Blog Post 1

My current beliefs regarding assessment in the elementary school classrooms are that they are much more in-depth and advanced from when I attended school. I believe assessment is extremely important and can be used in multiple ways. Assessment to me means more than just testing a student based on their knowledge of the content through paper and pen testing. This is the type of assessment I can recall as a child, or having to read for my teacher for him/her to see how well I am progressing. I believed this type of assessment is not beneficial because testing does not always grasp a student’s knowledge of the content. A student may be very intelligent but struggle when it comes to testing, and I believe it is critical to incorporate other types of assessments that can give a true representation of that student’s understanding. I personally struggle when it comes to multiple choice testing, I would much rather prefer short answer testing, that way I am able to explain my thoughts. This is where multiple choice lacks, as it does not allow the student to explain themselves.

Assessment has expanded and I hope continues to expand through the upcoming years to give students the opportunity to reach their full potential to learn as they deserve. Some types of assessment that I find beneficial are participation marks throughout the class because if the student is participating regularly it shows there is an effort in their learning and they understand the concepts. If the student ends up scoring poorly on another form of assessment you as a teacher can still see there is some form of understanding during class participation that is not reflecting in their marks. Discussion is a great way to see if students are on the right track because if they are talking about something that is completely different you as a teacher can direct them back to what they should be focusing on. This is beneficial before other forms of assessment, making sure everyone has an understanding and is on the same page before jumping into another lesson.

Another form of assessment is through assignments, if students are able to complete assignments by applying their knowledge they have learned and connect them to other concepts, it shows they have a developed a deep understanding that they are capable of transferring that knowledge and apply it to something else. Another form is through observations. Along with discussion, seeing students interacting with their peers, observing them during class work time or individual time can help students share and gain new ideas. This can help build their knowledge individually and expand their learning potential. Growing up I do not recall completing a lot of group work or assignments, I think it is beneficial for students to learn from one another as much as it is important for the students to learn from the teacher and for the teacher to learn from their students.

In the younger grades such as kindergarten to grade 2 students may not be aware of the different types of assessments the teacher is using opposed to the higher grades such as grade 5 to grade 8 students are capable of understanding their own marks. Report cards start to become more important in the highschool years where students need to maintain certain grades to apply for college or university. I think students should be aware of the different forms of assessment in all grades as their learning is very important to us. 

Week 6!

         This week we focused on our last section in the strand number sense and numerations, touching upon Ratios, Rate and Proportions. A ratio can be expressed as either a fraction (2/3) or a ratio (2:3) expressing a comparison of quantities that are the same units. A rate is a comparison or ratio of two different measurements that are different units, for example, distance and time (110km/hr). Lastly, proportion is an equation that shows equivalent ratios in fraction form, for example, 3/4=9/12.

        Some things that stuck out to me this week were the activities within the presentations. Below you will find a picture with 3 fun, and engaging activities that you can use in your classroom to teach these concepts!

        On the left you will see two pie charts, the students were asked to organize the different foods into their food groups and label the percentages of each group onto the pie graph. I think this exercise is very beneficial because they are not only looking at a math problem but are also incorporating health concepts into the lesson as well. Students are required to know their food groups in order to complete this question to answer it correctly. In the second portion students are asked to than show the percentages of foods that are junk and healthy food. Here again students should know the differences.

       In the middle we played the price is right, looking at different bookstores and the different costs per round. For each round the students were asked to figure out what bookstore would offer the cheapest value for 5 books. This question is beneficial for students to use if they were at a grocery store, shopping for clothes or trying to figure out what store would offer than the cheapest and best deal.

       On the right, we looked at a recipe that I thought was creative and interesting because students can also go home and attempt to make these oat bars! It looks at the quantities of each ingredient, and asks the students to alter the recipe that is originally for 10 people, for now 30 people. I think these types of questions are great because it is incorporating real life situations for the students to see the connection with what their learning in the classroom and how they can use it in their daily lives. This makes learning become more meaningful!

       The great thing about all these activities is that you can modify and alter them to different concepts or subjects within your classrooms! Creating a fun, creative and positive learning environment that connects to real-life situations that they can take out of the classroom. It's nice when students are able to see a connection with what their learning, and can give that extra motivation to learn!

FINAL WEEK!

I have added some badges I have competed throughout this 6 week course within the TPACK Quest tab of my blog. These badges have helped me build a deeper understanding for technology in the classroom. These badges allowed me to explore new resources, come out of my comfort zone, and use tools I never thought to use before. I feel my knowledge for use of technology in the classroom has expanded and I am excited to apply and use these tools in the future. 

Completing these badges and the course in general has made me feel extremely happy and accomplished BUT... can you believe its already over?!?!?! I can't. These 6 weeks flew by, and I now want to take a moment and let's sink in to how I really feel...

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Yes, that's happy---> Sad. Happy we have Thursday's off now, but sad that such a fun class has come to an end.

This last week has been the hardest I would say considering we had to create our Ted Talk. Now this can be found in the Ted Talk Tab above!! (I personally would rather you did not go watch it, but who are we kidding, I know you are going to anyway...) So in this case I hope you enjoy it if you choose to watch it, because it took about 8927982 takes. I would have preferred to create a blobbers video but you would be watching that one for hours.

ANYWAYS. I hope you enjoyed reading my blog posts over the past 6 weeks, and appreciate that you tagged along my journey through this technology course! I hope you learned a thing or two, and enjoyed the resources that I have posted.

Signing off.


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Week 5!

It's almost the end !!! This week I have completed the movie trailer for my Genius Hour Question, that can be found in the tab above. As this course is coming to an end I have realized that I was not able to get super specific with my Genius Hour Question by actually create an itinerary. Europe is HUGE, and there are A LOT of places I would like to visit that I would definitely need to make more than one trip down. I ended up narrowing it down to Rome, Italy for this assignment. I decided to look up package deals compared to buying a roundtrip flight and winging it when you get down there. I was able to find prices and create a general overview of how much it would cost which I thought was still interesting. I realized that booking a roundtrip flight then going to hostels would be the best call to keep the trip budget friendly, however I would also say that I would not want to do something like this alone. I would 100% want someone else to come with me because for me that is a little risky, but that's also because 1) I have never travelled alone before and 2) I have never actually slept in a hostel BUT have heard great things from friends.

Below on Padlet I have created a page to store research that I have found so far that I thought was beneficial and worth saving! It looks at some tips, comparisons, and provides some links to websites I found were very useful.

This week I will be creating my Ted Talk, so STAY TUNED. Hopefully finding some more useful information to add to this padlet or into the Ted Talk video. 

Until next week!

Week 5!

For this week’s math class we focused on integers, adding positive numbers, and negative numbers together! For example, 5 + (-3)= 2.  A tough concept for most to grasp onto so what was great about this week was we learned some different manipulative a teacher could use in the classroom to create a better understanding environment for students. Some manipulative that can be used are: base team blocks, connecting cubes, games, spinners, and counters. Using manipulative’s is beneficial for students because it allows them to visualize something and move it around, whereas seeing the numbers on a piece of paper may be intimidating and confusing for some.

What really stuck with me this week was a riddle that helps students remember and understand integers. This riddle is about a Town, and uses good/ bad people leaving and entering the town as positive or negative factors to the town. 

I think applying riddles like the one above, songs and visuals is very beneficial for students to learn a concept. It allows them to remember something easily and can potentially stick with them in the future. I know I would reminisce with friends and talk about the fun things we used to do in school and laugh at the fact that we still remembered it. This is what I want my future students to be like, I want them to look back and say remember this time? or I have no problem with multiplication because my teacher made us sing a song I still remember. I hope to make a positive impact on my students in the future, and believe that this is a better approach for students to learn as it will end up sticking with them longer than you think, rather than memorizing something for a test and already forgetting it a week later. 

And that's my wrap up for this week! Stay tuned for Week 6!

Media Literacy

Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog!

As I have begun my journey to become a future educator, I have noticed the enormous shift in education. Applying technology into the curriculum is the new big thing, and the traditional style…well, not so much. As a start I will be introducing two terms that I will discuss throughout this blog, those being media education and media literacy. To begin, media education is the process that students go through to become media literate, and media literacy is being able to evaluate, analyze and understand media messages and productions. That being said, it gives students a chance to explore, be creative and learn in a fun and engaging way!

            Not fully convinced? Here are some reasons why teachers should teach media literacy in the classroom…It allows students to question, evaluate and appreciate the media, allowing them to become active, creative and engaged with different media consumers. It is bringing real life situations into the classroom by giving relevance to traditional subjects such as English, Health, History and Art. For example,What influences does the media have on individuals regarding their body image and how they eat? Media education is student-centred learning, where media such as music, comics, television and video games are apart of the students every day life that they enjoy. It encourages students to use media tools, and prepares them for potential future work placements that use different forms of communication. It deepens the students understanding of diversity, helps the students personal growth and social development, and can help students critique media. This meaning they can differentiate between fantasy and real-life things. They can understand what they should be posting online, and what they should avoid. This as well can be beneficial to them as future employers. 

            Now to incorporate media literacy into your classroom you can give students the chance to be able to create their own media, instead of just analyzing it. This will give your students a fun, and hands on experience. Allow your students to bring their own media to the classroom, with your expectations for the assignment, will allow them to have fun and be more engaged if they have a choice to pick something they are interested in. Another strategy would be to make it so you're asking questions, not just giving them answers. Although you may have an opinion, your students have their own as well. Give them time to share theirs with the class to create a class discussion, this will also help students look at other ideas, and expand their own thinking. Lastly, teach about media, don’t just teach with media, this means that using media in the classroom is good but they need to learn about it or else it is not as beneficial. For example, you can use a book and a movie they are reading within the class. Have them compare the differences between both, and see what way was more meaningful.

For more in-depth information of the information above, click here. 

Denise Krebs. (November 25, 2011). Technology Use. (Flickr Image). Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2dLRu3f 

For educational games, teacher tools, and information for parents click here. 

Week 4!

Welcome back!

This week we focused on decimals and fractions. I was one of the three students to present  and I focused my lesson solely on the relationship between decimals and fractions. To prep for my presentation and develop a better understanding of this topic I found this Youtube video extremely helpful. Fast forward to 3:40 to the decimal portion of the video.



It is important to teach students the meaning of each number value before AND after the decimal as this video outlines the base-ten number system. For example,  14.738 represents (1 tens, 4 ones, 7 tenths, 3 hundredths and 8 thousandths).  I highly recommend looking at the example she demonstrates at 4:30 minutes in the video to use in your classroom as an introduction to this topic. It provides a clear understanding that I believe will help students get comfortable right off the bat!

Roland O'Daniel. (February 25, 2010). Exit slips. (Online Image). Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2cVWoyi 

Above you see an image of three different ways a student demonstrates what 0.9 can represent. Students LOVE visuals, and what better way to teach students fractions then with PIZZA. Yes you read that correctly, it wasn't your hunger taking over your mind. Pizza is a great representation that you can use to explain fractions to your students, but be careful with this because if the pizza isn't perfectly circular each piece cannot be equal to one another. 

I found this fraction pizza game online called Tony Fraction's Pizza Shop. It creates orders at the top screen, allowing the students to create the pizza on their own and pressing "send" when they completed the order. If the student creates the pizza correctly they get the cost of the pizza in their earnings, however if the student gets the order wrong, a message appears on the screen stating "Incorrect. Your costumer is not happy. $2.00 off" that comes out of their earnings. I think its a fun way for students to learn, and can motivate students to see how much they can earn (even though it's not real money...sigh). 

Regarding our time in class, after presenting I reflected what went well and what did not. This is great to do to know what to change and keep the next time I choose to use this activity again. I definitely enjoyed creating a lesson because it allowed me to refresh on this topic as well as participate in the other lessons to get more ideas on how to present this information. I want to introduce one last activity that I enjoyed from this week, this is the Tarsia puzzle that teachers can make online. This concept allows teachers to use different math questions and have students try to solve the problems correctly to create a shape. Below, as you can see we were close but not close enough. We did not end up completing it but it was definitely motivating and I can definitely see myself creating a puzzle for my lessons in the future!

Until next time, Happy Thanksgiving!!

I Need My Monster Quiz

Hi everyone!

Today I am exploring Google Forms, I have created a mini quiz based on the storybook I Need My Monster. Feel free to watch this Youtube video, and take my quiz!

Week 4!

First off, have you ever thought to yourself "Could they have made this URL any longer??" when you are referencing something? Well you have come to the right place and this website is a LIFESAVER!  Introducing to you... BITLY ! I'm obsessed, and wish I knew about this website sooner. sigh.


Secondly, as for my Genius Hour Question, I found a blog that I would like to share with you, click here. This blog has a ton of useful tips, and resources that I will be using to help complete my Genius Hour Question and will be posting some more information shortly.

So sit tight!!

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