Wow, hard to believe that my course prototype is ready to launch. It is even crazier to think that the semester has flown by so quickly, when it’s over I will have another 2 classes under my belt. I decided that I wanted to finish up Grad School before I returned to teaching in August from my maternity leave. I will also attempt a spring and then a summer course and tada, I will be finee, I will level up with my Masters Degree. On a side note I can’t believe my baby is six months old, where have the days gone.
Aimee, Justine, Rochelle and I decided that we wanted to focus our course prototype on Treaty Relationships. This subject can sometimes become difficult for teachers to implement in their classrooms. I personally think that now is the time for reconciliation because there is so much ignorance and mis-education when it comes to First Nations and Treaties. Also, working in a school that is home to 97% First Nation students is reason enough to explore First Nation culture.
I am looking forward to exploring another groups course prototype in just a few short days. It will be very helpful to receive some constructive criticism about our prototype, this will help us improve. I am not worried about being evaluated by my colleges as we are the guinea pigs for this EC&I 834 course, this is the first time that it was offered by Alec and Katia.
I have definitely learned a lot in terms of how to get a LMS up and running. I had never worked with Google Classroom before and found it very simple to use. I was even more shocked that I could have been using it for awhile with my Division but was never given any training on it or was it even mentioned as an option. My school uses Google Docs and Google Forms quite often but again I was unaware of Classroom. However, my step daughter spoke about using it in her high school. Perhaps, I should have just Googled it and I would have figured it out for myself a year ago. I mentioned in a previous blog about how I was using Google Docs with my students and it was becoming redundant in terms of creating Docs and having them share assignments with me, and basically my email inbox busting from student work. After this course I am very comfortable working with Google Classroom and feel that I will continue to create courses with it.
After we decided to use Google Classroom as our LMS, it was just a matter of how and what I wanted to do with my module. I had a few ideas in terms of lessons and just like my life I tend to overthink it and make it very complicated. My module grew to be something more than one lesson, maybe one lesson with four parts. It just seemed to flow so nicely together, I could not stop. I decided to make a few Screen-casts to familiarize students with Adobe Spark, Google Docs, Google Draw and Story Jumper, as for original content I used a Voice Over PowerPoint. I had never used some of the content creation tools myself so doing screen-casts allowed me to gain more experience in it. After I got the hang of all the new stuff that I was dabbling in, it wasn’t all that terrifying. In fact, I was even excited to use Screencastify, and show off my new learning to my step daughter, she wasn’t as excited as I was.
I think that my group did an amazing job tackling Treaty Education. It will be awesome to find out what other think about it too. If you are interested in taking a peak at our Grade 3 Treaty Education Prototype in Google Classroom send me an email at Chalyn_s@hotmail.com and I will provide you the classroom code.
Oh and an after the fact edit, our teacher information, rationale and rubrics can all be found in the about section of our Google Classroom.
Chalyn's Online Journey Through Technology 