It's that time of year again. The crispness in the air returns just as the students flood back into the university and college campuses, ready to begin a fresh school year. To kick off the uOttawa Education Welcome Week, I have been invited to give a series of workshops to first-year B.Ed. students - a sort of Digital Hub 101 presentation, if you will. I have described this workshop as the following: This 50 minute workshop is designed to introduce PED students to the concept of a Digital Hub (or website) and to encourage them to begin thinking about what type of professional presence they wish to build and maintain throughout their two year Bachelor of Education journey. The rationale behind the Digital Hub strategy, which the University of Ottawa has pioneered, will be briefly introduced. Following this, this workshop will help students begin the process of choosing a platform as well as thinking through what type of professional teaching identity they wish to create. Together, we will look at current examples of Digital Hubs and think through the varied messages that each one sends. The goal is that upon leaving, each student will have a jumping off point and a bit more confidence to start the process of website design than they did before they entered today. The slides for this presentation can be accessed here: Good luck to all first year and returning students!
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The last three weeks of my Bachelor of Education degree consisted of an alternative teaching placement, which I chose to complete with a University of Ottawa professor. Together, we designed a research study to look deeper into the many potential benefits to the creation of online portfolios for teacher candidates in the B.Ed. program. I can proudly say that this work has had visible impacts on uOttawa's Teacher Education program. Furthermore, this Fall Professor Hagerman and myself submitted our work to the online journal LEARNing Landscapes, leading to my first ever academic publication. Pretty exciting stuff! Read the full article here. -Miss. Coleman
My Alternative Community Service Learning Placement: Deep Interactions with Digital Literacies4/21/2017 The two year Teacher Education program has included many changes, specifically in relation to the types of placements that are both required of and available to us as teacher candidates. We have been so extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience multiple teaching placements over the last two years, spending even more time in the classroom than teacher candidates have in the past. In addition to longer and more diverse teaching placements, the Teacher Education program has also put into place a final three week Alternative Community Service Learning Placement which takes place during the last three weeks of year two.
I had the opportunity to conduct my Alternative CSL with Professor Michelle Shira Hagerman at the University of Ottawa. I had the opportunity to learn in two of Professor Hagerman's classes over my two year B.Ed. degree. I developed a digital hub in my first class as part of the course requirements but continued to use it as a space for curation, reflection and professional networking over my two years. Professor Hagerman is an assistant professor of educational technology who has a long history of helping graduate students develop professional digital presence through teaching and leadership in a Master’s of Educational Technology program in the US. She studies questions related to digital literacies development and digital literacies pedagogies and teaches courses in the B.Ed. program focused on technology integration and curriculum planning, assessment and evaluation. Professor Hagerman and I outlined three specific goals that I would be working towards during my three week placement with her. The first of which was to create, analyze and report on a survey designed to gather information from Year 2 teacher candidates about their experiences in relation to the creation of a professional digital hub throughout the program. The survey gathered information from 74 Year 2 teacher candidates. I went through all responses and conducted qualitative data analysis in search of themes in the data. Professor Hagerman and I went through these themes and created a presentation which we delivered to the Teacher Education Program Council stating our findings and recommendations for the implementation of the Digital Hub Strategy. The link to the presentation is below. The second goal was for me to use the information which we gathered from the survey and the TEPC meeting to design a workshop for the Teachers Teaching Teachers 2017 symposium put on by the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. This workshop was designed to inform attendees of the Faculty's Digital Hub Strategy, offer guidance to students for building their own digital hubs and running a 'playtime' to help students explore digital hub platforms and begin their hub architecture. The link to this presentation is here. The final goal of my placement was to co-author an article with Professor Hagerman on our findings, reactions and recommendations to the world of education through an academic journal. This article is currently being drafted and Professor Hagerman and I will continue to work on it in the coming weeks for submission. Thank you for following me through my final experiences in the Teacher Education program. This journey has been one of the most memorable of my life so far and I can't wait to begin my teaching career. -Miss Coleman Recently, the Government of Canada announced that the internet has become an essential service, meaning every Canadian citizen should have access to it. Along with access to the internet comes access to knowledge, and access to knowledge means access to power, so this statement is incredibly meaningful. However, as societal divides become greater due to economic, educational and geographical factors (just to name a few), digital divides may become greater, too. During class today, I found myself wondering about a specific question:
How can I design learning that encourages the development of certain skills when there is a divide in the access to digital tools to begin with? Based on class discussions today I have come to understand that divides in access to internet and its use are directly linked to the delay or lack of development of fundamental digital skills that would allow people to take full advance of the internet they do have access to. For example, some students do not have access to a computer at home and are not able to practice fundamental digital literacy skills such as writing, creating and participating in online spaces. This means it is our responsibility as educators to be aware of potential digital divides and introduce these concepts and skills in the classroom. If we do not, our students will most likely lack these skills as adults and the cycle of divide is perpetuated. Some concrete examples of how I as an educator can address this concern and work to minimize digital divides in my classroom follow. One of the best things I can do is allow time for students to experiment with digital spaces on their own. We should provide enough scaffolding that students feel confident branching out online as learners and researchers, which will then allow time for us to make observations that will inform our pedagogy and future lessons. It is also vital that we spend time with students planning activities that will take place on the internet. Such activities can include brainstorming strategies for using the internet, generating specific questions we can ask, and compiling a list of potential search terms to use depending on the desired search outcomes. Finally, in our planning we need to anticipate questions and difficulties that students will have and develop a plan with our students that they can implement if they are having trouble. I believe that if students feel like they can be successful online at an early age, they will feel empowered and develop a sense of agency that they will carry with them from then on. I believe that empowerment is the key to developing students’ digital literacy skills and ensuring that the digital divide is minimized starting in the classroom. -Miss. Coleman Today we escaped the classroom and entered the realms of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), simply by using Google Cardboards and our own devices. Just to explain the difference, Virtual Reality (VR) is when the user’s current physical surroundings are replaced by a virtual surrounding through a device of some kind. Augmented Reality (AR) is when the view of the real-world is supplemented by additional input generated from a device, such as sounds or images. As with many concepts and technology tools that I have interacted with in this course, this was my first time ever using a Google Cardboard to enter a Virtual Reality, and I must say it was pretty cool! I could immediately see the ways this tech tool could support student learning and the numerous connections I could make to its use in the classroom. As with any technology, the likelihood of a teacher using something in his or her classroom goes up when that teacher feels confident using it him- or herself (I can vouch for this statement on a personal level – if I don’t know something works first, I’m probably not going to attempt it in front of my students for the first time). So, we began with some explorations of VR using Google Cardboards and cell phone Apps such as Google Expeditions, and AR using an App called Aurasma. After the exploration period, we had a discussion on how these two different technologies could be applied to the classroom and type of learners would benefit from its affordances.
Students in elementary schools would love learning through this technology. It’s fun and exciting and opens a digital world to them they probably never even knew existed. Even more specifically, I could see this technology being incredibly beneficial to English Language Learners, as it adds so many more layers to their every day cognitions. VR and AR combines images, videos and sounds together to allow students to gather a much more in-depth understanding of something than if they simply read about it in a book or on a website. For example, if students are learning about different countries around the world, why not take them to some of these countries to see what they really look like and sound like, all through the simple tool of VR. This tool also promotes the theory of multiple intelligences, as it combines visual and spatial information with auditory information as well, creating a complete understanding of a concept or idea. Now that I have had the chance to practice using this tool, I can’t wait for the opportunity to use it in the classroom. -Ms. Coleman Today in class we discussed the topics of coding and computational skills and their relation to the development of students’ foundational literacies. I personally had zero experience with coding prior to today, so in addition to learning about its applications to the classroom and how it supports student learning, I had a really great time doing some learning and exploring of my own! Foundational skills or foundational literacies describe an individual’s ability to understand the inner workings of the digital world to create, communicate and participate in it appropriately. Today we discussed the importance for students to understand the platforms and programs they use to participate in digital spaces. If students do not have the foundational skills to actively understand, question and critique the information they are exposed to and the methods of dissemination, then they could potentially be at the mercy of programmers/developers, which has significant implications in society and their ability to be digital citizens. To develop foundational skills, students can engage in activities that require them to work on their computational thinking. Based on discussions from our class today, I have learned that computational thinking doesn’t necessarily only happen in computing. We as teachers and therefore our students have most likely engaged in these skills and the language in other areas in teaching and learning. Computational skills include pattern recognition, algorithm, decomposition and abstraction. Some examples of where these skills can be developed in every day learning experiences include problem-solving, linguistics and language exercises, science, storyboarding, sentence writing, population trends and social studies, just to name a few. There are also more overt ways of teaching our students computational skills, and this is where the idea of coding comes into play. During a coding ‘playtime’ I had the opportunity to explore a variety of platforms and applications that I could potentially use in my own classroom. Each of these tools have direct affordances for use in classrooms and support the acquisition of foundational literacies and computational skills. I decided to draw a comparison between Code.org and Codeacademy.com and discuss the reasons why I could see myself using one over the other in my own teaching. After exploring two different coding sites, I think that Code.org would be more enjoyable over Codeacademy.com for younger students to initially be exposed to the idea of coding. The premise behind Code.org is to make a game or solve a puzzle by connecting different pieces of code. I could see this site being very powerful for primary students to help them begin to develop confidence using the internet to solve puzzles, recognize patterns and learn different algorithms, all essential computational skills. Codeacademy.com however would be fun to really see how websites are created and the language that is used to write words and images into a site. Now that I have experience using both sites, I am excited to bring my experience and knowledge into the classroom and share my own insights with students on the importance of being digitally literate and truly understanding the inner-workings of the internet. -Miss. Coleman References that informed this work: BBC. (2017). Introduction to computational thinking. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/guides/zp92mp3/revision Yadav, A., Mayfield, C., Zhou, N., Hambrusch, S., & Korb, J.T. (2014). Computational thinking in elementary and secondary teacher education. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 14(1), 5:1-5:16. This week in my Technology Integration in the Classroom course, we were discussing the monster topic of Social Media. The following are my three main takeaways from this session. All suggestions and comments to these questions are welcomed and encouraged!
1. When is it appropriate to start introducing Social Media into an Elementary classroom and how to go about doing so safely? The time to learn about how to handle something is usually before the risk takes place. So, when we are in the situation, we are prepared with a tool kit to know how to respond appropriately. It is never too early to start having conversations about healthy relationships and healthy interactions. As early as Kindergarten and Grade 1 we can talk about why we should not send mean notes or what does kindness look like? It is important to cultivate conversations deliberately. Then, when media usage is more integrated in the classroom, that would be the time to include cyber bullying and other forms of media abuse into the conversation. We should include anecdotes and real-world examples. “What if…” and “What would you do?” scenarios should be included to get our students thinking and prepared to handle difficult situations. Teachers should include all stakeholders’ perspectives so students can learn through a series of experiences when to recognize when they might not have all the information. Tensions can be avoided if we stop and think, “Is there more to this?” “Do we have all the information to make judgement?” 2. What are age-appropriate Social Media platforms that classrooms can use to support student learning? Today we talked about what applications come to mind when we say "Social Media". Not surprisingly, the most popular included Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn, just to name a few. During our class time, we all collaborated on a Google Slides presentation to create what we named "The Preservice Teacher's Guide to Social Media in the Classroom". This guide actually turned out to be an awesome resource for information on what social media is, what affordances and constraints different social media can offer us and a long list of different ways to incorporate social media into your classroom. We're pretty proud of the document, so check it out! 3. How can students practice being responsible digital citizens? Are there platforms that exist to help scaffold student's ability to participate in online conversations? One of the biggest concerns that was voiced in class today was how to get students online practicing their digital skills but not run the risk of sending them off into the world wide web too soon or with too little parameters? To help address this fear, we came across some great resources that will allow students to practice their digital skills in a mock space, where they still need to be critical thinkers but their search options and access to information is limited. Some examples of these platforms are: KidzSearch, a kid friendly search engine, HootCourse, a virtual space similar to Twitter or Facebook, and TodaysMeet, an online discussion board great for giving all students a voice. These platforms align with our conversations surrounding frameworks of digital literacies and 21st century skills, as they promote collaboration, open sharing, communication, and creating and creativity, all of which we have agreed are important skills to foster within our students. Thank you for reading about my experiences learning about social media in the classroom! -Miss. Coleman This semester, students in Year 2 of the B.Ed. Program were given choice in two electives we wished to take in order to further our learning in specific areas. One of the courses I have chosen is PED3119: Integrating Technology in the Classroom with Professor Michelle Hagerman. For this course, we are required to complete five separate blog posts based on themes discussed during our class time. This week's topics surrounded Digital Literacy, Digital Citizenship and different methods of instruction to integrate digital literacy into our 21st century classrooms. We also had the opportunity to participate in a Google Hangout with Amber White, a Michigan-based colleague of Professor Hagerman's, who shared some very eye-opening ideas about how to conduct inquiry in the classroom. She and Professor Hagerman introduced using a framework that supports teaching our students about how to be reflective and productive members of the online community. This framework has been given the acronym PST2 + iC3, which really stood out to me an excellent jumping off point when trying to encourage students to conduct their own inquiries using digital skills, such as collecting and representing information found online.
The acronym I mentioned above stands for the following words and phrases put together: Purpose, Pre-existing Knowledge, Search, Source Selection, Type, Trustworthiness, Identify Important Information, Compare, Connect, and Continually update Understanding. Amber advocated for the use of this framework when teaching students how to conduct inquiries in digital spaces. Inquiry is a messy, recursive process, so having a structured, common language to return to is vital in ensuring that the purpose of the inquiry does not get lost in the ever-twisting roads of the world wide web. When students begin an inquiry, or any work in general, they should always be mindful of their purpose. What is the reason they are even online to begin with? Amber suggested having your students write out their purpose on a tent card and sticking it above the computer as a constant reminder - I love this idea and will definitely remember it for the future! Next is identifying pre-existing knowledge the students might have on the topic they are inquiring about. This means communicating possible biases as well as things that the students are unsure about and want to discover. Based on the purpose of their inquiry, the students then identify what key words or phrases they think will be most helpful to their search for information. This is a living list and should be updated constantly. Next comes selecting sources that they believe would be reliable. Should they choose blogs, Wikipedia, or other types of websites as their sources? How come? When they come across a source that could be of potential use, should they check it against other sources? This stage encourages dialogue between students to talk about what they know about reliability, but it also requires a lot of modelling from the teacher. Amber talked about doing a similar type of inquiry as a whole class and going through these steps all together so that they students have an example and scaffolding for their own inquiries. Modelling the types of questions that should be asked is vital to set students up to succeed in their own digital inquiries. This process of a gradual release of responsibility through different level of inquiry is also suppoted by Coiro, Castek and Quinn (2016) in their article Personal Inquiry and Online Research. The next step of 'type' ties into the source selection. What type of source will lend itself to being most useful for the given inquiry? After the sources are selected, students must decide whether or not they are trustworthy. This is a huge component of teaching students how to do research online. Unless taught otherwise, students generally tend to select the first source that pops up at the top of their search. We must teach students how to evaluate sources to determine whether or not they should be trusted. Some fun mini lessons that can be incorporated into this process could be dissecting hoax websites such as The Northwest Tree Octopus, or The Pomegranate Phone with your students to look for indicators of reliability. Once reliability has been determined, students need to identify important information. Amber described this step as one of the most difficult for her students. She explained that one of the biggest challenges when teaching inquiry is getting students to extract information from sources that actually pertains to their purpose. Students need to be able to put ideas into their own words. If they are unable to read the source to begin with, then it is probably not usable for their purpose. This goes back to the messy and recursive nature of the inquiry process - it will take a lot of time. Finally, students should be comparing, connecting and continually updating their understanding as they work through their inquiry. The opportunity to hear from Amber was fantastic and really solidified the PST2 + iC3 framework into something that I can picture myself actually using in my future practice. I am still nervous about the process, as it seems like doing something like this with my own students would be a giant undertaking, but I believe that doing the things that we are uncomfortable with lead to the most growth, which is something that I also wish to model in my teaching practice. Stay tuned for more on this topic, and thanks for reading! -Miss. Coleman References: Coiro, J., Castek, J., & Quinn, D. J. (2016). Personal Inquiry and Online Research. The Reading Teacher, 69(5), 483–492. Full article can be found at: http://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1450 Saturday, October 22nd marked the first day of Ottawa University's Reading Week. Our condensed school and practicum schedule has been incredibly busy as of late, and so this week off has come at a much needed time. However, instead of taking a break from studying and planning, I took the phenomenal opportunity which I was presented and attended the EdInnovation 2016 Ottawa Bilingual Summit on Education held at La Cité College. This two day event offered sessions all day on innovative classroom practices and ideas, presented by teachers to teachers, with a strong focus on technology in the classroom. The goal of this event is to demonstrate strategies that promote student learning and higher education. The University of Ottawa was invited along and allotted spots for teacher candidates to attend this conference as well. This was my first experience at an event of this magnitude and I must say it was fantastic. The atmosphere in the main arena where we all congregated to begin the day was electric. After having time to reflect on my experience now, I am so grateful for this opportunity and am excited to share with you all of the amazing takeaways I have from attending. Due to my work schedule I was only able to attend the Saturday sessions, sharing my spot with another UOttawa teacher candidate. What follows is a run down of all the workshops I attended and a summary of what I learned from each one. There is also a link to each presenter's Google Doc where more information can be found on the presenters themselves and their topics of focus. KeyNote Speaker: Chris Hadfield
"We need to take advantage of all the genius there is out there, inspire, educate, enable. [...] Push the limits of what is impossible, enabling our young people to dream and find motivation to deliberately turn themselves into someone who can reach the maximum potential." As his final words rang out, the room exploded with applause. I turned to a fellow teacher candidate beside me and yelled over the sound, "I just want to go out there now and Do Stuff!". Not exactly eloquent, but I couldn't find any better words to describe the intense sense of drive I was all of a sudden feeling in relation to the words Chris Hadfield had just spoken. To say that the summit started out on the right foot would be an incredible understatement. From the gymnasium we broke off into the smaller workshops and everyone began making their way around the campus to find their next rooms. The two of us sitting together met up with one more Ottawa University teacher candidate and our group headed to our next session with the inspirational buzz following us where ever we went. Session 1: Escape Rooms and Deep LearningOur first hour long workshop was entitled "Deep Learning and Escape Rooms" and was presented by two current teachers from the OCSB. A link to their presentation can be found here. This session focused on how we can use the concept of an 'escape room' to engage students in inquiry-based learning with a specific focus on how to then link the curriculum to this open ended inquiry for assessment. Escape Rooms have become very popular recently, with the premise being exactly what it sounds like: you're locked in a room and you need to escape in an allotted amount of time, solving puzzles along the way to get your lock combinations or find keys to release you. I personally have attempted four different escape rooms in the city, breaking out of three of them successfully with my teammates. They are incredibly fun and I wanted to learn how I could bring this concept into the classroom and get my students involved in the creation of something like this. Above is a photo I took of the types of things the students created to go along with the two different escape rooms that the presenter's classes designed and completed. Based on everything I heard from this presentation, it appeared that although this would be a giant undertaking in not only the classroom but the whole school, it turned out to be incredibly worth it. The process of planning, designing, building, revising and advertising the escape room was excellent for promoting student voice, rapid brainstorming, reflection, collaborative inquiry and the sharing of and listening to multiple ideas. The level of student engagement was huge, and the things the students came up with blew our two presenters away with how creative they were. Finally, it was addressed how this type of project can actually be used for assessment and where curriculum links can be made and infused in the inquiry. Many opportunities for assessment came from students' reflections on their processes throughout the project. There was lots of writing infused into the brainstorming and planning phases. Mathematics and Science can be integrated throughout the process of deciding what sorts of clues will need to be solved in order for those who are actually doing the room to escape. Finally, many aspects of Social Studies were integrated in the researching of the potential 'back stories' each of the rooms would have. This was a fantastic way to start the day and it inspired me to begin to think that large scale projects like this should be brought into the classroom. Although they seem impossible, the outcomes will be amazing. Session 2: App-tastic - Plickers, Kahoot and ShowMe for assessmentThe second session brought us to a first year teacher who actually attended the summit last year and is now presenting at it this year. That fact in and of itself was incredibly inspirational, as it showed that even though we are not yet out of school and into our careers, growth and success within the educational field in Ottawa are possible. The link to the presentation can be found here. This session was all about using different Apps in your classroom to engage your students in valid and reliable assessments that they actually want to take part in and will save you as a teacher time afterwards in the grading and inputting of marks. The three Apps presented are Plickers, Kahoot, and ShowMe (links to each App are embedded). The presenter spent some time introducing and describing each app and offering examples of how she's used them in her own classroom. We were then given the chance to try out each app as a group, participating in whole class quizzes and seeing how the assessment tools work in practice. I enjoyed this session immensely, as I hope to be as aware of methods of technology integration in assessment as I can. I plan on using both Plickers and Kahoot in my classroom during my practicum this semester, as I believe my students will absolutely love them. Below is myself and two of my fellow teacher candidates, Reily and Caiti, having some fun with Plickers! Session 3: Everything is Awesome with Lego ®The third session of the day was not actually one I was planning on attending, but I am so glad I did. The presenter is an absolute genius when I comes to all things LEGO®. The amount of things that one can use LEGO® for in the classroom was actually mind blowing. The link to the presentation can be found here. The most obvious area where LEGO® can be integrated in your classroom is in Math. Curriculum expectations in all strands can be addressed using these tiny little blocks that students (or people of any age, really) love so much. We can address number sense (counting, multiplying, representing numbers), measurement (measurable attributes of objects, standard and non-standard units), geometry (positional language, shapes and figures), patterning (recognize, build and describe patterns) and data management (graphing, estimating) all with LEGO® blocks. LEGO® is versatile, showable (won't break easily if stuck down to a board and can be moved around the classroom), and easily assembled. We can also integrate literacy skills into working with LEGO®, as students can write about what they create in story or personal narrative forms or rules for games or movements though their LEGO® creations. Once again, I found myself thinking about all the awesome things I will be able to do with my students in my upcoming practicum using the things I learned about LEGO® in just under an hour. Session 4: Breaking Out-The Creation ProcessThe final session of the day brought us full-circle back to 'escaping' from things and how this works in education. This workshop was all about BreakoutEdu, a program which helps educators set up their own classroom breakouts. The BreakoutEdu website gives you a summary of what this product is and links to go about purchasing your own kit. However, our presenter gave us information on the alternative methods you can use to go about bringing breakouts to your classroom yourself. The link to the presentation can be found here. We were given some information on the types of breakouts our presenter's students have created in the past and the process she goes through with them each time they begin a new one. We also got to attempt two different breakouts that her students had just created (the photo above shows the proof that we did indeed breakout!). Students get to work collaboratively to solve the puzzles to breakout, as well as when they are in the creation process for making their own. This activity fosters teamwork and communication and is just plain fun. I enjoyed this session very much, as it showed me a smaller scale alternative to the first session's ideas of escape rooms. The concepts are similar, however much less involved and consuming. Students will love using their knowledge of school learned curriculum concepts and applying them to solving or creating breakout puzzles. Once again, a fantastic idea I am glad to be aware of. Final Notes and ThoughtsAs I look back on my notes from the day, there is one thing that sticks out to me the most. It is something Chris Hadfield said at the very start of the day, however I feel that this theme permeated the entire summit and was surrounding us all.
Permission to Dream We are in charge of the growth of our future generations. Possibilities and positive mindsets begin with teachers. There are so many options out there for everyone, we just need to realize that we have permission to dream about them and be encouraged to do anything we want. Our students deserve the best education possible and it is through attending days like EdInnovation 2016 that we as teachers can begin to build this education with them. Once again I am truly so grateful to the University of Ottawa, the Faculty of Education, and all the professors who worked to get these spots for teacher candidates to attend this summit. I hope you enjoyed my thoughts and comments on this conference, and would love to hear your feedback. Thank you again, Miss. Coleman I truly cannot believe that is already October 2nd! It feels like just yesterday that I was reflecting on my first day back, and now it's been four weeks and the time has flown. September has been incredibly busy. I spent my first two weeks of school in the classroom at St. Michael Catholic School, which was absolutely amazing. I already feel as though I have learned so much and it has only just begun. I have also had two weeks of classes at the university, which have been very informative and have given me so many valuable resources for my future teaching career. Some of the tasks which I have been involved with so far include thinking about curriculum planning and reflecting upon my own experiences in elementary and secondary school in relation to explicit, hidden and null curriculum, critiquing a Phys. Ed. or Social Studies resource I have used in the classroom before, as well as presenting a grade appropriate gym lesson to my colleagues and explaining its relevance to the Ontario curriculum. There is still so much to do, and finding my school/study/work balance is going to be crucial for me to succeed during this semester. Meet Ms. Watson's ClassAs I mentioned previously, I am placed in a Grade 4/5 combined class at St. Michael school in Ottawa. I already love every day I get to spend with these fantastic students and cannot wait for my 6 week Practicum to begin in November.
One of my favourite responsibilities with these kids is the creation and maintenance of our very own classroom website. I am very interested in learning about ways to integrate technology into my classroom, and a year long class website and blog was something I was very excited about starting and overseeing. I personally wrote the first three blog entries for the class, with some input from the students, but mostly on my own to showcase what we had been up to each week. This past week however, we turned the creation of the weekly blog post into a language activity, and so I took a group of six students and we co-wrote this week's update. If you follow the link below, you will be able to see the very first student-written post for Ms. Watson's 4/5 class. mswatsonsclub.weebly.com/classroom-blog/best-week-ever Feel free to further explore our class site and catch up on all the awesome activities we've done and the experiences we've had in our first month. Stay tuned for my next post where I talk about all the exciting ways I have discovered to integrate technology into the classroom, my further university class assignments, and the interesting lessons I have created for my 4/5's so far. Thanks again for reading! -Miss. Coleman |
AuthorJessica Coleman holds a Bachelor of Education as well as an Honours Bachelor of Social Sciences, both from the University of Ottawa. She is an Ontario College of Teachers certified teacher, currently working towards a Masters of Education degree at uOttaw, as well. Archives
September 2018
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