Week 11 Reflection – The Exit Meeting
Heading into this week there were only a handful of things remaining on my to-do list for this course, especially with the pod presentations behind us. I have to complete and post my final free inquiry post, complete and submit the self-assessments for both the open Inquiry and weekly reflection posts, and prepare for my exit meeting with Mike on Thursday which includes the completion of this post.
For my final free inquiry post I ended up creating 2 posts: one which documented my final food truck destination experience and the second post was a conclusion to my free inquiry as well as information about an upcoming Food Truck Wars festival. I really enjoyed this assignment, not only because it was linked to my passions of food and teaching but also because I have toyed with the idea of creating a blog based on my food adventures but never got around to it. I hope that those that read my posts enjoyed them, got to know me, and are maybe even going to visit some of the food trucks I went to.
Since I’ve never written a blog before I would say that the biggest challenge I faced was figuring out how to turn what looked like a mini essay into something that looked like a blog post. I had to remind myself to use the technology to the fullest by ensuring that my posts had visual content and hyperlinks since these aren’t things I typically include in my writing. As you can see in my week 3 blog post I started off by doing this through the inclusion of images and hyperlinks, but then as I got more comfortable creating blog posts I started including things such as subheadings making them more blog-like and easier to read as you can see in my week 9 blog post.
When it comes to the content of my blog posts I would say that the topic I think will be the most prevalent when I become a teacher is the topic of AI. AI is something that a majority of us have probably used to help us with schoolwork and we will probably end up in a classroom where students have used it to help them as well, so I think that rather than seeing AI as something that we should avoid at all costs, it’s better to embrace it as we know that students are using it, and teach them the concerns as well as find a way to use it to positively affect our students’ learning such as by using Do Ink for an assignment where students have to choose a backdrop for a story they have written and present their stories to the class with it in the background, or using something like Minecraft Education to teach students about AI (see my week 3 reflection for more information about these two platforms). I am happy to know that districts and schools have put into place significant efforts to ensure privacy and security when it comes to the use of AI, however I do have some concerns as to whether such apps are impacting students’ ability to creatively and imaginatively think without a starting point being given to them, especially if they’re used in the primary grades.
Overall privacy, security, and accessibility are big topics when it come to AI and the use of apps and other technologies in the classroom – they are all very important and need to be kept front of mind. Through this course I was happy to learn that districts and schools seem to be on top of this and have put relevant policies in place and are screening the technologies accordingly, however I realize that I also have to take personal responsibility for this and ensure that the technology I’m using in my classroom is inclusive and is keeping my students’ personal information private.
I am also walking away from this course with a toolkit of valuable teaching resources. To be honest I was expecting to walk away with the technology-based resources but not curriculum related ones as well such as:
- Focused Education Resources – these resources provide students with age-based information about a wide range of different topics
- Live it Earth – this resource provides scientific learnings in a fun and engaging way
- I Am Because We Are – a website which included a separate PDF teacher’s guide which includes teaching tools about Black Canadian history – although I have already taken the history course in the education program, this was not a topic that was covered a whole lot is one that I would need a lot of support and resources for in order to do it justice in the classroom
- SAMR – this model helps teachers evaluate how they are incorporating technology in the classroom so that rather than using technology just because, its use is actually beneficial