Tag: #weeklyreflection

Week 10 Reflection

On 13 November 2020

colored pencil lined up on top of white surface

Today’s class started off by debriefing and sharing our thoughts about last weeks EdCamp.

After listening to each other’s experiences, we transitioned into our week 10 topic which is Inclusive Education Assistive Technologies. Linked here is a blog post one of my instructors created on this topic for lots of additional information.

To lead us through this topic, we had the pleasure of listening to Tracy Humphreys talk with us about her experiences. Tracy is the founder and chair of BCEdAccess. This started as a private group of Facebook and is completely volunteer run. The purpose of BCEdAccess is to serve the families of students with disabilities and complex learners all over the province of BC.

Tracy started off by telling us what her group hears from parents. These include:

Denial of tech – can’t get FM systems, won’t allow students to use AAC
Tech is always outdated
Access to tech is hard and still problematic
There’s no central keeper of knowledge around tech at a school or in the district, usually.
There’s no supports to learn how to use the tech for parents, especially a bigger issue now with COVID but always important

Tracy shared her own personal story about her son’s struggles and mentioned how difficult it is for family’s to access support. She talked about how parents always try to advocate for their children, but it’s hard to do that if you don’t know everything going on with their child.

She then talked about the things we can do to assist a student’s needs?

Read IEP
Ask family
Ask student
What do you have available? What can you get? What will you need to advocate for?

Photo by Jess Bailey on UnSplash.com

Week 6 Reflection

by sarahdolezal

On 16 October 2020

In edci336, EdTech

love to learn pencil signage on wall near walking man

In today’s class, we had the pleasure of listening to Jeff Hopkins speak on the school he created – PSII. It was fascinating to look at the blog post and watch the videos of the school. Currently, it’s set up quite different than normal due to COVID. For example, they can’t use the kitchen, so they’ve turned that space into a room where students can sit and work together. They have also decided to rent out space outside of their normal school space just so that they can increase the distance between students during COVID.

I find this school so interesting because it’s all built on inquiry – everything starts with questions. This is great since one person’s inquiry can lead to multiple new questions from other students as well. Which can therefore bring multiple people together.

From a teacher candidate’s perspective, it’s awesome to see how the school is built on teacher collaboration. Teachers will have their one or two specific subject areas and if a student has a question about something outside of those areas, then teachers have the ability to collaborate with each other. The school is set up for this purpose, since there’s no formal classes with teachers. This gives them the flexibility to go and collaborate right when students need assistance.

Overall, it was super informative and thought-provoking to hear Jeff speak to our class today!

Photo from Unsplash.com by Tim Mossholder

Week 2 Reflection

by sarahdolezal

On 18 September 2020

In edci336, EdTech

In class today we shared our thoughts after watching “Most Likely to Succeed” and I thought I would share some of our discussions around it.

The overall consensus was that we all loved the film and were so inspired by the type of learning they did in High School High. It was a fresh and exciting approach to education with a project based learning and assessment. It was so great to see the use of multiliteracies and cross curricular systems in school. Which relates very well to our other courses we are currently taking, so it gives us great real-life examples of how these are applied.

However, we did see some holes with the boy who was in charge of his group for the rise and fall of civilization project. Some of us thought that maybe the teacher should have stepped in sooner to help put the boy get on track and advise him to not make it so complex with the time frame they had. But on the other hand, he probably would not have learned the same hard lessons if the teacher had stepped in.

It was also important to note how the system they were using in High School High had not been in use for very long, so there is not sufficient research to support that this way of learning is effective over the “normal” system in schools.

After watching this film, it definitely opened my eyes to different ways of learning and assessing in schools. It also gave me the opportunity to begin wondering how I can implement some of these ideas into my teaching one day.

We also discussed Privacy and Safety principles, including FIPPA. It was insightful to learn about this and then read all about on my own time after class. We also spent a little time discussing copyright and intellectual property. I used my knowledge of this in this post by using a picture from unsplash.com. This website allows you to use their pictures without worrying about copyright.