Category: EdTech (Page 1 of 2)

It’s reading week! 

No classes Monday-Wednesday this week, so we don’t have a ECDI 336 class to reflect on this week. However, I spent last weekend doing a 24 hour charity event that I streamed so I thought I would reflect on the digital resources I used for that.

Myself and six others pledged to play games, and stream it all, for 24 straight hours last weekend. We started at 3 pm Saturday and ended a little after 3 pm on Sunday. I can truly say that I am amazed that my computer did not melt during the event. I was attending as a player but I was also the “producer” as I was running the stream, monitoring chat, checking and reporting on donations received, and playing a soundscape for the event.

I was trying to think of ways that I could use the digital tools for this event in educational ways so I’ll run through the tools and how they could be used in schools.

Discord – This is what we used for the players videos and audio feeds. It has some similarities to Zoom, but is meant for smaller groups with the bonus that the chat never goes away. Last March one of my profs used this when we switched to online classes and it was good for screen sharing and asking questions (in text or voice chat) it might be better for small classes.

Foundry VTT – This was our solution for our virtual tabletop. This could be interesting to use as a way to add some gamification to a lesson. You can create a map of just about anything and have students roll dice (digitally or in a classroom) for math games. 

Epidemic Sound – This site has hundreds of hours of music available. Yet I don’t know that it would be very useful in a classroom setting with the exception of using it as background music.

OBS Studios – This is a really powerful tool and I have  only scratched the surface of it. I think this would be most useful when creating online or video presentations. You can make different “scenes” and transition between them smoothly. For my purposes I had a starting soon, stream, be right back, video clips, and thank you scenes that I would transition between during the 24 hours. I think this would be great to use for a presentation with scenes for talking heads, slide decks, videos, and displaying websites in a seamless manner. Because OBS Studios will record everything for you the video you create can be uploaded to YouTube or sent directly to teachers and/or students. This software lasted over 24 hours and recorded the whole event! I’m impressed with both it and my computer for being able to handle that, not that anyone needs to record a 24 hours presentation.

That’s all I have to say about this for now.

Until next time!

Part of our to-do list for class this week was to watch some videos taken at the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). I was really interested in hearing about a school in Victoria that focused on inquiry based learning and teaching critical thinking. Hearing Jeff Hopkins talk about the way that students interact with other students and teachers at the school seemed so forign to me. It’s hard for me to think about running a class at an inquiry based school while trying to make sure students hit the milestones set out for them. The material got me wondering how teachers find themselves teaching at this sort of school. Maybe they have experience with inquiry learning, or teaching or maybe they see traditional classrooms not working and want to be part of the transition to a better system. Are the current teachers at inquiry schools the early adopters of the new way we educate Canadians or is this one step of many in education reform? 

We are almost a third of the way through this term and I feel like my days are flying by. With the time moving so quickly I am happy to be recording my journey in writing. I think this will be a great resource later when I am trying to remember some content that we have covered.

Until next time! 

This week I decided to look into using Trello. We had talked about this app in class and I was intrigued because I am always looking at ways to schedule myself or groups more efficiently. At first Trello looked  like Padlet, which I was using frequently in the summer for work. I used Padlet to work on weekly camp schedules and activities with my coworkers so we could both add in ideas where we thought they would fit best. However, after working in both apps I can see how much more powerful Trello is. 

Details Details Details!
I was impressed with how much this app allows you to edit in a single ‘card’. For instance, you might have a card labeled “English 201 Essay” but you can click into that card and add a more detailed description, a checklist, a due date, or assign that card to a member of a team you are working with. You can also assign colours (Trello also includes colour blind options) to cards, so you could make all your biology assignments appear blue, but those cards will turn red if not completed by the due date you assigned them. Although I wish they applied a traffic light system to the due date so you get a warning, yellow colour change, when you are 24hrs from a due date.

I was roaming the internet looking for helpful board templates and wow is there a bunch available out there! I love being able to try out different systems because I am able to see what I like best from a variety of sources and then merge them into something that I like working with. Trello boards are no different, so I’ll be copying some of the boards I have found to see what works for me.

If you want to copy some free Trello boards here is a video of how to copy a Trello board. 

I found the Trello boards in the above video through this YouTube account.

Until next time!