Category: EdTech Inquiry

Fresh Grade in an online communication tool for teachers, parents, and principals. It has many various applications for reporting and assessment, including digital portfolios, scores/grades, checklists, and anecdotal comments. It is very helpful for teachers wanting to document, track and highlight students learning. Teachers can use Fresh Grade to send out announcements. assignments, and activities online. They have the ability to communicate with the whole group of parents or select specific ones. The accessibility and timeliness of Fresh Grade supports parents’ engagement with their students learning. This makes early intervention easy, especially because all parties (parents, teachers, principals) are all in the loop from the start. It can also be a tool for students’ online journaling and self-reflection

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Fresh grade is open to anyone to use and it is easy to set up a classroom.  There are some concerns. Focusing on the quality of posts over quantity is urged. Teachers have the ability to document students’ entire educational experience and all their work.  I am concerned with the psychological effect this might have on children knowing that so much of their life is being tracked and documented.  The over-structuring of children’s lives and overbearingness of helicopter parenting continues to be an issue that society struggles with, and Fresh Grade definitely has the potential to step in that direction.

However, using Fresh Grade for ways that you would already communicate with parents has many benefits. For example, replacing paper handouts and announcements with online notifications saves lots of paper.

A couple of weeks ago some of my classmates did a presentation on digital storytelling. It seems like a great way to increase student engagement and participation in class. As a teacher, I would like to use it to introduce exiting topics, as well as a way for students to sum up their learning. From the demonstration in class, it’s clear that you can convey complex and emotional messages with simple texts, photos and videos. You don’t need to be very tech-savvy with video software, or to have a picture in every frame. The multimodal nature gives every creation a unique feel. The class gains skill while collecting images, making soundtracks, filming, editing themselves. When students are given lots of freedom over the storytelling process, they are able to show their own diverse learning and what they are getting out of class.

For language arts, I am interested in using digital storytelling as a tool for students to tell personal or book narrative, or create a trailer for a specific text. In science class, they could be used to document experiments. I also like the idea of using digital storytelling in math class to represent a word problem narrative, where students can record their questions, calculation, deductions, and answers.

Digital storytelling captures students’ voices in a way that doesn’tfeel forced. However, like most great practices it requires some scaffolding. You have to take the time at first to introduce students to the concept, and practice with paper storyboards and templates.

The other week our Tech Ed. teacher facilitated a class over video conferencing. It was really interesting to be communicating over video and audio with other students and a guest speaker halfway across the country.  Although the tech ran into some problems with the internet connection, it was an eye-opening experience to see how this technology could be used to teach classes with students in different geographical locations or even just in a different room in the same building.

It gave me some ideas about ways these tools could be used to teach in elementary school. I think would be intriguing to run lesson over skype, like a test review done in a game show theme. Students would probably find this novel and interesting. You might need a teacher partner or substitute teacher to make this work. You surprise students by leading them to believe they are just going to watch a video online, which then turns into an interactive lesson with the person talking back to them and able to see them. You can introduce characters and narratives over interactive video conferencing. This technology makes bringing topic experts into the classroom so much easier or introducing students to environments they unable to visit in real life possibility

It is important to have a good internet connection though so that the lesson is able to flow seamlessly, using a wired connection is recommended to avoid any lag.

I finally had a chance to play the game Minecraft. After having read the same Minecraft book to a child that I worked with hundreds of times, it was interesting to get a chance to experience the game first hand. I was aware that the game had some educational aspects to it, regarding resources and building. It was insightful to how the game could also be played in a social way that utilizes communication, leadership, and cooperative skills. It is clear that teachers can facilitate the game in a fashion that requires students to practice their problem-solving skills, through play.

I found it interesting that have some environmentally conscious aspects built into it as well. Over exploiting natural resources like trees will have negative consequences-the trees won’t grow back. Leaving the tops of the trees will ensure their survival and players have the option to collect seeds and replant trees.

https://www.idtech.com/blog/educational-benefits-minecraft, this website attempts to explain some of the lesser know educational benefits of Minecraft, ranging from creativity to reading and math skills.

The Human Learning Institute website provides useful information and resources for anyone interested in taking up inquiry as an educational practice. One of the resources included in the Competency Assessment Framework. It lists and defines competencies and their characteristics for teachers and students to refer too. They providing guiding questions for assessment when discussing learning processes and artifacts of learning. The framework is useful for teachers who are interested in using inquiry, but not sure how they might go about  formative and summative assessment.
The institute also links to a step by step interdisciplinary inquiry guide that students and teachers fill out at each step of inquiry. It’s very useful, as it walks you through most of the process. There is also an example of a filled out guide which makes it even clearer. An Inquiry Process flow chart that outlines the steps students and teachers take throughout the inquiry process, that is a very helpful visual for putting it all together.

http://learningstorm.org

At the link above you find the website for the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. A school I am genuinely surprised that I only started hearing about recently, because it is truly remarkable. The video on the front page describes the process  by which students learn at PSII, called inquiry. Students come up with questions about topics they are interested in and then conduct critical research into their questions. They learn and reshape their questions as they go.  Students then choose projects related to their research questions to work on and present to peers and teachers. Subjects are blended together when it makes sense, assessment is personalized, yet according to the website students either meet or exceed BC graduation standards.

Learning happens through the process of discovery and creation. Everyone’s learning experience is truly unique. It is remarkable to see a school with such a difference model than the public education system.  This unfamiliarness can make it seem scary, free inquiry. So much of the curriculum and learning lead by the children. Who will ensure that they are actually learning everything they need to? In western society, we often want knowledge to be easily observed and measured. But we also want children to grow to be independent, resilient and confident. This school model seems to be a step in the right direction. When these students go out into the world, will they be more successful or happier than those that graduate from the traditional school model? I think the autonomy, independence, and mastery that is weaved into free inquiry will be an asset to their professional and person development.

The website also has inquiry resources, samples, and guides, so that other educations can see what PSII is doing and try it out for themselves.