Week Nine: It's over! It's finally over!

I've done it! I've survived! I am out of the classroom and into the...well, into another classroom.  But this time as a student teacher!  I can't wait to mentor under my old football coach Kevin Grindey.  He has me very excited with his ideas on inquiry based education.

It was a fitting end to the semester to watch all of our cheesy videos today.  This class has shared a lot of laughs since September and I cannot wait to hear about how this student teaching placement goes for everyone.  As I sit here I struggle to think of anything insightful to write as honestly I want to click publish and not think about class for five months or so.  In fact, I may do just that. I just finished my unpolished iteration of a web page that can be found here:

http://camtataryn.weebly.com/

I know a lot of work still has to be done on it but I am happy with the start.  It really reminded me that I have to work on a professional resume however.  I think I may really need one of those a year from now.

Mike, thank you so much for this class.  Your relaxed demeanour was a major help as the semester got stressful towards the end.  I look forward to building on these ICT skills next year hopefully under your tutelage.

Cheers,
Cameron Tataryn

Week Eight: Ain't nobody got time for a blog

We have three more evenings remaining to get done everything there is to do in this term.  Forgive me that this week my blog post is not receiving top priority.  This was still an interesting week in ICT however.  Carmen and I went to Kelsey's all day on Saturday to assemble our soon-to-be award winning masterpiece of a film.  I hadn't put together a crappy youtube video since high school so it was a refreshing change of pace to return to that.  It was made much easier as well by the fact that Kelsey is an expert video editor.  Though we split the responsibilities, Kelsey was far superior to Carmen and I when it came to that part.  She was an excellent resource to guide us along as well.  I hope everyone likes cats and cheesy explosions...

I am still interested in seeing how much the things I have learned in this class will affect my second teaching placement.  In Social Studies, I hope to have students on their phones or tablets as much as possible.  I've heard Vincent Massey does not have a favorable stance on cell phone use in the classroom but maybe I can sneak it in while administration isn't looking.  I feel that students can learn all of the biggest lessons Social Studies has to offer by accessing the news so hopefully I can incorporate that into each class.  I guess we'll see!

Anyway, I'm going to attempt a few hours of sleep since I don't see myself getting a whole lot of that throughout this week of due dates.  I hope everyone has a more relaxing week than I'm about to!

Week Seven: The Force Awakens

It's Sunday night and everyone knows what that means: my blog post will be due in a matter of hours! It's time to sit down and reflect on my week.

First, I feel I should address something that I haven't spoken about yet.  Each week I write my blog post after dance rehearsal for Seven Ages' Fiddler on the Roof.  Today I was doing some Russian dancing steps that I hadn't done since taking Ukrainian dance as a kid in Russell and my legs are so sore that I can't help but complain about it to the internet.  Anyway, Fiddler on the Roof will be showing April 6-8 at the Centennial Auditorium if anyone is interested!  I will be playing the role of the lowly tailor Motel Kamzoil.

This week in ICT we received the task of creating a short video.  This is particularly interesting to me as I used to create youtube skits with my friends in middle school.  I will not be sharing any of the names we went under as I am understandably unwilling to share the cringeyness that was middle school Cam.  My best friend Riley and I worked on them mainly: I wrote the scripts and usually portrayed leading characters and he was most often the camera guy and editor.  These roles seem to have been worth something for our lives, too!  Riley has worked his way from being a camera man to an editing position for Global News Winnipeg and I've been milking all that I can out of the theatrical side of life.  Not to mention that when we were able to take classmates under our wings to create video projects for school I was able to create some of my favourite high school memories.

There is a small issue with having experience on these sides of things, however.  As I said, Riley was the one doing the editing.  I watched and could do the simple parts but I always had him to help out. Most people aren't aware of this however.  It seems that my classmates have high expectations for me with this kind of project.  We will see how it goes.  

There is one piece of advice in particular that I can give as someone with experience with every part of this process: set your expectations low.  To reiterate, you will never think your video is funny. Even if it does end up containing some semblance of wit you will be far too focused on "oh my gosh, does my voice really sound like that?!" to appreciate anything you worked on.  I hope the realisation comes peacefully to my classmates and we can all have fun making low quality audio visual entertainment!

Week Six: Nanaimo was beautiful!

In case my title didn't give it away, my travels combined with the whirlwind that was the Westcast conference provided very limited time to work on ICT.  Now that I've come back and I am a week behind in all my work I must admit that my anxiety levels are becoming more and more difficult to ignore.  Time to get one thing off of my To-Do list at least, let's blog about it!

The conference itself was excellent.  Though the Wednesday Evening Gala preceding the formal conference left a lot to desire (I mostly sat in the corner with a small Brandon University contingent eavesdropping about how students from other universities had this trip paid for in full), Thursday morning washed away the bad taste in a hurry.  I attended this conference with the expectation that the key note speakers would be very sought after and far too expensive for Brandon University so I was very excited to get a taste of high quality.  I was not disappointed.  The first key note speaker goes by the name of Shelley Moore and is pursuing her P.H.D. in inclusive education.  Oh my goodness are her metaphors on point.  She really spoke to me when she described education throughout the twentieth century alongside a picture of a automotive factory in Detroit.  She explained that the way we used to teach students worked great for assembly line workers, however she showed a second picture from the same angle taken from the last year or two and those workers were all replaced by machines.  Her point was that we can now make machines well enough to do mechanical jobs.  What we need to train students for now are the things that machines cannot do.  She is an excellent human.  I will be posting a video of hers onto the G+ community as well.

One of the more impactful takeaways from Westcast (at least from my point of view) wasn't necessarily any of the content but rather my impressions of education in the rest of the country.  In this faculty we don't go a week without someone pointing out that Manitoba is one of the weakest provinces in terms of education so we get the feeling that the grass may be greener elsewhere. Similarly to my first year of university in which I attended Minot State University however, I realised that these people were not smarter than us.  From what I could gather from a few short presentations and mingling with peers it seems that Brandon University is preparing us at a level that is at least on par with other provinces.  Moreover, we have a longer program to receive certification and we spend much more time student teaching.  I can confidently say that some of the presentations I've witnessed throughout the past six months in our class are at a generally higher level than some of the presentations that peers from other universities brought to this conference.

Now that I've gotten this brief blog post out of the way I am hoping to have some time to catch up on the other things I missed in ICT.  I haven't fooled around with photoshop for a number of years but creating a poster should be a nice refresher.  I am pleased to notice as well that tech task #8 involves the use of animoto since Miranda used some of those for our presentation.  The easiest way to catch up is to find out that you were ahead before you left, it seems!

Hopefully my next blog post will be on time but if someone sends me two time zones over again my blog will once again have to wait until Tuesday morning.

Week five: weebly wobbly woo

HTML never intimidated me.  I always figured I could pick it up if I ever needed to create a website. As it turns out however, even when I am able to ignore the coding step I am still not very adept at site creation.  It seems that the visual organization and content of a web site are far more daunting obstacles to my brain.  I'm already blogging about myself and now I have to create an entire weebly page about myself?  Oh boy.

Though I am pretty terrible at it, using weebly is very straight forward and easy to use.  I would even go so far as to say it's kind of fun to mess around with.  I'm not sure if my future potential employers are going to look at this site but if they do I intend on having a product that will reflect well upon me in their eyes.  In fact, it feels more likely that I'll have a well put together eportfolio than a physical binder full of glossy pages and scrapbook-style characteristics as I (try to) use technology to keep me organized.

I have been continuing to use google drive frequently though!  Miranda Sadler and I are departing for Westcast this Tuesday for Westcast in Nanaimo and we've assembled our entire presentation using the google drive.  I can already tell how immensely useful technolgy can be for things like networking.  Anyway, I haven't much more to say this week and I still have some work to do for ELA Methods in the morning.  That was my week in ICT!  I'll post when I get back from BC!

That Owl was Superb!

Hot diggity.  I was cheering for Atlanta, but how can a football fan hate an overtime Super Bowl game? (One that will likely spur the change of the ridiculous overtime format the NFL currently uses.) Anyway, ICT this week went well.

I won't lie, when I heard there was another speaker coming I was not very excited.  I didn't want to be the one complaining last week but holy cow did I dislike her presentation style.  She didn't let her colleague speak and all she did was read from the slides.  Please don't get her to present again.  This week however i found myself actually engaged as he explained Maple to us.  I think that might prove useful by the way.  I don't see myself relying on Maples groups for inspiration but it's certainly helpful as a tool when we're stuck.  I was bothered by one aspect however.  As he was addressing some of the early content on Maple (before he knew that we were a senior years course) he mentioned a number of planning guides set up specifically for K-8 teachers.  It seems that there is so much more for early years teachers.  Most PD days seemed to be geared toward them and now it seems a lot of online help exists for them as well.  Why is there nothing specifically for high school teachers?

Admittedly, I am starting to get down with the social aspect of this blog assignment.  It's kind of enjoyable keeping up with my classmates' blogs and I won't lie and say that I'm not pretty flattered to be included in some of them.  When Sonya messaged me to ask what I had mentioned in class earlier in the week so she could quote me in her blog I felt pretty good about myself!

I've got a good amount of nachos left over from the game so I'm going to put some work into that before bed, but thanks for reading my weekly ICT (and NFL playoffs) update!

Week Three Recap: WBC's

It's Sunday night once again and so now the internet gets another wrap up on my experiences with ICT.  The topic of the week was Web Based Courses.  Though I have not taken or taught any WBC's in the past I have still been close enough to them from a number of angles to have something of an opinion.  For starters, they're excellent.  One of the greatest advantages to living in this digital age is the ability that we have to conduct such things as lessons online.

In my first year of university in Minot, ND I was fortunate to spend a day in Minot High School shadowing a teacher.  One of the things that resonates in my memory of that day is watching the man I was shadowing conduct a lecture via correspondence with no more than a dozen rural students. Though I received only a brief overview of the online program, the fact that this was happening certainly exceeded my expectations of what I was going to see that day.  I have also been exposed to the idea of distance education through my father who has taught more than a few over his years working at Assiniboine Community College. The third party that I have discussed WBC's is my cousins who live in a hamlet outside of Tulon Manitoba.  In each of these cases, the main point was that WBC's are great for students who live in smaller schools.  The best thing about WBC's is that they make all sorts of course content available to all students regardless of where they live (assuming there is internet.)  Obviously I think this is great for most of Manitoba as the majority of schools are in rural communities.

I can not stress enough how much I am in favour of WBC's existing, however I am not sure that my calling is to create and moderate one myself.  Though I do consider myself tech savvy in comparison to the baby boomers working in the educational system, I feel this type of work may be best left to a more organised individual.  A huge part of why I want to teach has to do with the in person aspects. For instance I find that I excel with classroom management and my experience as a performer makes me much more adept at interacting with students in person.  More than adhering to my strengths however, I find that I need human interaction throughout the day to stay sane.  I am not sure that moderating a WBC would fulfil that need of mine.

Web Based Courses are an excellent resources to people all over the world...but someone else should teach them.

Week 2: Football makes me sad edition

I quite like the idea of updating this blog on Sunday evenings as a way of wrapping up my week.  What I failed to consider however was how little I would feel like writing about ICT after watching my Pittsburgh Steelers embarrass themselves in the AFC Championship game. For that reason this post will be brief and to the point.

The first thing that stood out in my mind about everything we did in class this week was not any of the material itself but the method in which it was presented.  I feel like teaching tech in the classroom is the best time to give the instruction "just play with it" and I love it. It seems to me that playing with it is the best way to learn most of these applications and google drive features and the attitude required to do so is very important for students to learn in my opinion.  If it were possible to teach more material by telling students to play with it, school would not only be more fun but lessons may resonate in the memories of students.

As for the programs and applications we were using I must say this week brought a sigh of relief to me. I have been working with my partner Miranda on a presentation for Westcast over the last several months and she has been inviting me to edit google documents the whole time.  I finally know what the heck she has been talking about.  Thank you!  Now that I know what I was supposed to have been doing I certainly see the potential that google docs has for collaboration.

Hopefully next week's blog will be a little easier to write as no millionaires will disappoint me (assuming the Jets don't play on Sunday.) Having the guest speaker on Tuesday will likely give me something to think about as well.  Anyway, Go Falcons, I guess.

You want a blog? You can't handle the blog!

I'm comfortable under many headings: athlete, performer, geek, or particularly educator.  One such heading I have never felt particularly close to however was blogger.  I've never been one to talk about myself.  In fact, I've spent most of my life in some kind of spotlight so I have always believed that if you do a good enough job with what you're doing other people will talk about you more than enough. Perhaps this assignment to keep a blog throughout this Classroom ICT course is already doing its job then, by forcing me to shift my thinking and write about my own experience...here goes nothing!

Within this first post I am supposed to provide some of my personal insight as to why technology is important to use in the classroom so I will get right to it.

The initial question may be as simple as "should I make sure to incorporate technology into the classroom?"  The answer however is not quite as straight forward as replying "yes."  Obviously, making an effort to incorporate technology into the classroom is something you want to do in this digital age but the reason should never be so shallow as thinking it's a good idea for the sake of itself. There certainly is a push to develop computer literacy within the school system and I will not argue as this becomes a priority, although I believe the proper question should not be how to implement technological tasks into a lesson but how a particular program or method can be used to bolster understanding. - Effectively killing two birds with one stone!

My reasoning for this outlook is rooted in my experience as a student.  When I entered high school they were just installing the first smart boards and by the time I exited nearly every classroom had one.  This provided some varying levels of effective instruction but I was fortunate, at least, to take note of the successes and failures my teachers had as they implemented this new technology into the curriculum.  The most common error I can recall is when a teacher would make the technology the centre of the lesson.  Students can tell when a lesson plan is shallow and a teacher is using technology just for the sake of itself (not to mention the fact that they generally have a better grasp of technology from the onset!) It can be very easy to lose all credibility by doing this. I think it is important for a teacher to ask themselves the question "Would I be conducting this lesson without this technology?" If the answer is no, my way of thinking is to try something else.

Just because I don't believe technology should be the centre of most classes, it does not mean that I am arguing the importance of implementing technological aid when applicable.  I view computer literacy similarly to how I view its less advanced predecessor.  In a working classroom the development of these skills should be a byproduct as we cover the main ideas of the course.  For example, by the time a student reaches high school they are working on essay structure and how to formulate an argument, but spelling and grammar are certainly being developed as they practice those skills.  By the same token, while going through their assignments a student in the 2010's should be developing computer skills as they progress.

Finally, my philosophy as a teacher stresses the importance of teaching students how to find answers and solve problems rather than learning the answers themselves.  If the answer to questions these days is so often "Google it", perhaps that is what we should be teaching them to do.