Tuesday 18 October 2016

Week #5 Reflection

Hello again Teacher Candidates,

Where has time gone? I cannot believe that this is already our second last tech class. This week I have been working extremely hard to complete the final touches of My Genius Hour project and to make my blog portfolio appealing to my audiences! I am beyond excited and eager to share with all of you my thoughts and findings of why we forget things. I truly have a strong passion for understanding the way people think and the way in which individual’s brains work. In saying this, I have found lots of information surrounding my Genius Hour topic on the thought of why people actually forget things.
During this online class I was able to explore two education tools that can be used with our own classrooms! I chose to explore Class Dojo and Padlet. Class Dojo, is a classroom management system that helps with student behaviours in classrooms. Class Dojo can be used on a phone or on a tablet in class to encourage positive behaviours like participation or teamwork.  Some teachers show class Dojo to the class to see how they are doing, you can even use it to set up an awards system too. Teachers can call on students randomly or encourage the whole class. You can even use it outside of the classroom; most teachers give about ten positive points each day.  The most important thing to do is a invite parent right away to your class dojo tool, teachers can simply do this by printing and sending home invitations or by inviting parents by email. Teachers can instantly respond to parent’s questions, this tool makes classrooms that much more connected!
In addition, Padlet is a virtual wall that allows students to express their thoughts and feelings on a common topic. Students and teachers can put any content on this sheet a paper at anytime they would like! After reading the online article, one way that I can use Padlet in my classroom is for book reviews. Padlet will offer students a great space to share their thoughts. Students will be able to highlight favourite quotes from the book, ask questions and even discuss character from the story! I hope you have enjoyed watching my movie trailer and that it has made you ponder some new ideas! I am eager to share my final Ted Talk with you next week.

Until then...



Made with Padlet

Week #4 Reflection

Hi Everyone,

In this week’s tech class we finished our Powtoon video, which introduced Genius Hour. We also watched a read aloud story of our choice, I chose to read ‘Stellaluna’ written by Janell Cannon. We then worked with Google forms to create a quiz for our classmates to test them on the knowledge they evoked while listening to the story. If you would like to watch the read aloud story and answer my Google Form assessment, please feel free to do so. If you scroll down through my blog you will find it and be able to submit your responses J

For the remainder of the class, I began to think of ideas for my Movie Trailer as well as gather my research together to begin creating my Ted Talk for my Genius Hour question. For next week, I will be editing my blog to make sure that I have all the requirements and artifacts embedded and ready to show my classmates. I am going to be working on my Genius Hour movie trailer so that I can get some peer feedback and evaluations from classmates within the next couple of weeks!

Stay Tuned…


Monday 17 October 2016

Introducing my Genius Hour Question

Hi Again Fellow Digital Learners!

I want to introduce to you my genius hour question I prepared in class today. I am a very forgetful person and I want to learn how to work on memory so that I can be successful in my future endeavours! With this being said, I have formulated a question centralizing on the idea of memory. My genius hour question is something that I am strongly passionate about in finding the answer to:

What causes us to forget?

Tuesday 4 October 2016

"Stellaluna" Storyline Online

Enjoy and Good LUCK!

In today's tech class we were given the opportunity to watch a read-aloud book of our choice! I chose the story 'Stellaluna' written by Janell Cannon. I have embedded the video below, please feel free to take a look and test yourself on the book with my quiz below.

Tuesday 27 September 2016

Week #3 Reflection

Hi Digital Learners,

Are you starting to feel more comfortable navigating the web? I certainly am :) I finally feel relaxed and content adding slides and playing around with Powtoon. This week we watched a TedTalk video by Sugata Mitra that educated us about the child-driven education and brought us around the world to see different kids self-supervised access to the web and showed results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching. We also watched a insightful and inspiring video on assessment by Mr.D.
Today in class we were given the opportunity to do some research regarding out genius hour question. Much of my research is very psychology based since it has to do with how our minds work! With today research, I was able to find out that Elizabeth Loftus, has identified four major reasons why people forget. They are: retrieval failure, interferences, failure to store and motivated forgetting. I still have a lot of research to do within the next coming weeks so stay tuned!

 Thanks for reading

Monday 19 September 2016

Copyright

Hello Again Fellow Digital Learners,

I want to share with you what I learned in todays session regarding the concept of copyright. According to the Candice (2013) article, basic copyright law means that all rights are reserved. It is important to teach students that copying, distributing, performing, displaying or the adapting of digital media found online is not allowed. If we take any information from the internet we must cite to give proper credit to the original publisher.

As a future educator, I want to allow my students to create, revise and generate media. I think it is a fantastic way to encourage deeper learning and media literacy. But we as teachers need to focus on the one issue that complicates digital freedom of expression, which is the notion surrounding copyright law. It is critical that teenagers and kids have a basic understanding of what’s legal and ethical while playing with other people’s intellectual opinions. In my future classroom, I want to promote digital learning. With copyright being a serious topic I want to educate my students and support and guide their learning when understanding all the necessary aspects of copyright.


(2011, April 8th). The Vision Therapy Centre. All rights reserved (online image) retrieved from: http://www.thevisiontherapycenter.com/discovering-vision-therapy

 J.Higham (2015, Sept 15th). Nourishing Obscurity. All rights reserved (online image) retrieved from: http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2015/09/











Welcome to my Blog!

Hi Everyone!

I am beyond excited to be a teacher candidate in the 21st century. It is quite evident and exciting to think that technology will soon shape our education.

As a teacher candidate I think it is extremely important for student to be able to share their passions and have time to use their imaginations. Today we learned that teachers give students a time during the day where they can explore their own passions. Personally, I think this is a great educational tool because it is a place and time where students want to participate and express their ideas. As a 21st century teacher I want my classroom to be a place where students want to come and learn. Genius hour is great addition to students' daily routine that promotes engagement, creativity and imagination. Genius hour is a great way to allow students to drive their own personalized instruction.

GENIUS HOUR- where passion comes alive!