Category Archives: Philosophy Connections

Genius Hour Potential💡

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“Working in the Classroom” by Kathy Cassidy is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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:

“AI for Oceans: Behind the Scenes

Levels 2-4 use a pretrained model provided by the TensorFlow MobileNet 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.

Resource Idea

“Scratch coding cards” by dullhunk is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Thinking Outside the Box Connecting Literacies

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“CDL five” by hj_dewaard is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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.

“Wordle of my Ed.D. thesis” by dougbelshaw is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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.