Category: Weekly Reflections

Over the course of my inquiry into the perfect loaf of sourdough bread I have made approximately three loaves of bread a week and sometimes much more. Some of them were successes while others were failures. At first, the failures outweighed the successes and my bread more closely resembled a brick than a loaf of bread—but we ate them anyways. Toast it and load it with butter or turn it into french toast, both work with bread that is less than perfect. The successes on the other hand were super tasty moments I loved sharing with my partner and friends. When a loaf of sourdough came out of the oven having sprung up over twice the size of the dough I initially put in the oven, I may have jumped for joy with a grin that only left my face once I had closed my eyes for the night—even then I’m sure there were remnants of a smile and maybe some bread crumbs too.

The biggest breakthroughs I had were a long time in the making, more of a trial and error that is still ongoing. The most difficult thing I found about making a beautiful loaf of sourdough was getting the bread to rise well, the nice crispy crust wasn’t so much of a difficulty. I posted a few weeks back about the little tricks I use to help the bread get a good rise. I picked a few of them up as I researched and tried to get to the bottom of why my bread was rising so inconsistently even though my starter was super healthy.

If I were to carry out this inquiry again, I would choose a recipe that is easy to scale up or down. What I mean by this is that it is easy to increase the size of the batch to make even more bread using less starter. The amount of starter I had to work with was always the limiting factor because the recipe uses quite a bit of it. The reason being that opening a bakery is an idea my wife and I have toyed with and having a recipe that is easy to increase and decrease the size of without the need for a large quantity of starter would be more than necessary—I know there are quite a few of these recipes.  

Though I am very happy with the breakthroughs I have made with baking sourdough bread, there are other avenues I wish I had gone down. For example, I could have used this inquiry to further develop my understanding of musical theory and taken you along for the ride, or chosen an inquiry topic that would require me to spend more time outside–something that has been somewhat limited since Paul joined us a few months ago. The reality is that it would have been much harder to complete an inquiry that required a lot of leg work and travelling around.

Though I mostly stuck to a few applications of technology I learned about in education technology, I feel a lot more comfortable using different forms of technology in the classroom I would have probably avoided before. I’m grateful for this and look forward to the day when I have my own classroom where I can let the students creatively express themselves and their knowledge in a variety of ways. I thought I never would have said it but we may even go on a Minecraft field trip!

Coding is essentially plugging instructions into a system that tell that system what actions to perform and how to carry them out. The quality of the instructions determines how the task is performed and the quality it is performed with. This idea of following exact instructions was wonderfully expressed in the short video we watched during class about following exact instructions to make a peanut butter and jam sandwich. The children in this video are learning the value of clear, sequential instructions as their father makes sandwiches following their exact instructions with hilarious results — I feel for the little boy.

Though the focus of the lesson was on coding and computational thinking, which we often associate with mathematics, it made me think about how important making sure your expectations and instructions are crystal clear for your students. Sometimes leaving room for interpretation is important for fostering creativity, but in other situations, too much vagueness can lead to unfavourable results. Like the father in the video tormenting his children by following their instructions for making a pb&j sandwich exactly as they had written, I will use this activity as a segue into computational thinking and later into coding. Though I’ve never used it in class before, I can see it being very successful and wonderfully cross-curricular in nature.

During my hands-on time during class, I had a look at some of the coding programs available on code.org and tried one called flappy birds — there is a screenshot of my final challenge at the top of this reflection. I loved how interactive the program/game was and how it scaffolded computational thinking so well. Though I have never coded in my life, I understand the process a little better and if I kept working with these educational games, I’m sure I could get quite good at it. There was one program/game where you could choose to work with the computational language or code. How wonderful is this? For those of our students who are super keen, there are wonderfully scaffolded interactive programs, with varying difficulty levels, where they can hone their skills.

I look forward to incorporating some of the material I picked up in this class and putting together a few lessons and units I hope will be as informative as they are fun.

Our guest speaker this afternoon left me with lots to think about as I walked out of the class. Thoughts about my digital footprint and identity in social media, and the posts I have made in the past that could be used as fodder by potential students making their way around the web looking to uncover secrets about their teacher. It also brought up other thoughts about navigating using technology–photos in particular–to create portfolios and document learning in a way that doesn’t put me in a precarious situation. More than anything else, it made me think of the direction technology is moving, the speed at which it’s moving and what that means for young learners engaging with it and interacting. My thoughts here are on social media in particular.

The change seems to be almost too fast to keep up with and our guest speaker Jessie Miller seems to have taken a pragmatic approach to deal with it rather than advocating for moving away from the use of social media. But the question remains: what place should social media have in our lives and how should we embrace it? This isn’t just a question we should be looking at in the context of students and children because children see how adults use technology and tend to follow by example. So many of us are addicted to social media without even realizing it and only after checking the time do we realize how long we have been falling down the rabbit hole. The algorithms are set up in a way that directs us to content we may be interested in and we sometimes find ourselves endlessly consuming. This is not good. Next time you’re riding the bus just look around and see how many people are on their phones. If we are setting an example for our children or the young ones in our community, what kind of a model are we setting? Is this an example of behavioural addiction?

According to The Journal of Behavioural Addiction, although there are correlations between smartphone overuse and mental health issues like depression, stress, anxiety, and low self-esteem, the negative side effects of smartphone overuse are not the same as the presence of addiction. They also note one reason it may not be pathologized yet is that its effects have not been fully understood. With a little more research, I wonder what will come out. I wonder if likes on social media and listening to a few coins dropping from a slot machine will be found to have a similar effect on the brain. What would that mean?

Putting the addiction debate aside for a moment and going back to the idea of a digital footprint and identity. Whether we are conscious of it or not, when we post on social media we are putting together a representation of ourselves for the world to see–depending on our privacy settings. Elementary school students become high school students and shortly after high school, they become adults. If they aren’t taught how to be literate on social media and the internet, they may post something they regret, become victims of bullying, become bullies themselves, or any number of other negative outcomes. So where does this leave us?

Because the internet is almost unavoidable for anyone wishing to function in contemporary society, the impacts of one’s actions on the internet need to be fleshed out before a regrettable mistake is made. For this reason, digital literacy is extremely important and should not be overlooked and left to chance. But who should be responsible for this and at what age should it be taught? This is context-dependent and an area with far more than forty shades of grey. As our guest lecturer said today, “many children on social media are too immature to be on social media, but there are also many adults on social media that are too immature for social media as well.” At this point, it is an issue with far-reaching effects that runs through much of society and continues to get perpetuated with limited concern for the results of actions taken.

For myself and my child, I will spend time with him exploring the internet in a way that teachable moments don’t fade away into the abyss–interacting with technology in mitigated ways seems to be the best way forward. The harder you push, the stronger the resistance. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon so I embrace it in intentional and meaningful ways that act as a healthy model for my child and my students.

Today

Today we learned how to do screencasting and explored the different ways it can be useful in educational contexts. I feel like this is something I will use to explain difficult subjects, topics, and concepts and put them somewhere they can be readily accessible for my students. The H5P feature is also extremely cool and brings another level of interaction to the screencast. It allows myself and the students to check their understanding, which is very useful for formative assessments to check on how my students are doing – and how i am doing as a teacher.

Though screencasting has a lot to offer learners and can greatly enhance the teaching practice – as we have seen during the pandemic when all schools went online – there may be limitations. The first limitation that comes to mind is access. Though technology has become much more widespread and available, there may still be many learners who may not have access to computers outside of the classroom. Another limitation i can see is that not all students learn well from video. This being said, it is important that material be presented in a variety of ways that make it accessible to all the learners in your class.

A small study conducted in 2012 on undergraduate students in a single department – quite a small study – suggests that screencasts as additional resources can improve students grades as students use it to gain more concrete understandings of the material being taught (Morris & Chikwa, 2014, p. 10). The study suggests screencasts are most effective when they are clear, concise, and short (p.11). I can speak to this from personal experience.

Before my acceptance to the PDPP program here at UVIC, I had to take two math prerequisites. The most difficult of the two was finite mathematics. My professor for this class had examples in the form of screencasts for all of the different material semester. It was an amazing resource I often used and – as mentioned above – I hope to replicate in my classroom.

References

Morris, C., & Chikwa, G. (2014). Screencasts: How effective are they and how do students engage with them? Active Learning in Higher Education, 15(1), 25–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787413514654