Week 7

This week we had the opportunity to listen to John Finch talk about technology and some of the impacts it has on our youth. The one topic that we had a discussion on that I found quite interesting was how a child reads nowadays. John mentioned how people today don't read the same way as people use to. People are getting lazy in the way they read. They are reading short blurbs or paragraphs that summarize the information instead of reading all the information to get the facts. Social Media apps like twitter only allow 140 characters per tweet which is changing how we want to receive our information. No one is willing to read more than a page any more. I for one am guilty of this. If I can find a summary of an article I will always just read that instead of reading the whole article. I think as teachers we need to encourage reading and provide our students with many opportunities to read many different type of texts.

Tech Task #6 My Personal Learning Network

My Personal Learning Network by Brook Mcgillivary

21st Century Student by Brook Mcgillivary

Week 6

This week we had the opportunity to two teachers who are relatively new to teaching. It was nice to listen to two teachers who are at the beginning stages of their teaching careers and have already achieved so much. Both of the teachers are pushing the limits on the way they are going about their teaching.

I really liked Kristen's "Canadian History Told By Us" assignment that she has her students do. I think this a great way to incorporate technology into the classroom and a nice way to introduce blogging in your classroom. While introducing this assignment would provide a great opportunity to talk about creating a positive digital footprint and talking about their digital literacy.

Tyler has a lot of really creative things that he does in his classroom. I think the "best word challenge" is a cool idea and is something that you could generate some good conversations in your classroom. I also like the Writers Workshop that he does in his class. I liked his idea of making a book on the stories that the students thought was their best work. His Romeo and Juliet assignment where he had the students use Instagram is an awesome way to get students excited about Shakespeare which isn't always the case.

Overall, both of these teachers have a great outlook on teaching and they both inspired me to try and push the limits with the type of assignments I create for my classroom.

Tech Task #3 Twitter

Twitter
I have had a personal twitter account for probably 6-7 years. I have never been an avid tweeter, but I am very comfortable using the app. During my last years ICT course we spent a decent amount of time discussing twitter and using for an educational purpose. We have followed that discussion up in this class and I really see the benefit of using on a professional level. I think the idea of having Manitoba Ed Talks every week is a really cool idea and a great way to broaden my professional network. I haven't done any tweeting since creating my account for this class, but I am going to start trying to. This course has already provided me with plenty of great people to follow on twitter and I hope it provides me with some more as the class goes on. Another part of twitter that will be very valuable will the "twitter lists". I knew what they were before I started the course but have never used them. I like how by following a certain list provides you access to a lot of other people who have similar interests as you do.

Follow me at @BMcGillivary27

Tech Task #2 Organizing your self online

What is Curation?
Curation is the assembling, managing, organizing and preserving some type of a collection. There are many different type of curators including curators of: art galleries, museums, scientists, or a collection of digital assets. For the sake of this tech task online curation is how we collect, organize, or present the online data that we access online.

How I Organize my online life?
The two main ways that I organize my online life is through my laptop and and iPhone. On my laptop I have all of the main websites that I use bookmarked so that I can access them easier. I have all of my email accounts, social media, school websites (Google Plus or Google Drive for example), and other websites that I frequently visit. Since I started bookmarking all of these websites last year I have felt that I am way more organized and on top of things. I also find that I visit these sites more often. On my iPhone I also have a lot of the same websites or apps on my phone. I would consider my primary online organizer. I have all of my social media on my phone as well as all of my emails on my phone. I enjoy following sports and fantasy sports so all of these are on my phone as well.

Curation and in my Future Classroom?
One app that I will try and use in my classroom is Google Drive. I think by being able to post assignments and resources online for my students to access will be an easy organizer. It makes it easy for me as a teacher to put them all in one spot that all of my students can access. Also, it will be very convenient for my students to be able to access this important information from any computer that has access to the internet. Another app that I will consider using in my classroom is a classroom blog. This is a nice way to have students submit assignments or keep journals.  

Week 5

Daniel who is a High School Teacher in Flin Flon zoomed in on to our class on Thursday. I found Daniel's outlook on teaching very inspiring. I liked how Daniel isn't afraid to go against the grain when planning his lessons. He mentioned many times throughout his presentation about how it is easy to plan your lessons in the conventional lecture style, but he encouraged us change it up and be creative when developing our lessons.

One thing that Daniel mentioned that really caught my interest was the 20 Time Project. I can't remember how long Daniel said he has been using the 20 Time Project in his classroom, but it sounds like an awesome project and something I would love to incorporate into my classroom.

Daniel also touched on his use of VR in his classroom. I think this would be something that would be very cool and something that the students would be very engaged in. He mentioned how that as a school in Flin Flon virtual reality is very useful because for them field trips are not a very viable option. Instead of going on a field trip you could use a VR app to experience it in the classroom.

Week 4

During our Tuesday's class we again talked about digital literacy and digital citizenship. We touched on these two terms in a previous class, but we went into more depth during this class. Digital literacy is a fundamental aspect of your digital citizenship. Digital literacy is being able to use technology whereas digital citizenship is being able to your technology in the way that it was meant to be used. I think as educators it is very important that we are encouraging our students to be good digital citizens. Most of our students will already have good digital literacy knowledge before stepping into our classroom, but they may not think about how important being a positive digital citizen is.

On Thursday we had John Evans attend our class for a presentation. John works for MAPLE (Manitoba Professional Learning Environment). I was not familiar with the MAPLE website, but John went through some of the groups that we can subscribe to and I think this website will be a great resource in my future. The fact that this is a private website and that you have to be accepted in makes the website that much better. Knowing that the information on the website is from fellow Manitoba Teachers and not some random on the internet verifies that this information is valid. I think this is a great idea to have a website like this and I am glad that we had the opportunity to listen to John tell us about how we can use it.