This mini unit is a thematic unit created around the topic of residential schools. This is a Grade 3 Unit and an introduction to Residential Schools as a prelude to the tougher topics introduced in Grade 5. This unit is centered around read-alouds and encouraged students to relate their school experience today to those of the First Nations children when they were forced to leave their families. (some outside resources have been utilized and may not be attached to this document)
This is a project approach around Locks and Keys I created with a Kindergarten focus. The plan was inspired by my 5 year old nephew and is quite detailed with a classroom set up overview and layout, as well as detailed explanations of curricular goals and a connection to local community.
It is hard to believe that 6 weeks has passed since writing my first learning journey post. I decided to make another edible arrangement to wrap up the required course posts. Although this class is officially over, my edible arrangement creating most is just getting started. This skill brings me such joy and is a positive, productive way to channel my over active mind. I am the kind of person that needs to feel I have accomplished something each day, and having a tangible result helps bring me that. The icing on the cake, or chocolate on the fruit, in all of this is it brings joy to others as well. Creating the pieces is a small part of what makes me happy when practicing this skill, it is the appreciation for the art from recipients that really makes me feel proud of what I have created. I am blessed to be a part of the small community I live in and really wanted to be able to give back to those that give of themselves….the essential workers.
When learning a new skill does not always end up being the skill itself. Although I have learned many new technology skills, my biggest take away during this project is how small acts of kindness can change the day for the better. I remember watching and being inspired by the movie “Pay It Forward.” and the random acts of kindness trend that followed. I have been the recipient of small gestures in the pass and this was a way to continue to spread joy.
This weeks arrangement reveal….. “Dreams, Daisies and Donuts” Made for Slobodian Pharmacy
The process
Apple slice donuts!
My former boss loves donuts as much as I do! The apple donuts were created with him in mind.
The back story…..Last year I gave up my position, after 15 years, at Slobodian Plarmacy to focus on my education. John and Tracey have been pillars in my personal and professional growth. They are the fantastic employers that exude kindness and generosity. They have been one of my major supports in life. It is a blessing to have employers who start off as role models and in time become friends. They continue to check in and offer to help in any way they can as I pursue my dream of becoming an educator. I have been thinking about this piece since the very first bouquet I successfully created, it had to be perfect! I wanted to bring my blog title alive….Slobodian Pharmacy is the where I learned to have a voice, gained confidence as an individual, went through the hardest times in my life and continue to go to for advice – professional and personal.
I used many of the techniques I learned online throughout this project to create the piece, but I had a vision and true to my style, I dug into my creativity and this one came straight form the heart.
Now for the learning recap……
Previous experience: “Memories of my theme party planning days when the boys were little were flooding my mind as well as that feeling of joy an accomplishment I felt when pulling off that perfect cake or brownie graveyard for the playschool Halloween party, and how the boys eyes lit up with delight when they seen the finished product. While I have baking and decorating with icing experience, turning fruit (maybe veggies) into art will be a whole new experience.” (week 1)
Week 2 – cutting simple fruit shapes, have to cut fruit thick enough to stay sturdy, berries are temperamental, importance of esthetic arrangement, Mother’s Day, PicCollage
Week 3 – tempering chocolate, types of chocolate, chocolate as decoration, dipping methods, fruit can be used to create patterns! iMovie and YouTube debut
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4 – put apples in lemon juice to deter browning, importance of arrangement and plating choice, caramel sauce from scratch, drizzling chocolate, InShot created video and photo collage.
Week 5 – Keto baking, berries are a go on the Keto “diet”, the beauty of parchment paper, Canva for recipe cards 🙂 make sure you take time to treat those you love.
Week 4
Week 6
Week 5
Week 6 – strawberry roses!, scalloped fruit, change in arrangement options and my patience test, iMovie fairytale trailer, PicCollage, InShot video.
Week 7 – putting all I have learned into action, dipping cut fruit in chocolate, apples make such cute donuts, the addition of greenery (celery), cutting letters, grape wreaths, creatively bringing a vision to life…..thankful thoughts, work of “heart” ❤️💙
Week 7 – Final Project
“FUN + Learning = the best educational experience” – Tamara L. Chilver
It is hard to believe I am sitting down to write my final #edtc300 Networked Learning” post. I chose the quote for a title as I do not believe the connections I have made during the short time in this class will end when the class has officially ended. The support I have received throughout this journey has been both humbling and inspiring. I believe that we get out of our experiences what we put in. I hope to keep connecting and building these relationships with not only those in this class but and my newly built PLN. I will take the knowledge I have incurred with me as I head into internship this fall. Before I go into the ways I have helped contribute to the learning of others, I want to thank everyone has helped me along the way in this process of learning to become more digitally aware and taking the time to reach out and connect.
Throughout this class I have participated in learning networks to connect with others on multiple platforms: padlet, slack, WordPress blogs, group texts, Twitter and contributing to zoom session conversations. Rather than link to the evidence of these conversations, please watch the video below to see how I have contributed to the learning of others which in turn helped me build and strengthen both personal and professional relationships. 👩🏻💻
Hello fellow learning enthusiasts! I am finally getting around to those strawberry roses I have been wanting to create. I found a great video tutorial on a blog site called California Strawberries pick real that explained the process step by step. (even the name sounds yummy) My go to sites are Instructables and All Recipes, but I am looking to expand my favorites list. I appreciate when the resources I find have both a video and written method, as the one I used for this project. I like to watch the video first and then follow the written instructions with the images from the video in mind. I was amazed at how simple the process of carving the strawberries was and how well they turned out!
I was excited to take this weeks creation to the Quilly Willy Early Learning Center to say thank you for all they do! The roses were the perfect gift for the 6 staff. However, I could not forget about the reason we have the center, the kiddos. I browsed images on the internet and came up with some ideas. I was going to rely on past learning experiences as well as signed up for a free online tutorial from Nita Grill to make scalloped flowers from radishes. The description explained that the technique could be used with fruit as well. I was pleased to find a follow-up lesson extended for free using watermelon. The 14 lesson course can be purchased for $125.00. The tutorial did not end up working for the kiwi I had chosen to use this week, but I am still happy I took the time to learn the new skill. My chosen goal for the little people at the centre was an ice cream cone flower garden.
Inspirational screen shots I am a messy creator Final fruit creations!
I had so much fun making these whimsical creations this week! The smile of amazement on the staff and kiddies faces was worth every minute of the effort🥰
To end this weeks learning I challenged my tech skills and created a movie trailer to give you a preview to my final post! Hope you enjoy 📽
Trial and Error: You may have seen in the video the jar with the green liquid. My niece, nephew and I tried to make rock candy sticks to add to the flower garden. Unfortunately, the sugar all fell to the bottom of the jar and no crystals formed on the stick. I conducted some research and found that we may not have let the sugar stick dry long enough before we inserted them into the syrup, or we did not let the syrup cool long enough….we have yet to retry the process!
Last semester I read an article about the top 24 trends predicted for education in 2020. One of the trends was artificial intelligence. When scrolling through the options for our “Hour of Code” assignment my interest was caught by AI for Oceans. It triggered my memory back to the article and a conversation I had with Yohan in a Zoom breakout session where he was talking about AI in the classroom. While I have heard of AI, I was not familiar with how it worked. This code game was going to teach me how AI and machine learning can be used to address world problems….specifically stewardship of the ocean. The site nicely laid out exactly what I was to expect and learn from experience I was about to partake in:
Levels 2-4 use a pretrained model provided by the TensorFlowMobileNet project. A MobileNet model is a convolutional neural network that has been trained on ImageNet, a dataset of over 14 million images hand-annotated with words such as “balloon” or “strawberry”. In order to customize this model with the labeled training data the student generates in this activity, we use a technique called Transfer Learning. Each image in the training dataset is fed to MobileNet, as pixels, to obtain a list of annotations that are most likely to apply to it. Then, for a new image, we feed it to MobileNet and compare its resulting list of annotations to those from the training dataset. We classify the new image with the same label (such as “fish” or “not fish”) as the images from the training set with the most similar results.
Levels 6-8 use a Support-Vector Machine (SVM). We look at each component of the fish (such as eyes, mouth, body) and assemble all of the metadata for the components (such as number of teeth, body shape) into a vector of numbers for each fish. We use these vectors to train the SVM. Based on the training data, the SVM separates the “space” of all possible fish into two parts, which correspond to the classes we are trying to learn (such as “blue” or “not blue”).” – *TAKEN DIRECTLY FROM DDDDDDDDDDDDD
Check out my experience!!!!! (watch in full screen to see better:))
I played the “fish” game 2 more times after I completed the first round and received my certificate! I was curious to see how my results would change by what I taught the computer to recognize as fish and not fish. The results portrayed a tangible way to see how what we teach the computer is the evidence it accepts as real and uses in the future to acquire results. I also played and changed the amount of information I gave the computer to use in assessing for results. The more times I labeled the images as fish or non fish the more accurate the computer was able to categorize the images.
This experience made me think of coding as a Genius hour project and the benefits of the integration of human and technological environments. Genius hour was another top trend for education in 2020. This would be a great way for students to be introduced to a new topic and learn through inquiry and exploring code in a self-paced and self-directed manner. Students would learn the importance of coding. Coding provides opportunity of students to learn resilience, problem-solving skills, expands creativity, learn about technology and how computers work and the important lesson that being successful takes practice. This could potentially expand job opportunities in a future immersed in technology.
I plan to continue exploring artificial intelligence and coding with the completion of additional Hour of Code experiences to further learn and become more fluent in the concepts. (plus it is addicting and FUN!) I look forward to integrating coding into the classroom with both online and offline experiences by using activities like the coding with cards activity.
Hello readers! Thank you for taking the time to drop by. I chose this image with a specific intention to start my blog today. Part of my teaching philosophy is ensuring I using a diverse range of resources to reach multiple learning styles. It is so important that every student has the opportunity to tap into their strengths as learners, and I personally find images help in connecting information to a central idea. I could have chose to write about what it means to be digitally literate, but found the image summed it up better than I could have rambled on about, and we have talked about the concept in class. When completing my pre-internship days in a Grade 3 class I found that students were more engaged when they had opportunity to share ideas and information and a great way to do this is with graphic organizers like the one I chose above.
Working with the students in Grade 3 was rewarding and I hope to be in a Grade 3 or 4 class for internship so I am going to talk about how I can teach students at this age to be digitally literate and connect those literacies to other areas of learning. The Grade 3 ELA curriculum directly connects to digital literacies. Outcome CR3.2 View and respond to grade-appropriate visual and multimedia texts (including videos, cartoons, illustrations, diagrams, charts, maps, and posters) explaining reactions and connections as well as visual features that convey humour, emotion, and mood. This outcome made me think about of class lecture and the Four Moves and a Habit resource (link provides a pictorial representation), also found in the Web Literacy for student fact-checkers resource by Mike Caulfield. The Habit: Check your Emotions – Move 1: Check for Previous Work, Move 2: Group stream to the resource, Move 3: Read Laterally, Move 4: Circle back. I can take these moves and rewrite them into student friendly language and then provide resources for students to fact check and analyze. The student friendly cartoon about George Washington’s teeth would fit perfectly into this Outcome as well as lead to potential Social Studies content. Do the students know who George Washington is? Having the students play the telephone game, like the birds, after introducing the cartoon and talking about how the media and digital images are not always real and look at the strategies they can use to determine what is real and fake may be an authentic relatable way for students to see and understand just how mixed up stories can get when we only listen and trust the voice of one person rather than the collective group or multiple resources.
Another example to use and tap into the humor and emotion aspect of the outcome would be the house hippo to bring awareness to digital literacy and the importance of media smarts and how important it is to critically think about what is real and what is not. A good resource to I found start the conversation is Break the Fake Animal Quiz for Kids.
The NCTE is committed to connecting English literacies to socio-cultural realities. “Our task is to support the work of teachers as they work closely with their students and their families to build classrooms where everyone has an opportunity to participate in the conversation with a renewed consciousness of worth and possibility of their own language use and the literacies that they share. ELA Outcome CR3.1: Comprehend and respond to a variety of grade-level texts (including contemporary and traditional visual, oral, written, and multimedia) that address: identity, community, social responsibility and make comparison with personal experiences, along with Health Outcome USC3.6: Distinguish between examples of real violence (e.g., schoolyard fights, shaking a baby, bullying) and fictional violence (e.g., cartoons, world wrestling entertainment, video games) and determine the influence of both on health and well-being, could be combined to talk about social responsibility, digital citizenship, and the importance of being able to distinguish between what is real and fictional and extend and scaffold that learning into social justice issues and the media with the use of current world examples pertaining to digital literacies and teaching the critical literacy skills crucial to living in an connected “on and offline” and post-truth or “fake news” world.
Side Note: Cloud or word bubbles (as seen above) are another great way to brain storm collectively to introduce, research and discover new topics of study to create a pictorial representation.
This weeks topic of discussion in class was social media and our digital identities. What exactly is a digital identity? I found the following video that simply explains the meaning behind this term.
It is crazy to think that we live in a world where who we are as individuals is what we portray online, “our footprint on the web.” – Eric Stoller. I have been hesitant about personal posts on social media accounts and tend to share other thoughts, rather than express my own, especially recently since I entered into the education program. We have been cautioned about participation on social media accounts as one wrong post could hinder our chances of employment. The image below is how I was beginning to feel before this class!
In the video “One Tweet Can Ruin Your Life” we hear about a young woman posting a Tweet and waking up to a digital nightmare. One comment taken out of context, although probably a mistake, ruined Justine Sacco’s life. The mob mentality or cyber vigilantism had fellow Tweeters short of wanting her head served on a platter. One mistake! She lost her life a she knew it, and gained an anxiety and depression disorder. “Good people make mistakes.” We need to remember this when participating on social media and critically think about what we are reading and empathize for those that unfortunately made their mistake for the world to see. The idea that as digital citizens we take pleasure in someones else pain is a misuse of power. “The internet was a place where the voiceless people could have a voice and now has turned into a surveillance for society.” –Jon Ronson This terrifies me. It also serves as a reminder that we have to be digitally aware of what we are posting and ensure we are portraying a positive online presence.
A question posed that had me reflecting is ” What version of you online is the most true?” Previous to reading an article about having multiple online identities I would have had a very different answer. I would have argued that you should be posting authentically, your online presence should not differ from your offline life. I understand now that I too use different platforms for different reasons. My Facebook and almost non-existent Instagram are where I connect with friends and family. My newly acquired Twitter account is where I portray more of myself as a professional building my PLN. Just like in my “real” life different events involve different segments of life. As much as I can see the benefit of having multiple accounts for the same platform I cannot imagine keeping track of them all. As I commented on Morgans post Investigating Our Digital Footprints, I quite often can not remember the passwords I have for the accounts I have! So to answer the question, every part of my online presences is the most true, just in different segments of my life.
“Different sites, different audiences, different purposes. Very simple.” – Nicole Lee
While online lives can be fun, educational, and enable us to build connections I also see how misrepresentation can portray a double or “Split” life as explained in the article about Madison. Her silent struggle with depression and the pressure to present herself digitally perfect. As the use of filters, only posting smiles and successes flood social media there is a message being sent that if you are not always happy there is something wrong with you. The need for acknowledgment needed and sought through likes and continual comparison to an edited identity can change our perception of what is real. It is important that we also use our platforms to be authentic and supportive, and debunk the myth that “Happiness is a choice.” As educators, we need to teach about digital citizenship (this link provides a visual) and not only critical thinking and analyzing, but acting on those thoughts by really looking at what is real and what is fake. We need to educate about our digital identities being what put out there for other to see and react to…..positive or negative intentions.
This week I was able to put the things I had learned about digital identities to cyber sleuth s classmate and analyze her digital identity. This process made me realize just how much I could find out about someone online. I was able to find educational backgrounds, family members, friends, pets, birthday, where she lives, what she liked according to Pinterest. She has multiple social media accounts including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and a WordPress blog…not from our class list. Stevie’s online presences portrays a well-educated young lady that loves her family and friends. Her pictures showed her being an active Auntie and having 2 pet cats. She likes to celebrate and takes time to go out and have fun. She posts I would guess an average amount. Stevie seems to use Instagram and Facebook as personal platforms and Twitter as a professional platform, as talked about in the multiple identities article. i would venture to agree with the article when it states that having “multiple digital identities is more normal than you think.”
“The notion that we have just one authentic self is a fallacy.” Nicole Lee
How many of you reading this post have multiple accounts on the same platform? Please feel free to leave a comment as I am curious and would love to hear your thoughts 🙂
I thought I would share this PowToon video. It is a good explanation as well and just in case anyone was interested and exploring this platform for the final learning summary.
💭Dreams, Daisies, and Doughnuts 🍩 