Guest Speaker Presentation

Joanna Lake had a lot of great ideas on how to build community in the classroom. I liked the idea of doing attendance with guinea pig pictures. It was also great to see students get involved in their classroom, when I did out of school care, we were always encouraged to get the children involved with decorating the bulletin board and they loved showing off their ideas. I think self-assessment is very important for students so they can feel more in charge of their learning. I like the idea of con-constructing rubrics with the class, and it is something I would like to try out, I am just unsure how much time needs to be dedicated to doing that. Overall, Joanna seemed very knowledgeable, and I enjoyed her presentation. My practicum is in grade 6/7 so I found her experience especially useful as she mainly spoke from a middle school perspective.

One female stident looking a smartphone while four other students surround her to look as well. They are all in a classroom.
Photo by Max Fischer: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-boys-and-girls-looking-the-smartphone-together-5212669/

Fresh Grades

I think this is a great tool for keeping track of student work and communicating with parents. There are some privacy concerns so some parents may not want their children on the internet and the teacher would need to create another form of tracking progress. I noticed under the assessment section as a teacher you can display grades and do standards-based assessment which are not things we do currently in Canada. The assessment can be adapted to suit our curriculum’s proficiency scale, but you need to know how to do that because it is not one of the first options you see. I like that you can create classes for each subject if you are a general education teacher, or if you teach a specific subject in high school, you can create a class for each different block you have. I think for the primary years this would be very valuable for parents to see what their children are doing. For older students this would be a good way to manage their work and see their teachers’ assessments on their work, since at this age parents are less involved so it could be used more for teacher-student interaction.

Arduino Science Journal

This is the journal I looked at https://science-journal.arduino.cc/sj/module/motion/project/have-a-ball. It is about putting a phone in a foam ball to measure different types of motion. This project can be used from kindergarten to grade 12 so it has a wide range. That means they are not ready to use projects, they need to be adapted to your students. These activities seem very fun and hands on. However, they require a lot of equipment that you may not have in your classroom or be able to afford to buy. I like the idea of doing a science journal and I think it can be adapted to be on the computer or on pen and paper. You can also make these activities cross-curricular for example, you can make a graph of your findings to connect to the mathematics curriculum. My practicum is grade 6/7 and most of them have cell phones so I feel like this would be a useful for science classes however, I feel it would be more difficult to adapt these lessons for younger students due to lack of equipment. These activities also have a physics focus so it would be interesting if there were activities for the other areas of science or just more activities in general.