was something very cool to listen to as students that lived in a more rural environment identified different sounds from their houses than students who lived in a more populated area had identified.

When I created my goal of including local content into my teaching, I was focused on Prince George specifically, but I also wanted to include content related to our broader local environment and chose to include some content that is unique to British Columbia. For an art/social studies lesson students were introduced to the Cherry Blossom Festival that happens in Vancouver in the Spring. Most students had never seen a cherry blossom tree before, so we looked up pictures of them and then talked about the cultural importance of the cherry blossom to Japanese people living in Vancouver. Students then created their own cherry blossom tree using paint, paper, and tissue paper to show texture. Students were very engaged when participating in this lesson and learning about the cherry blossoms and many were curious as to why cherry blossoms don’t grow in Prince George and how the cherry blossom trees came to be in Vancouver. This provided multiple learning opportunities and great discussion that went beyond Prince George yet did ultimately relate back to our local environment.

For the most part I believe I was successful with my #oneword2020 goal of including local content into my lessons. One of the challenges I did face when trying to include local content is that it can sometimes be difficult to find local resources. Most of my content came from my own research or knowledge of the local area. This was rather time consuming so it would have been better if more local resources were readily available for teachers in this school district. I know that from some of the professional development days that I have attended that are based on local content there is a push from community partners to create these resources for teachers to have better access to knowledge and history surrounding Prince George. I look forward to having these resources in the future not just for myself and other educators but also for community members to have access to as knowledge about local history is not something many Prince George residents have. Local is something that will guide my teaching for years to come and I am really looking forward to other ways I can include local content into my lessons by reaching out to community members and taking field trips to visit and explore the wonderful community that we live in.

I didn’t know what to expect from Education 431: Education Technology. I thought I would learn about how to use things like fresh grade and block coding games made for children. While I did learn about those things, I was also introduced to a vast world full of passionate teachers from around British Columbia who are using EdTech in creative and unique ways in their classrooms daily. I was blown away by the opportunity to hear all of these wonderful teachers speak about their experience with technology in the classroom. During Education 431 I was encouraged to create a PLN and run my own professional twitter account. I learned how to somewhat successfully blog and tweet and was inspired every day by the professionals I met online.

At the end of Education 431 I left feeling inspired and questioning how I could use EdTech in my practicum class. I was a little discouraged once I realized the reality of access to technology in the local schools. Most elementary schools in the district only have enough computers for one class at a time (roughly 30) and they may be a part of a mobile lab or they are in a separate computer lab. Tablets are non-existent in the public-school district and are only used to help students with special needs to communicate. In my practicum class I am fortunate enough to have access to a smartboard and the teacher’s laptop. I struggled to think of how I could incorporate EdTech into my grade one class until I was researching inquiry projects in Harvey Daniels’ book The Curious Classroom. In this book Daniels has a chapter about a classroom in the US where students observed an eagle nest via a webcam that a local university had set up to monitor the nest and the eagles that lived in it. Every morning the teacher would already have the webcam projected on the smart board and students would come in and write down or draw their observations of the nest. The teacher had such success with the webcam and the students showed such interest in the eagle family that the teacher began to leave the feed up all day. Students were invested in the eagle family and by leaving the feed up all day they got to witness many rare events in real time, such as the eagles hatching and the first time they left the nest. Students were able to observe and witness something that not many people are able to witness, and they incorporated what they had learned about eagles into all aspects of their classroom. They created an “eagles’ nest” reading lounge in their classroom and they built models of the nest and habitat. I was very inspired by this chapter and was excited because it opened up a new part of EdTech that I had never thought of before – webcams.

A curious grizzly bear checks out the trail camera in the summer of 2015. We did not know grizzly bears lived in the area until this bear began to make regular appearances on the camera.

Webcams are a very accessible form of EdTech as multiple organizations and universities around the world have set up webcams to observe the local wildlife. Cameras exist positioned in front of watering holes in Africa, in Churchill Manitoba to observe polar bears, and in Alaska there is a webcam operating in the summer that is pointed at a waterfall so that people can watch grizzly bears catch fish heading up the falls. All of these webcams are free and easily integrated into classrooms. I decided that I wanted to use webcams in my practicum class as I had already been tasked to teach a unit on local animals. My only problem was that I struggled to find a local webcam. The closest one I could find that was relevant and reputable was the one located in Churchill Manitoba. While this webcam is incredibly fascinating and no doubt educational for students, it is not very relevant to living in Northern BC. But then I remembered that my father-in-law, an avid bird watcher and wildlife enthusiast, had been setting up a trail camera on his property just north of Prince George for more than six years. These turned out to be the perfect response to my EdTech dilemma. I had found the videos I needed of local animals that would also intrigue my students. Now I just had to sift through years of 25 second videos to find what I was looking for.

This coyote walked right in front of the camera and howled. Other coyotes can be heard in the background. Sometimes you get lucky with your camera placement and you capture something quite fascinating!

Trail cameras are motion and sound activated. My father in law positions his trail camera on a game trail on his property. Some of the videos he has managed to capture include black bear cubs wrestling, a grizzly bear, lynx, and a coyote howling, just to name a few. While the animals themselves are fun to watch, their behavior is sometimes even more interesting. Sifting through hundreds of videos I was able to observe things that are important aspects of the curriculum for students to understand such as the fact that rabbits will change colours depending on the season. This is an easily observable trait in the trail cam videos where you are able to witness the changing seasons and the change in the rabbit’s colour. Students are also able to observe the differences between mother and baby animals. Cows and calves are a common guest on the trail camera videos as well as a black bear and her two cubs. I created observation journals for students where they had a space to draw what they witnessed on the camera and then would label or write a small description of what was happening. I have carefully selected the different videos I plan to use and will have students focus on specific traits of the animals they are watching. Through this activity I will cover aspects of the grade one science curriculum as well as having students work on their writing. The opportunity to use trail cam footage is endless and can be used in many unique ways for almost any subject and grade level.

Students are able to see the differences in the changing colours of a rabbit. Above the rabbit is in the fall where it camouflages well into the brown leaves. Below the rabbit is changing colour as the snow begins to fall, notice the rabbit’s ears are still brown as he still needs to blend into the trees behind him.          

An extension with using the trail cameras in the classroom would be to bring in the trail camera at the beginning of the year and talking about it and then talking to students about how and where it should be set up. Once the teacher has set it up somewhere it can become a monthly thing where the teacher will go and collect the footage and bring it in to the class where everyone can watch in anticipation of what footage you might find during its month long stint in the wild. Trail cams can also be used year-round, providing the opportunity for students to observe the changing seasons and how the animals will change with the seasons. When do we see the most bears on the camera? Are the animals we see the same ones coming back or are they different ones? What are the animals eating in the videos? Opportunities are endless for what students can learn from these videos, not to mention that these videos appeal to students of all ages and can be incorporated into any aspect of the curriculum. Field trips can even be set up so that students can explore the habitat in which their camera is in and discuss the optimal position for it to be placed in. I am so excited to continue to use this piece of technology in my classroom and can’t wait until the spring when I will go with my father-in-law for the first time to collect the footage and see what our local animals were up to this winter.

A mom and two cubs were regular visitors during the summer of 2013. Here the mother is checking out the trail camera while her two cubs play and eat in the background. Mothers and their cubs continue to pass by the trail cam every summer.

A cow and calf moose from the summer of 2019. It is hard to understand the true size of these animals until you see them in this footage.

A rare appearance by a lynx in 2015. We rarely catch lynx on our trail camera but we do find tracks all over the property.

On Tuesday we had a wonderful presentation given to us by the very inspiring Janet Chow from Burnaby school district. Although Janet was there to talk to us about EdTech resources in use in Burnaby schools, I found the most interesting piece of her presentation to be about how technology can be used for formative assessment. This echoed what a lot of other presenters have talked about in our class thus far in that technology should be a tool for students to help express their learning.

Janet talked about class blogs and even student blogs where students would post some of the inquiry questions or work from in class. Teachers and parents then have access to these blogs and can see the progress students are making.

Janet was big on assessment being meaningful and related to individual goals and success criteria. Janet also posed the most interesting question of how assessment can be used to empower students? I believe this is a wonderful question and is something that should guide your practice as an educator. If the end result is not clear to students why would they want to do it? Similarly if they are not interested in the topic, why would they do well on it? Meaningful assessment to empower my students is something I will keep in mind as I approach my practicum and continue in my education journey.

This is the dashboard for Spinndle. The classrooms are located at the top of the page and the student feed is located at the bottom.

Today we had a the pleasure of listening to Kristina Tzetzos, one of the founders of Spinndle, which is a self-assessment/portfolio platform for students to upload and self-assess their work. Spinndle is meant to help students self-assess and upload their work in order to show their progress. The really great thing about Spinndle is that students can also comment on their peers’ work. The teacher is also able to see what students have posted and the feedback they have posted to their peers.

My greatest takeaway from Kristina’s presentation is that self-assessment is really difficult for students. I know from experience that self-assessment is difficult for everyone, let alone asking a child to do it. What Kristina really stressed is that you must be very intentional when it comes to having students self-assess their work. Have students know exactly what they are assessing and how they will be assessing or they will not know what they are doing. Also, self-assessment needs to happen regularly in order for students to become more familiar with it and better at it.

This shows the self assessment loops for each assignment uploaded to Spinndle

Today we had another presentation by the wonderful Sandra McAuley. We learned about quite a few resources that would help with computational thinking in the classroom. Specifically I found that some of her examples were perfect for primary students. My favourite resource that Sandra showed to us was called Coding Hopscotch. Coding Hopscotch used computational thinking skills by acting like a series of codes using directional pieces on the ground. Students would follow these arrows and symbols on the ground to to make their way to the end of the piece of code. It is my hope to use these cards in my grade one practicum this winter. Check out the pictures below to see all of the fun we had  with Sandra and Coding Hopscotch!

Let me start by saying that I love podcasts. They are one of my favorite forms of media and I listen to them every morning when I wake up and every night before bed. The type of podcasts I listen to however never really has anything to do with professional development. Talk shows, comedy channels, and news podcasts are usually my go to. That’s why Tim Cavey’s presentation to our class on his use of podcasts for professional development was so interesting to me.

I had never thought before to even search for an education podcast, but now that I think about it, podcasts are very similar to audio books. The flexibility and ability to listen to podcasts while doing other tasks makes it so easy to get in professional development time while cooking dinner or driving to work. In just a short period of time I have found many education podcasts including Cavey’s own “Teacher’s on Fire,” “Popular Pedagogy” by Queen’s University, and “The Cult of Pedagogy,” to name just a few. Now all of these podcasts have their moments. Not everything you hear may resonate with you, but the same can be said for a book. The benefit of listening to podcasts as opposed to reading a book is that podcasts are free and you can listen to them while doing other tasks. I will definitely be adding these podcasts to my regular lineup while also searching to find more education podcasts as they are becoming increasingly more popular.

The greatest message that I got from Karen Lierenman’s presentation on technology in the classroom was to not consume technology, but instead to create with technology. I LOVE this message from Karen as I believe there is a time and place for technology in the classroom, but that doesn’t mean that we always HAVE to use that technology. Karen was highly critical of apps that are mainly “drill and practice” apps where a worksheet or other manipulative will provide the exact same function. Instead Karen advocates for apps and technology that provide an experience that could not be replicated (or would be harder to replicate) with a paper and pencil.

Karen is such a big proponent of technology in the classroom because of the amount of creativity and connectivity you can do with it. Karen told us about her use of twitter in her classroom where she will often post pictures or ask questions on the platform on behalf of her students. She often receives responses from all over the world or from experts – this is collaboration at its finest and it also teaches students how to ask for help!

An important takeaway and realization that I got from Karen was that often you only need one device to help students access technology and the world beyond their school. This makes incorporating the use of technology into my classroom a little less challenging as I know that I can access this technology with only one device, yet still incorporate my students in the use of that technology. Students and the teacher can come up with and edit tweets together and then send them out and watch responses come back in. Students can also send out challenges over twitter such as a recycling challenge for other schools while deciding on the content the teacher should post. This is something I know students would love to take part in and it excites me that this is an aspect of technology I feel comfortable and am able to incorporate into my classroom relatively easily and is also budget friendly.

Coding without computers is not a workshop I thought I would be attending in an EdTech course, but once I got there I realized that coding without computers is more relevant and accessible to EdTech as any coding workshop. Carrie Antoniazzi came from Science World to discuss coding without computers to us. What Carrie focused on was the process of Computational Thinking. Computational thinking is the process of: logical reasoning, decomposition, evaluation, abstraction, patterns and generalizations, and algorithmic thinking. Now these are all processes that computers use when coding, but they are also processes that can be taught and applied in the classroom without the use of technology.

Carrie provided us with activities that made us use our computational thinking without us even realizing it. One of these activities was coding your friend where students created a task for a classmate to do using simple commands such as arrows and other symbols. Students then had to follow this exact code in order to carry out the task. Some people had more success than others, but the main thing realized in this activity was how every aspect of computational thinking was used in order to have your friend carry out the task as a computer would.

Coding your own friend. The legend is important for students to understand what each symbol means, just as a computer would use symbols to carry out a task.

Another activity Carrie had us do was called the Knight’s Tour Board. The idea behind this activity was that your knight would start in square 1 and had to end in square 1. The knight has to stop on every square on the board exactly one time before ending back at 1. The knight can only move in an L pattern. Students must keep track of their moves on a separate piece of paper in order to keep track of the different ways they have succeeded, as well as to help with assessment.

The Knight’s Tour Board.

This simple puzzle was extremely effective in forcing us to use our computational thinking skills. This would also be a great activity for students in the intermediate grades and would also work as a great brain buster or something for students to do when they finish early.

The opportunities and activities to encourage students to use their computational thinking skills are endless. It is important that we keep an open mind when planning lessons surrounding technology, as often the most effective activities don’t even require a computer.

The greatest benefit to Fresh Grade is in its ability to communicate student learning in real time. Fresh Grade operates and looks like an eportfolio for students. The idea of Fresh Grade is that teachers can use it to update student learning in real time. Parents can then access their students portfolio on the site from anywhere with Internet access and see how their student is doing. Students can also use the platform to upload evidence of their own learning.

While Fresh Grade is a wonderful platform it does take a lot of work on the teacher’s end to set it up. The benefit of this though is that once it is set up, all the teacher has to do is upload assignments and grades for students.

The one drawback of Fresh Grade is that it does require access to the Internet. While that may sound like a non-issue in 2019, there are many families where this is a problem. Therefore it is important to still remember to provide families access to Fresh Grade while still making it known that they can come directly to you to talk about their child’s progress and learning in person.

I would like to thank Cliff Waldie from SD57 for coming in to talk about Fresh Grade.

“You don’t have to do it all” is one of the first things Sally Song, a teacher from Surrey, BC explained to us. This was a rather welcoming and refreshing insight from a relatively new (last 10 years) teacher to a room full of teacher candidates who are constantly being told: “do it all,” “be innovative,” and “step outside of the box and try new things.” While these are all great things to keep in mind and frame our practice around, it is not practical and it causes burnout, frustration, and can seriously hinder your classroom learning environment when you are too focused on doing it all.

Sally explained to us how she tried to do it all in regards to technology during her first few years of teaching. While she learned a lot from this experience it led to burnout on her end by constantly trying to update her classroom twitter or her class blog and website. Sally realized that the content she was putting out there was just because she felt like she had to, not because she actually wanted to. She also realized that this was not necessarily helping the students or parents in her class. Eventually Sally decided to tone back her use of technology in the classroom and focused on technology that was useful and benefitted her students and most importantly was what she liked and made her comfortable.

“You can overdo it with technology,” Sally explained, but you still need to make sure students know it is more than just social media. That technology is a tool for communication and doesn’t always have to be on our devices. Sally left me thinking about the question “How will I use technology in my classroom?” While I still have plenty of time to think about this question, I have quickly realized upon reflection that technology is a tool that students need to learn how to use responsibly and positively. Technology is not just about research, typing, and social media. It is about communication and providing a medium to explore and connect with others on a deeper level in order to communicate learning and ideas with each other.