I think that the google classroom presentation was the most interesting and I could definitly see using google classroom as a way of creating an online space for a classroom. The only problem however is that after watching the presentation I don’t really know how to use google classroom or what the limitations of it are. Some exploration of the tool will definitly be useful but I think it would make a great central point for an online space for a classroom and then other technological tools can be applied to expand on the capabilities of the online space I am creating.
How can we prepare for instances of suspected plagiarism in our classrooms? is the question that I want to focus on for this post. In order to prepare for suspected plagiarism we should create student profiles where they are limited to only their minds for writting activites. These inclass portions should be done incrementally throughout a term to show development. The profiles can then be compared to term work that is being done throughout the semester to compare for plagiarism. If plagiarism seems evident then the student should be interviewed about the topic of the work they submitted and asked loaded questions in order to test if they wrote the paper or used ai.
I’m personally very in favor of including AI in education as I believe that its going to be used in the real world regardless of what happens in schools so it would be better to have students understand the technologies that are being used in different fields so that they are better suited to work in the real world. I think that with the development of AI the way teachers assess learning should change but I don’t think that this change should only be in response to ai development. Teachers should have always evaluated how students could use the technologies they have access to in order to complete specific tasks. School should be a space for students to experiment and make mistakes so that as adults they are more capable of adapting their way of being and applying their knowledge to the various problems they find themselves facing. I think that the line should be drawn at the point where students aren’t thinking about their projects anymore and are instead becomming dependent on ai to do their work for them. If students never learn how to use ai to be advantageous to them and instead become dependent when society outdates ai then those students will become outdated as well.
I personally really enjoy the gameification of learning concepts. That said I also believe that the way it is employed also makes a big impact on the success of the gamification. For example I really enjoy being able to see my progression so that I can set realistic goals in order to progress. However if the progression doesn’t make sense to me or the outcome of my progression seems useless to me it doesn’t add any motivation to apply effort into progression. For weight training I like recording my working weight for each exercise go up and when I have free time I love to throw that data into a graph or table to visualize the progression and determining the intervals of growth but the same thing doesn’t work for climbing. I think from an educational perspective it would also be really interesting to have curricular content structured as a skill tree instead of just a list. Some concepts are essential to understand before you can explore new ones and having a visual representation of how schemas are developed would be an excellent motivator for students as they can choose which ways they want to explore based on interest and they also can see thier progression as it adds up. Overall I think gameification is great but where its at currently seems only beneficial for add ons to pre existing classes and is somewhat uundeveloped enough to fully replace conventional learning.
After discussing accessibility this week I began thinking a lot more about how to create an accomodating classroom. That said however I think that one valubale thought that was missing in todays discussion is that your classroom shouldnt be built to be accessible to every possible disability but it should instead remain adaptable to accomodate to any students who may need additional consideration. I specifically really enjoyed the section where we discussed text colours and the need to consider how certain colours look on others. This is an essential consideration when making any form of presentation or work sheet. The more readable something is the better. If for whatever reason there is a desire to move away from conventional black on white the contrast of the text to the background should be significant so that no student will struggle with reading.
Image generated with help of bing image creator. Prompt was accessibility in the classroom
I didn’t realize we still have a week left for this but to finish off my reflection of climbing and it’s relation to teaching pedagogy I will talk about the importance of connections. So much of what I have learned from climbing has been largely due to the people I have interacted with. One of my favorite parts of the climbing community is how willing people are to share lessons they’ve learned and provide insight into how you can apply specific techniques to make your climbing easier. I moved here in september but I have recieved so much useful information on how to effectively climb from strangers, coworkers, and even Guillaume. The same applies to teaching and how you are surrounded by valuable resources it’s just up to you to utilize those resources.
Image above generated with the help of Bing image generator accessible from this link
My technology inquiry question is how can I create an online evolving brain stroming space with a class? This brought me and my group to mindmeister an online mind mapping software. Through exploring this we have found a number of other ways that it can be applied within our classes. We thought it was a great way to present terminology and complicated topics in a non overwhelming manner. We also thought it would act great as a space to facilitate discussion over specific questions that relate to eachother. The pros of mindmeister is that it has collaborative aspects built in which makes it great for a classroom. It is easily operated so anyone with a device can access it. The UI is also appealing and adds to the simplicity. The cons are how poorly the phone port works and how little you can accomplish with the free version. The pro version isn’t too expensive but it would probably be more valuable to find a mind mapping software that operated similarly for free. I think the greatest takeaway from the inquiry is that mindmesiter would be great for creating a FAQ for a class so that over the years student questions can be added and students can refer back to the mindmap FAQ when they have questions to streamline the troubleshooting component of learning and by browsing the FAQ students can also correct misconceptions they have about specific topics.
My involvment in the project was to look into how mindmeister could be used in a grade 11 chemistry class. I made my own mindmap and linked it to our original mindmap and then filmed a short video breaking down my mindmap. I don’t think anything I came across challenged my current perspective of technology in the classroom but I think that by playing with the tool I was able to think of some creative applications of Mindmesiter that I would employ in my teaching. If I had the premium version I would be able to create my visions in the tool and share that with students who can access it throgh the free version. The collaboration would be a little choppy but ideally I could use other technologies to streamline the process.
With this being my last blog post I wanted to finish off my thinking of climbing as a resource for developing pedagogy with discussing how expansive I am beginning to percieve climbing. Climbing by itself is a sport that is made up of traditional, sport and bouldering. Each of those section rely on the use fo different gear but all incorporate the same moves. Those moves can be performed indoors in a gym, outdoors in urban areas, on mountains or cliffs, outdoor boudlers, or on rock above water. They way the moves are applied is what makes climbing climibing. Since climbing is a movement based sport any movement can be incorporated into it and so practicing stuff like gymnastics and calisthenics becomes valuable and the different sports feed into eachother to encourage growth and progression. This is how I’m beggining to see everything. You can break down individual activites into their finest componenets but you can also uncompartmentalize your knowledge by drawing upon your knowledge of two different things to accomplish one task. That then creates a pathway in your brain establishing a relationship between the two knowledges. This can be repeated over and over as every skill you develop is tranferable in some way. My goal from here forward is to continue to develop my skills but also place myself in different sports, research areas, and environments to continue my growth as a person.
Last week I finished off talking about platueing and it is something everyone experiences in any field they are in. It is the feeling of lack of progression in comparison to the intial feelings of progression when they first started what it is they are doing. This happens all of the time in climbing because people are focused on grades. Grading is subjective and people tend to get sucked into the thought process of having to send the next grade to feel like they are doing better. This ends up becomming really toxic because people will use it to make others feel inferior or will think poorly of themselves if they complete a new grade but then get stuck at that level for a long period of time. The way I’ve tackled getting my atheletes to avoid the feeling of platueing is providing them a framework for how to visualize their progress. The objective is to go up grades but between each promotion they need to complete a large number of climbs that they are already climbing at. To do that they need to work on problems that are difficult for them. So then the goal isn’t to complete the whole climb it’s to complete a move on it. So we take the large scale progression adn break it down to its smallest component. Now every time they complete a move they couldn’t originally do they get the feeling of progression and that scales until eventually they are able to move up a grade.
Image generated with Bing ai photo generator. Prompt was to create an image of small steps making up larger steps.
This week I was coaching the junior league kids at my work I was focused on the kind of vocabulary I used when speaking to them. I avoided telling them directly what to do and instead asked them question to encourage metacognition. The questions I asked were along the lines of “Where di you fall” “Why do you think you fell” “What will you do next time”. I didn’t accept answer such as I wasn’t strong enough or I slipped. I wanted them to really think about how they positioned their bodies and if they didn’t know I’d have them do the climb again but have them pay attention to the different moves they are making. After doing it a second time they had way more to say and reflected more on what they were doing instead of avoiding thinking about their failures. This was extremely useful to get them reflecting but this type of thinking can very easily lead into the feeling of platueing. I will talk on how I’m tackling that next week.
Image generated with Bing ai generation. Prompt was create an image portraying the feeling of a platue. Tool accesible here
