Category: Weekly Reflections

“Every student comes with an invisible backpack, you as well.” Said Tracy from BCEdAccess, our guest speaker from this week’s class. This class was particularly interesting to me as someone with a learning disability that was only diagnosed after my second year of university. I think it is incredibly important to expose future teachers to guest speakers such as Tracy and Kaori, who can speak upon their experiences with the education system.

They also spoke about the designation letter system and provided the class with advice to help our futures in education. They taught us the designation letter system, where students are categorized by letter based on their disability type. This system seems outdated to me. Here is a link to the Abbotsford school district list: Abbotsford School District Learning Support Services. They advised us to read student’s IEP‘s before the beginning of the year so that we are prepared for sensitivities and suchlike when the term begins. They made an important note saying that technology isn’t accessible to everyone, and that this became apparent during Covid-19, when online school rose in popularity.

Science Venture:

• An outreach STEM program that works with youth. Summer camp opportunities I may look into it if I choose not to be a lifeguard. Opportunity for on-campus employment or work in different areas of Vancouver Island.

Group Project

• Should discuss with the tech group how we will present our project, the presentation is on the 27th of November. 3-5 minute presentation showcasing the process of the project.
• common sense education: shows reviews on some software, tells what skills the tool could be used for, shows pedagogical ratings

AI Discussion

• AI can generate images, prompts, game strategies
• AI was made available to the public in 2023, which is a paradigm shift
• Something interesting: ChatGPT can operate in other languages but has less information in those languages. Can have implicit bias.
• ChatGPT can also generate rubrics
• outputs of AI are not currently under copyright, copyright can only be held by individuals.

Interacting with ChatGPT:

I have been struggling with lower back pain in barbell squats. I have experienced a lower back injury in the past and asked ChatGPT about some form tips to prevent injury, and it mentioned some good tips.

I also asked ChatGPT about how to make a springboard diving learn-to-dive lesson plan and it generated good main acitivities but made the lesson too advanced by incorporating backwards dives on the first lesson. I think it would be a good tool to use as a skeleton for the lesson or a checklist to ensure that everything is incorporated.

• Teachers are often looking for interactive graphic activities, but it’s not that hard to create them. Think about this for yourself, but also apply it to future students, such as making posters – why might one create graphics for teaching?
  • we can make visuals that are “culturally relevant” to the students to build healthy relationships
  • words combined with visuals are more memorable for the students (cognitive theory of multimedia learning)
• To make graphics, we can make use of tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Powerpoint.
  • we can also make worksheets with PowerPoint and awards for the students.

For our lab component, we experimented with these applications and created graphics to save with the class. Here’s what I created:

I took this picture of a nice Miata a few weeks ago and brought in some characters from the Studio Ghibli movies. I love how the Jiji‘s bow matches the car and Totoro‘s lighting aligns with the sunlight in the original image.

Today our class invited a guest speaker named Kirsten Pierce. We began by discussing how people learn about nature, touching upon the concept that individuals tend to show less concern for nature that they don’t have firsthand experience with. This highlights the importance of students venturing outdoors to observe the nature that surrounds them. We also discussed the idea of a “two-eyed lens.” This essentially means thinking about concepts in a broader way, such as thinking about what the concept means to ourselves but also thinking about what meaning it could hold for others in different contexts. Instead of looking at things from a single lens or single point of view, we broaden our perspective and consider other perceptions as well.

We also discussed the relationship between technology and the development of eco-literacy. Some technology that I’m familiar with would be stargazing apps. I’m familiar with this because my friends would often argue about which constellation is which or whether a bright dot is a star or a planet. I am also familiar with native-land.ca, which is a website that I used to help determine what Indigenous land I live on. Kirsten showed us many more resources, such as LeafSnap Plant Identification, Rock Identifier: Stone ID, Moon Phases and Lunar Calendar, Minecraft, and a few more.

This week our class was taught by Rich McCue. For the first bit of the class, we were taught about educational videos and some of the science behind them. One point that arose was that people will remember less content from a digital presentation if the words spoken are also written on the presentation slides. This concept was taught to me in my early years of high school while I was enrolled in the project-based learning program, and I feel that it is an inherently obvious fact. If you look at a company like Apple giving a presentation on their new iPhone, you’ll note that they don’t display blocks of text on the screen because they know it won’t catch the audience’s interest. Similarly, TED talks use a giant presentation screen that often projects visuals that relate to what the presenter is saying. I am glad that future teachers are being taught about memorable presentations since it means that fewer students will have to sit through lessons where the instructor reads points off of a slideshow that the learners could just read themselves.

For the lab component of the class, we were introduced to a screen capture application which we could use to create an educational video. I thought this was a nice application since it is versatile and easily accessible from my web browser. It also allowed me to choose whether I wanted to capture just my browser tab or my whole desktop screen, which is versatility that I appreciate. I already use a screen capture application on my desktop at home, but this new application called Screencastify seems like a good option for my laptop.

Here is the video that I made:

It was just a quick experimentation type of thing, so the quality isn’t spectacular. I still put effort into the editing and video creation, but I could do much better if I were in a quiet setting with a proper microphone.

As a person who works in pedagogy, I have long since been informed by my mentors that I must be mindful of my online presence. I have always been weary of my actions in public and somewhat careful of my posts online. In 2022, I began posting gaming clips on TikTok which I enjoyed and continue to enjoy even now. I also began livestreaming on Twitch and TikTok where I’ve made a small community of friends. While I’m gaming, my language isn’t necessarily PG, and I was concerned that this would negatively affect my career in teaching, however, I can’t get in trouble if I never get caught 😈.

On the internet I am known by an array of names and most are not my real name. When I search my full name on google, I am met with nothing relevant to me. When I search my full name and ‘Vancouver,’ my blog from PLP is the first result, which is relevant to me but not harmful in any way. When I scrolled further, I found my BC Diving Provincial results PDF, which is also beneficial if anything. When I clicked images, I found a picture of myself that I uploaded to my blog:

This image does not concern me in any way and I think that it displays my photoshop expertise nicely.

When I searched ‘angela chirico vancouver bc,’ I am also met with nothing, apart from an ID finder website. When I scroll down far enough here, I am able to find my instagram account. This makes me wonder if changing my username may be a good idea, since if I remove my full name it would be more difficult for others to scout me out online.

If you believe that you could risk your teaching career, then why post? Is it really worth it?

In my opinion, it is. On my Tiktok, I edit content into something that I’m proud of (most of the time) and I enjoy looking back on this collection that I have of funny little videos. It makes me happy that other people on the internet have been able to enjoy my little videos as well, and I’m grateful to have a platform to display my creativity on. Streaming and editing is a hobby I’ve come to enjoy over the past few years and I hope that I can continue to enjoy it for however long that I wish to.

I love talking to my STEM friends about homework. While they’re assigned labs and are stressed about midterms, I get to watch a film related to teaching and reflect on it. My little brother is in his second year of engineering at UBC and he can’t even leave the house, poor thing. He comes home from lectures and does homework until midnight, every weekday. His weekends are spent doing homework from morning until night. I hope it pays off one day.

As I briefly mentioned above, our task this week was to watch the film called Most Likely to Succeed. In brief, this is a documentary style film that examines a high school that has implemented different styles of education that contradict the traditional secondary classroom. I was enrolled in a program that followed this same idea of education, where we learn how to use technology and our work is project-based. I did the program back in 2016/2017 so it may have changed over the years, you can read more about it here. In my experience, most of my projects involved me cramming things together at the last minute and pulling all-nighters before exhibition day. I would tie my hair up in a disgusting bun for the week and spend every spare hour working on my creation. I would aspire to do many things for my projects but was often incapable of following through with my big ideas. My perfectionism focus also made me struggle with time-management. For instance, I remember constructing a model of a diving board that had something like a sensor which would sense when someone was about to hit it, and it could retract (or something). Unfortunately, I procrastinated this project until the last minute and was unable to complete a poster board for the display, meaning that there was a 3D model placed on a table where I stood with no visual story and nothing to draw guests in.

Attending the POL meetings with the teachers afterwards was usually a nerve-wracking experience. The criticism was difficult, especially when I knew that I hadn’t done all that I could have done for my projects. Watching Brian go through the same process that I had gone through made me nervous for him because I feared that he would be harshly criticized. Brian’s meeting went differently from mine, however. While I remember being faced with disappointment, Brian’s teacher’s acknowledged his strengths, saying, “One of the things that is special about you is that you’re a visionary person, and we do not want to hammer that out of you.” This phrase made me tear up because I can relate to Brian as a visionary person and having a teacher acknowledge this is incredibly meaningful.