Scratch is an online kid-friendly coding website. It allows students to learn a coding language through drag and drop coding commands. My Education Cohort was extremely fortunate to be able to attend the coding workshop put on by KCJ. We were taught the basic commands, which I included as a video below (which includes a little joke from the Disney Channel movie Sky High).

What we were also shown, is that there is no limit to what you can do with scratch. What I really enjoyed from the presentation, and in the book “Lifelong Kindergarten” by Mitchel Resnick was the idea of play. Allowing students to use Scratch to build things from their own imagination. In addition, after showing the students the basics, allowing them to play and discover / learn new functions or commands to accomplish their goals.

I think that Scratch allows for a simple application of ASTD component of the curriculum along side any subject.

For example:

• Math: you may want students to learn graphing and the use of coordinate points –> students could create a scratch project or game.
• English: during literary analysis –>you could have a student create a storyboard representing the important components of a story or plot or even an extension on what happens next.
• Humanities: when students are understanding maps and distances    –>students could create a map and having a plane travel between points.

Overall, I think that the application of scratch to the other subjects is interesting. But what I think is even more important to me, is the idea of teaching coding to students in such an approachable way. Computer science and coding is definitely one of the largest growing industries in right now. So giving students a chance to experience what they can build through coding seems like a good way of seeing if they enjoy it. I also think that using school resources to allow students the time and space explore and understanding coding is essential, since not all students will have access or time to learn coding outside of school. Therefore wouldn’t have the exposure to know if that we something they would be interested in for higher education. So, knowing all of this, I  was nervous about students who would ask or wonder about coding since I have no background in computer science. However, this program is an easy enter point, that I could understand and feel comfortable presenting to students in class.

Currently, the internet plays such a key role the way our society functions. I think it is arguable that it is a part of who we are or even how we define ourselves. We post our ideas, photos, and videos on our social media accounts, forums, and websites. So, in a way our online presence is a part of who we are. This online presence has been called our digital footprint. Is all the digital information that people produce that there are either actively sharing  through posting on social media or uploading to the internet or by devices passively uploading information that people may not be aware of, but have consented to, like sharing GPS data (Thatcher, 2014).

Attribution: Footstep by Samy Menai from the Noun Project
https://thenounproject.com/term/footstep/372220/

Since it is so common to have a digital presence, that looking into someone’s digital footprint is becoming a regular part in a background check. This means that an employer is not exclusively looking for criminal offenses, but also looking into who you are on social media, to ensure that you are who you say your are (Benson & Filippaios, 2010), but most likely to see who you are compared to what you said in your interview.

Due to this extra layer of scrutiny on our digital footprint, we need to exert caution as to what information we put on our digital scrapbooks. This may be disheartening to some, because we want to share our experiences and share with friends and family who may be far away. However, a negative digital footprint can cause a lot of problems for a person in the future. By posing inappropriate information, pictures, or opinions  you can ruin a chance at employment, a post-secondary opportunity, or be reprimanded at work (Buchanan, Southgate, Smith, Murray, & Noble, 2017). Therefore, I think we need to change the way we teach social media in school to including the importance of a positive digital footprint into our lessons on digital safety and citizenship.

Societal norms have changes, in which we expect people to have a digital presence, teaching kids to not use social media can also be damaging to the futures (Buchanan, Southgate, Smith, Murray, & Noble, 2017) We should be teaching students about the importance of the digital footprint. It can be a way of representing your own “ ‘Personal brand’ that allows others to see your interests, achievements and skills” (Buchanan, Southgate, Smith, Murray, & Noble, 2017, p. 285). I think that through these kinds of lessons, we can also show the opportunity for professional networking, sharing of ideas, and resources that can be achieved through social media.

Check out an example of how to include positive uses of social media  embedded within the classroom environment.

References

Benson, V., & Filippaios, F. (2010). Effect of Digital Footprint on Career Management: Evidence from Social Media in Business Education. Springer, 480-486.

Buchanan, R., Southgate, E., Smith, S., Murray, T., & Noble, B. (2017). Post No Photos, Leave No Trace: Children’s Digital Footprint Management Stratagies. E-Learning and Digital Media, 275-290.

Thatcher, J. (2014). Living on Fumes: Digital Footprints, Data Fumes, and the Limitations of Spatial Big Data. International Journal of Communication, 1765-1783.

I think that my word of the year is going to be balance.

I feel that it is easy for myself to get swept away with a task and it can feel all consuming. Therefore, my goal this year is to instill more balance in my schedule.

In terms of school…

I want to give myself balance with schoolwork, work-work, and personal life. I found that in the past semester doing online learning, it was hard to be able to “leave school”. I felt that every time I would open my laptop to play a game or watch Netflix, I would feel guilty for not doing more reading or homework because school was basically equal to my laptop. I felt the same way when I came home for subbing. So, this year, and hopefully into future years as well, I am going to work towards finding the balance. Where, I work during my allotted work time, and relax afterword. What I think will work well for this is setting myself a consistent schedule.

In terms of screen time….

Lastly, I want to introduce more balance into my time using technology. I want to find balance in my screen time as well. Since we spend so many hours on zoom because of the online nature of school, I want to take more time to be off the computer. So! I have formulated a list of novels that I have been dying to read instead of watching TV in the evenings.

In terms of fresh air…

I want to introduce more balance into my time outside vs inside. Sometimes it feels like I can spend days without really going outdoors, other than to my car, to the store, and back to my house. So, I want to take more time to go for walks outside and really enjoy the mild winter.  Hopefully, we get more snow and then I would love to get outside for exercise like cross country skiing and snowshoeing.

Why did you want to go into teaching?

Source: https://webstockreview.net/pict/getfirst

UNBC I completed my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with a minor in Psychology. Afterwards, I was very confused in what I wanted to do for a career. I had started my masters in cancer research and natural product drug discovery, again at UNBC. Quickly, I realized that living a life centered around research and its competitive/output driven nature (at least of the lab I was in), decided that this was not the path for me.  I did a lot of self-reflection and realized that the jobs that I have brought me the most joy were centered around teaching and working with youth.  So, I applied to work as an educational assistant at a local high school and found myself working in learning assistance and I was sold. The kids, while taking a bit to warm up to me, were fun and wanted to learn.  I enjoyed trying to adapt my explanations and ways of teaching so that they all could accomplish their work. This is what truly inspired me to be a teacher.

I before the program I wanted to an educator who is:

 Be accessible and adaptable.  I have learned through my experiences that not every method of teaching is going to be useful for all students. I want to be adaptable, helpful so that all students can be successful. Also, I am open to learning about what the most profound learning methods are. I found that the linear teaching methods can lead to just regurgitation for a test and not real learning – which I am sure every person can attest to.

Foster critical thinking. As an educator I want to foster critical thinking, questioning, and creativity. Especially in the age of social media I want youth to question that information that they find and not take it at face value. This is one thing that I have learned in my time at university that we really need to evaluate the information we find and understand people’s motive and biases.

Be relevant. I really want to provide practical, meaningful, examples to make learning relevant. The best teachers I have learned from had always given useful examples to help broaden their perspective and that are either meaningful to them. I also want to help find ways in to use technology to either keep them engaged and help them later on in life.

After the first semester, I wanted to add to this list:

Be empathic. I think as an educator, we have to know that our students live difficult lives outside our school. The best way in which I can be a teacher that is accessible, adaptable, relevant and foster creative thinking  in context of our ever changing classroom in terms of students and medium (online or in person) is going to be through applying a level of empathy.

What provoked my thinking this semester…

What provoked my thinking the most in EDUC 394 was the concept of gradeless assessment. I had first heard of this during my time working as an educational assistant. I’m not going to lie- I originally thought that it was rather meaningless compared to the letter grade system that I grew up being use to.

What really changed my opinion was two sources that we reviewed in EDUC 394.

• Degrading to De-Grading.
  • This article explains that grades induce a level of pressure to preform  that can lead students to cheat; resist to learn material that is not testable; and stops them from trying more difficult problems.
  • This article also explains that the way in which we produce grades is also incredibly biased. It is dependent on thee way that we write the test, how we mark, and just who you are as a teacher. So the idea of placing such a precise value on a students understanding based on a biased measure does seem like a fair measure of their ability.
    

    Source: https://icon-library.com/tags/logo_1596.html

• Dan Pink’s The Puzzle of Motivation: The Candle Problem.
  • Daniel Pink mentioned that reward-based learning is not enough to motivate and can even inhibit a person’s ability to reform a task. This idea of trying to get a reward takes over our ability to think critically. I have experienced this. In high school, I had one math teacher who would put a riddle, puzzle, or word problem on the board. The fastest one to solve the problem would get a candy. But I felt every time I would become flustered and couldn’t really think past the first way I tried the problem.

Overall, these two sources gave me a better insight what the purpose of gradeless assessment was. I now think that gradeless assessment really speak to the pressure that we put on students and how we can change that. I mean, if we are setting up a situation, where students feel a stress to preform (in order to get a competitive GPA for school admission or scholarships) for the extrinsic reward, then we are really creating a situation that inhibits their ability preform the task. So, it makes a lot of sense why students are feeling test anxiety, and maybe even that anxiety is inability to think that was described by Dan Pink.

However, I feel that fundamentally, the effect of giving these grades is opposite to the teachers intent. They want students to succeed and learn. So, this is what really inspired my curiosity into gradeless assessment.  I think it could make a more accessible learning environment.

What challenged your thinking? 

Previously, I didn’t really think that our school system had anything really wrong with it. Mostly, because I grew up fitting into the expectations that were set out. However, from my experience outside of school and being in the education program, I realized that I couldn’t have been more naïve.

The education system (prior to the curriculum update) was still heavily grounded in the colonial ideals that came in the systems prior to it. This colonial influence lead to expectations of students that controlled the way that they behave and learn. Which in turn lead to students either assimilating to the routine, or being excluded.

One video that was shown this semester that really emphasized this problem was the

Purpose of Schooling by John Gatto. What I understood from this video, was that our school system is stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecy of students learning specific ways of being a, going onto to university to learn to teach the same way they experience, then being bound by a rigid curriculum.

That being said, I feel that the cycle is being broken, and change has began through:

1. The new curriculum. I think that is is being taught as a praxis in the new revision of the curriculum. Producing a flexible, changing, moldable set of big ideas that can be implemented in many ways  allowing for kids to represent their learning in a meaningful way for themselves rather than in the way that is prescribed by the teacher.

2) Changing teacher education. University’s like UNBC are preparing future educators to teach in a more inclusive, and differentiated way. The implementation of the “pass/fail” course structure has really modeled the way that teaching should go forward in the future. Personally, when this way of grading was presented, I initially felt that internal bias from my previous schooling make me resistant to this kind of assessment. However, what I found over the semester that a pass/fail structure has allowed me to be more open to the idea of learning for the sake of learning, not to get a certain percent on the test.  I also felt that this allowed me to explore my interests within the content, whereas before I would have been resistant to extend on my course learning because it wouldn’t be on the test.

I think that this experience has really proven to me the impact that gradeless assessment can have on learning.

What I bring to teaching…

What I wonder about…

How do we get students to buy into  gradeless assessment?  Using words like “extending” and then comparing it to an “A” or “86%” seems to be counter intuitive. Yet I feel that because it is so engrained in the current system that students will ask for that comparison. I think that there will have to be a real cognitive shift in teachers, kids, and parents in order to get to a point where gradeless assessment becomes second nature.

How can gradeless assessment be fully implemented (where we aren’t making those comparisons) and still translate to university admissions ?

My guiding question into next semester / into my career

How will changing the focus of schooling from “getting good grades” to “learning” through implementation of gradeless assessment  impact students mental health?

Digital citizenship is a broad and ever-changing term. It describes the way in which we act on the internet, which is guided by a set of rules that describes an appropriate interactions and personal accountability (Wang & Xing, 2018). Digital citizenship also includes the way we work with new information that we find online (Wang & Xing, 2018). However, when these rules are not followed there can be a substantial impact.

It is important to teach digital citizenship because people worldwide are using the internet and social media more than ever.

Attribution: world location by ProSymbols from the Noun Project
https://thenounproject.com/term/world-location/564877/

One statistic that I found was that the average use of social media daily was 144 minutes (Clement, 2020). In order to ensure that our students are interacting with social media and the internet safely, we need to ensure that they have the proper education about acceptable uses, the impact of their internet presence. One interesting metaphor I found about the importance of digital citizenship was the “digital tattoo”. The digital tattoo describes the idea that  what you put out on the internet is permanently painted onto your online identity, similar to a tattoo on your skin (University of British Columbia, n.d.). For students to be conscious of the information they put on the internet, we need to educate them about digital citizenship. Without this education, there is a greater chance for harm including cyberbullying, or sharing of personal information (Hsu et al 2019).

One way approach teaching digital citizenship in K-12 schools is through shaping students vision of what kind of behaviour, and decision making needs to go into interacting with information or posting information on the internet (Kim & Choi, 2018). I think that one way to do this would be through active modeling or speaking through a thought process. For example, teachers speaking through evaluating a source. Explaining the relationship between being a good person in the present and how that translates online (Kim & Choi, 2018). Overall,  it should be an underlying theme or lesson that is incorporated into all work that students are doing on the internet. (Marrs, 2019)

I found a couple of interesting examples of actives that model digital citizenship that are practical to use in the classroom.

• Peer assessment of both handwritten and online work. In order to highlight the idea that we need to respect the person on the other side regardless of the medium.  This can again be taken to the application towards social media (Farmer, 2011).
• Having a digital online portfolio and classroom blog (like what we have for the education program). Using the app Seesaw, Heather Marrs describes that she has students post an ongoing flow of their learning in blog post / social media post format. Which allows other students to comment and follow. This app also has a function to have students upload their work to make their own digital portfolio (Marrs, 2019).  Furthermore, the teacher has to accept or decline what posts are allowed on the website, so no inappropriate comments go up. This app also allows for parents to easily follow their child’s learning by reading their posts and portfolio.
  • Only cavate here is making sure that the app is FIPPA compliance and parent permission given

Overall, digital citizenship is an essential lesson that we need to be incorporating into our future classrooms in order to give the students the right skills so that they can be informed and hopefully make appropriate choices on the internet and to keep themselves safe. Within a school year this may start out as a class discussion and lesson but should be later incorporated into each online assignment that they do until it becomes second nature. We know, that if you don’t use it, you lose it and digital citizenship is a skill that is way to important to lose.

Clement, J. (2020, Feb 26). Daily Social Media Usage Worldwide 2012-2019. Retrieved from Statistica: https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/

Farmer, L. (2011). Directing the Digital Moral Compass: teaching Digital Citizenship. International Association of School Librarianship. The Annual Conference, (pp. 1-5). Bradford. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.prxy.lib.unbc.ca/docview/1221249403?pq-origsite=summon

Hsu, H. P., Wenting, Z., & Hughes, J. E. (2019). Developing Elementary Students’ Digital Literacy Through Augmented Reality Creation: Insights From a Longitudinal Analysis of Questionnaires, Interviews, and Projects. In Journal of Educational Computing Research (Vol. 57, Issue 6). https://doi.org/10.1177/0735633118794515

Kim, M., & Choi, D. (2018). Development of Youth Digital Citizenship Scale and Implication fot Educational Setting . Educational Technology & Society, 155-171.

Marrs, H. (2019, Oct 1). Don’t teach digital citizenship-embed it! Retrieved from ISTE: https://www.iste.org/explore/In-the-classroom/Don?articleid=809

University of British Columbia. (n.d.). What is the Digital Tattoo Project? Retrieved from University of British Columbia: https://digitaltattoo.ubc.ca/

Wang, X., & Xing, W. (2018). Exploring the Influence of Parental Involvement and Socioeconomic Status on Teen Digital Citizenship: A Path Modeling Approach. Educational Technology and Society, 186-199.

What are learning progressions?

Learning progressions are the break down of a core competency into achievable pieces that can be sequentially worked on to eventually accomplish the goal.

Attribution: conveyor belt by Ben Davis from the Noun Project
https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=conveyor+belt&i=906266

The first thing that popped into my mind when reading about learning progressions was conveyor belts. I felt that this was a metaphor for learning progressions. In my own mind, a conveyor belt has small boxes moving along the belt, where the boxes represent the compartmentalized pieces of information that the kids must learn. Then as the learning goes on the conveyor belt moves along bringing the new boxes or learning progression. Then I think of the teacher and the educational assistants as the people stationed at the conveyor belt that watch and adapt in order to keep the boxes on track.  In addition, the speed in which the belt is moving is individualized to their pace. I also feel that this linear path and scaffolding of the curriculum represented as conveyor belt is that it is a linear path.

Why are learning progressions important?

They allow teachers to assess a student’s development and give a suggestion for the next steps in their learning. During this assessment, teachers figure out where the child is a zone of proximal development. This zone where we are assessing what a student is capable of, where they are now, and how can I as a teacher get them to their potential. The learning progressions also outline how a teacher can scaffold the learning progressions and start adding layers of complexity. I also think that having a good grasp on the progressions, allows the teacher to quickly adapt to the students present. You may need to go back a few steps with one child, and another skip forward.

What did you learn from today’s learning activity? 

In our class, we had the task of trying to create the learning progressions that contribute to a skill and what ones come after. My group examined what goes into the learning progressions of reading in grades K-9.

Based on our activity I learned that it takes a lot of knowledge about a subject area and familiarity with the curriculum in order to break down the learning progressions. But, on top of just knowing the content, you really must know students and how learning works. I think when making this progression, it may make sense on paper, but when you try and apply it to the classroom it may not work in the same way- or you find that there is too big of a gap between the learning progressions.

Also, what we found when we were listing out our interpretation of the learning progressions. What we noticed is that the progressions looked very traditional way of learning. Furthermore, our group noted that we have to actively plan activities based on these progressions that incorporate innovative teaching techniques and activities.

I have gone through high school, my undergrad and currently the education program; and I have seen a variety of ways that our educators have presented, motivated, and graded their curriculum.

During elementary school and high school, the content of the curriculum was presented as a product. The view of curriculum as a product refers to the idea that there were specific objectives that students had to meet. This led to teaching of specific set of information set up through specific learning experiences and then a specific grading criterion. The way in which I experienced this was with the mannnny work sheets through elementary school and mannny textbook practice problems through high school, that allowed us as student to output the product of our learning (content of the curriculum).

In university, I felt that the curriculum was similar that it had a rigid structure of content, grading, and learning intentions. However, the way that it was outlined was different. In university, the curriculum was viewed as a syllabus. This means that the curriculum was listed in the syllabus, very specifically in what topic would be covered, in what order, with what assessment. Whereas, in elementary and high school because these outlines were not always evident.

In the education program, we have looked at the way that curriculum is being taught today in the new (to me) BC curriculum. During this examination it seems that this curriculum is a praxis. Praxis, meaning that the curriculum is a flexible, movable, set of ideas where teachers want to achieve certain things in the classroom but there is room for growth and differentiation. For example, this curriculum highlights a teacher’s ability to be adaptable and reactive to what is going on in their classrooms. The teachers must act in response to the children learning. Then critically assess moving forward with a lesson, go back if they don’t get it, build off it if is going really well; in order to foster student’s inquiry and experimentation. Furthermore, the teacher must try and appeal to student’s intrinsic motivation- or desire to learn for the sake of learning.

The BC curriculum being a praxis allow for us to move away from the reward-based motivation system that is typically associated with curriculum structured as product or syllabus. Daniel Pink mentioned that reward-based learning is not enough to motivate and can even inhibit a person’s ability to reform a task. This idea of trying to get a reward takes over our ability to think critically. I have experienced this. In high school, I had one math teacher who would put a riddle, puzzle, or word problem on the board. The fastest one to solve the problem would get a candy. But I felt every time I would become flustered and couldn’t really think past the first way, I tried the problem.

After watching Daniel Pink’s video, I thought of how students probably feel when they are writing tests, where the stakes are a lot higher than a piece of candy.  When scholarships, GPA, and post secondary admission are on the line, a student is probably inhibiting their own ability to write that test from stress and anxiety alone. So, it makes sense how test anxiety be such a prevalent issue in our school system. I think it is for this reason that there has a been a push towards more formative and gradeless assessment. However, what I really wonder about is how you still produce summative assessment without grades. Since using words like “extending” compared to “A” or “86” can seem to mean the same thing when the grading system has been ingrained in our expectation of school. I think that there will have to be a real cognitive shift in teachers, kids, and parents in order to get to a point where it becomes second nature.

For now, as I continue to learn about assessment and curriculum, I think I would use a lot of formative assessment. Allowing kids to learn, receive feedback, and adapt. I don’t feel a student has to be summative assessed while they are learning, because knowing myself, I don’t want to be judged on something I have not had time to wrap my mind around. However, at the end of a unit or what not, I think coming up with a variety of ways for students to show their learning will make it more accessible than just a test. We know every student is different and should have an opportunity to represent their learning in a way that is meaningful to them.