Future Educator Located in Victoria, BC
For my final Free Inquiry post I would like to look forward. I would like to keep taking some time to work on my Russian. I will spend sometime practicing on Duolingo. Eventually, when COVID allows it, I would like to visit St. Petersburg. I also took a class on Soviet era film in my undergrad so perhaps I’ll revisit some of those films to get some authentic Russian experience. Overall I have found this free inquiry to be a very valuable experience.
In this post I will reflect on the learning process, and whether or not I achieved what I set out to do at the beginning of this term. Overall I think I did a pretty decent job keeping up with my free inquiry despite it being a very busy semester. I found learning a language online to be a little bit isolating. Given that conversation is one of the most important aspects of language learning it was a little awkward doing it all online. However, I did enjoy the freedom that learning online gave me. The Learn Russian Reddit thread was also useful as it allowed me to see the difficulties and successes of other language learners as well. If I were to do this again I would still primarily use online resources, but I would try to find a way to converse with someone. Perhaps on Zoom?
This week we reflected on the course ad did another ed-camp. Some of my biggest takeaways from this course are the many resources and skills that we learned about, this blog here where I see potential for curating resources in the future, and the inquiry project which was the longest an most in depth inquiry I have done.
In the Ed-camp I had the opportunity to sit in and participate in conversations about gamification of learning, and cellphones in the classroom. Both were interesting, but I appreciated that I had looked into this topic in my ed-tech inquiry so I had much to share.
After class I read Isaac Asimov’s “The Fun They Had” a short story of two children in the year 2155 reading about the schools of today. Maggie imagines that school now must have been a lot more fun as unlike her day, schools happen in person, together, with living teachers. Asimov I think was hitting on one important and often overlooked by laypeople aspect of education. That is its social nature. During the pandemic I felt like Maggie isolated and bored receiving my lessons from a machine (at least in my case the was a person on the other side). When classes returned to in person I was very excited. I feel that any predictions of future education that doesn’t have a social element are unlikely to happen or would not be good if they did.
decided that here I would share some of the fun things I have learned about Russian just for interest’s sake
This video is fun and points out some of the cool aspects of Russian.
This week, despite being very busy with the end of term, I have carved out a bit of time to work on my basic sentences in Russian. I have found remembering them a little more difficult than remembering the individual words. Particularly because Memrise, which I found very useful for learning individual words has not been as strong for learning sentences. For this part of my inquiry I have been relying more heavily on youtube videos so I can get both the pronunciation and the sentences at the same time. Here is another video I found useful.
In leaning phrases I have also found this website that has broken down the phrases into a many topics which I have found useful below I have included a screenshot of the website
For this post I thought it would be useful to collect some of the great resources from the course all in one place for my future reference.
Free to use content sources:
Jessie Miller on Social Media:
Media Literacy on Mediated Reality
Tech Skills Resource:
UVic’s Digital Commons for leaning new digital skills
PSII and Inquiry Resources:
PSII Assessment Framework and how it connects to the BC curriculum
Trevor Mackenzie and Inquiry
Tracy Humphries and BCEd Access
a good video of a BC student using an assistive technology
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Tracy’s presentation on zoom but I have spoken with classmates who have, and I have reviewed the resources online. She spoke about BCEd Access, a volunteer run organization to help disabled students succeed in their studies. She also talked about how ablism affects students in BC. I think the Exclusion Tracker, which is run by BCEd Access is an interesting and valuable resource. Tracy in her slides asked the class to think about three ways that technology could support students in their classroom. While I wasn’t there, 3 ways I would like to use technology in my class are: allow students to access materials online and in person, record instructional time to help students who may not be able to make it in on a given day, and use translation and subtitles to support ESL students.
I have also taken some time to familiarize myself with some assistive technologies that may be available in my future classroom. The resource on our course website was was very useful for this.
Chromebooks: In many of the of the schools I have volunteered in, or have done my observations in I have seen Chromebooks. They are very useful as an assistive technology as they can do voice to text dictation, and they allow students who may have difficulty with writing to complete assignments at the same time as all their peers.
For our Ed Tech project my pod, Andrew, Chris, Claire, and myself wanted to look into the topic of smartphones in the classroom we each did some research on an aspect of the topic. I focused on the relationship between cellphone use and academic achievement. I found that while there are many studies on this topic the vast majority are correlational rather than experimental. For this reason it can be difficult to know if it’s the cellphone use itself that causing the effect on academics or if both the academic effects and the cellphone use are caused by something else.
As we discussed in the video the question of what to do about cellphones in schools is a very tricky one. On one hand it does look like they have a generally negative impact on learning, and can negatively impact the mental health of young people. However, taking cellphones away entirely is also has its own issues, and feels paternalistic. One step I believe would help somewhat and can be widely agreed on is that social media companies should have a greater responsibility to enforce their own age policies on their sites.
Here are the time stamps for our citations
This week has been a very busy one. However I am still working towards my next goal of creating a few sentences by November 18th outlined in my first blog post. Creating sentences has been quite a challenge and I feel that this is a part of the leaning that would benefit from an in person experience as opposed to my self led online one.
Here’s a helpful video I found. She begins by explaining a number of common Russian words, then moves on to more complex sentences. I found her explanation of the pronunciation very useful.
This week in class we had guest speaker, Trevor MacKenzie, from Oak Bay High in virtually. He challenged us to think about our own histories as learners. This was interesting for me as it made me reflect on a tension I have felt throughout my time in the program. On one hand, in high school and in university I have been successful with the traditional approach to learning ,and I have learned lots from it. However, on the other hand I don’t believe it’s the best method or one that works with the most learners. I know many others who that style of teaching has been very discouraging. I liked the discussion around co-constructing the lessons and assessments with the students. That’s something I would like to incorporate into my practice.
I enjoyed the example he gave on constructing students’ understanding of the core competencies. How he has his students define what those competencies mean to them rather than just using the Ministry’s definition.
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