Month: June 2022

From my own learning, I found educational learning games a great tool in my own learning. During my time in high school, the math teacher would do a games day during lunch once a week. The main focus was to get students to see mathematics within games, and to learn more about the connections within everyday life. Not only did this support students, but it also fostered a space of community and respect. With that said, there can be lots of different downsides to educational games, some students may take more time to understand games which will cause them to not want to play because they feel like they are bad. Another downside, maybe be the distraction of games/technology. Overall, education games can be a huge support depending on the class and student level.

Looking into google Google Earth Narrative Maps, there are a lot of different things to think about. I believe that this tool would be great for talking about where traditional villages and locations are. With the ability to put a picture as well as a short story is great when sharing elder knowledge. Within the class room, I think it would be great for students to do an inquiry project, such as, students work on a civilization, then use Google Earth to show where it was and different locations within it.

I believe the use of twine would be a great tool within language revitalization, not only would this allow for alternate avenues of learning, it would allow for a wider range of students to use the lesson/activity. Within twine, the ability to have a ‘hybrid’ language story would be great for beginning learners. As well as language revitalization, it would be a great tool to bring into the classroom (grade 4+), the ability for learners to have an interactive story, would allow for students to grow within the use of technology while focusing on English or social studies. With that said, there are several struggles that students may face, the basic coding of twine could easily confuse beginner students and the lack of technology within schools. Overall, I believe that this is a great tool to bring into your lessons.

When focusing on computational thinking, I believe that it could help students because it supports students in understanding the intricate steps that are involved within everyday activities. Not only will this introduce students to the idea that computers respond to everything that you give it, and that if something goes wrong, it was because the input that was given.

https://massotim.github.io/Prayer-Lesson-Twine/

For this lesson, we will go over the key ideas regarding prayer building and structure. This lesson will start with a prayer to model to students what they could sound like at the end of the lesson. I believe that this lesson is important, due to the lack of available prayers for students/educators. Through out this lesson students are encouraged to discuss and reflect on how this lesson ties into their prior learning (learning level depending). This can be done by stating which words or phrases they have already heard, or which suffixes of words they recognize.

This lesson uses twine as its main tool/instructional method, the reasoning for doing this, is so students can learn and share their prayer within a home setting. Another great aspect of using twine, is students are able to make multiple different prayers.

At the end of the lesson students will have a completed prayer on their paper. When closing this lesson, the main evaluation technique that could be used, is getting students to share their prayer as well as some of their thoughts regarding prayers, or discuss individually how prayer building went for them.

This lesson can range from a short amount of time or it can open up into a large scale investigation lesson.

Prayer Building in Nuu-chah-nulth

Goal

Learners will be able to create a prayer using twine. Students should also practice writing out their prayer and share it in class.

Learning Objectives

Learning objectives should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based.

By the end of the lesson, learners will be able to:

1. Build a prayer in Nuu-chah-nulth 
2. Begin to understand the importance of prayers 
3. Write out a prayer with the Nuu-chah-nulth alphabet 
4. Share the prayer with the class.

Prior Knowledge & Learner Profile

The learners for this lesson can be a hybrid of beginner learners to advanced. This lesson is designed for adult second language learners. 

1. Learners will need access to technology (computer, internet connection)
2. Prior language learning is not required but is encouraged for this lesson. 
3. Lesson depending, having knowledge in nuu-chah-nulth writing and sentence structure. 

Delivery

1. Beginning / Introduction: Introduce the students to prayers within the Nuu-chah-nulth language. Discuss the different prayers that students have heard from elders. 

2. Share a short prayer with the students to listen and hear some of the different sounds. Break down a prayer so students can see the sentence structure of the Nuu-chah-nulth language:
   1. White board, or slide show 
   2. Pictures 

3. Introduce the students to the Prayer Lesson on Twine, give time for students to build a short prayer. As students are building the prayer, get them to write down each individual line on a piece of paper.

4. Share out, (learning level depending) get students to share their prayer to the class:

5. Reflection: 
6. Get students to share their thoughts on the lesson. 

Evaluation

• Learner Evaluation: learners hand in their written prayer. 
• Self Reflection/evaluation: learners encouraged to reflect in class on what they need to work on. 

For myself I have been doing a mixture of sketch noting and typing on a computer, and I truly believe what was said today, sketch noting or written notes in general help me remember more than a computer. For myself, a computer is a great tool for quickly getting down knowledge as it comes but I only remember a fraction. So usually I will sketch note later after the lecture to help myself remember some of the major key ideas. With that said, I do know of other students that have gotten too caught up with sketching that they were lost when trying to remember the lecture. Over all, I find sketch noting very helpful with remembering things, but you have to be quick about taking notes to be successful.

I really enjoyed the presenter today, I found that there were so many great take aways from Joanna. I really loved how she was able to incorporate technology into the classroom, specifically how she allowed students to be themselves and share at their own pace within class. I found when I was in public school, so many teachers would put students on the spot which caused them to panic, and shut down. This led a lot of students to become scared to learn or share in the class. As I move forward into my journey as a teacher, I will try and weave some of these styles into my classrooms.

For myself, I found the process of 3D design and printing to be fascinating. This tool to be able to produce objects or even works of art I believe will be very important to share out culture with more people. As of now, there are very little tools that allow people to interact with artifacts or art work, many things are either behind glass, lost or not allowed to be shown/shared. I think, being able to bring artifacts into a classroom will not only help students recognize and understand some of these traditional tools but it will also create a hands on experience. I think being able to have a 3D printer in the classroom would be exceptionally helpful for students, this will give space for experiential learning. With that said, this tool of a 3D printer would be too complex or possibly too confusing for lower grade students. Overall, I believe that 3D printing and design will be a valuable part of my learning and teaching.

Attached below is a 3D image of a traditional halibut hook that I designed.

After using screen recording and using the H5P plugin on WordPress, I was surprised to find it simple. I could see this being a great tool for when working with lots of videos within the classroom, especially when you want students to be able work at different speeds. With that said, I wouldn’t have used this in my past practicum due to it being in a kindergarten classroom. I believe that interactive videos like this would be very helpful for higher grade classes, but I could see it easily becoming confusing for k-3 classes.

From my perspective I could see the video editing assignment really useful for high grade students to introduce them into cinematography. Not only would this assignment get them to film a short video, but it would build life long skills that could support student growth. Similarly to my statement above I think it would be too complex for lower grade students, but overall I believe that this assignment would be a great access point to learning to get different students engaged.

When thinking of a flipped class teaching model, I could see it being similar to how I did my past practicum. I had a Youtube video of a Nuu-chah-nulth healing song, to show students the basics of Nuu-chah-nulth drumming and singing. I first started with some small discussion and workbooks. After I did this pre-intro, I brought the Youtube video up on the screen so all the students could see it. Then asked them to think about how songs were made while the video was going. After I wrapped up the lesson and got them to share what they liked of the video. after doing this I brought in drums so students could be more hands on with songs.

From my perspective, the pedagogy that was used within the documentary Most Likely to Succeed, was able to support student learning more effectively than that of the public school that I attended. There are many different advantages of having an open style of teaching where the students lead their own learning, not only will the students be more engaged but they will also have passion for what they are learning. From my perspective, stepping away from the institutionalized structure of todays education system allows for space to students to grow on their own. Within my learning journey students that did not enjoy or were not engaged with what was being taught quickly fell between the cracks; this led to an increase of drop out/failures for students that weren’t engaged. The school, High Tech High, that was shown in the documentary gave a space for learners to experience learning in a holistic way, rather than separating subjects, they encouraged cross curricular learning. Although this style of learning opens space for learners to grow, I can also see issues with it fitting into the education system as a whole.

June 6th, 2022.

Today we set up our own website, the process of setting up the website was relatively simple. Moving forward, the navigation of the site seems a bit confusing but I feel confident with some practice I will be able to quickly navigate.