Assignment 1 Part A

Assignment 1 Part A

What issues, interests, or opportunities do you anticipate arising in your teaching in the near future?

• Digital literacy, online presence and footprint, detecting bias and critical analysis.
• Huge increase in emphasis on tech, but this is not part of teacher training in any practical and structured way.
• Often there’s a designated tech person (at the elementary school level), not a general level of tech knowledge in the school so a lot of responsibility falls on that person to keep things updated. It some ways it’s a “passing the buck” situation deferring the responsibility of everyone having a base knowledge.
• Greater focus on skills and processes rather than facts and specific subject based knowledge.

Is there a component of this issue, interest, or opportunity that relates to the use of digital technologies?

• What are the key components of ICT that students should be learning and that educators should possess some fluency in at school?
• How can education keep up with tech advances? Should it? Are their absolutes that make good citizens beyond the ability to push and click

What curriculum is related to this issue, interest or opportunity?

• ADST most evidently, but all curriculum is linked in some way: when students are conducting any sort of search, playing a game, logging in to a class site, and publishing.

What pedagogy might be useful for fostering learners' engagement and excitement? What digital technologies can you imagine contributing to enrich, enable, or enhance learning?

• Collaborative online learning environments
• Skype, Skype classroom

What are the keywords that you would use to identify elements of this issue, interest, or opportunity?

• Digital literacy
• Accessibility
• Digital divide (economic, generation vs. generation, literate vs. illiterate)
• Workplace skills
• Delivery vs. discovery

Drawing from the personalized key words pertaining to your interests and curriculum, pedagogy, and digital technology, make a list of possible topics you might need to broaden your understanding of this area of interest.

Think about grade level, age level of students, school setting, administrative setting, pertinent policy and guidelines from government, district, and school levels, technological setting, relevant curriculum resources, relevant pedagogical resources, potential technological resources.

• In most ways this applies to all grade levels. Children are given their parents’ phones will sitting in a stroller. Digital access, literacy, and ethical online behaviour must begin early. Once children begin creating their own online presence/identity rather than being consumers of content they become creators and the discussion has to change to ethical online behaviour in that arena, digital footprints, collaboration and publishing.
• The same way that there are programs to focus on numeracy and literacy and schools will adopt one or the other for a period of time, digital literacy needs to become a priority to prepare students for the workplace. That comes hand in hand with protective school and district wide policies that provide boundaries and guidelines for students, teachers, and parents to understand and operate within.
• One difficulty with tech is the maintenance. For example, our school is very fortunate to have quite a bit of tech: iPads, laptops, etc. But, these devices have district restrictions on them so that students aren’t able to add inappropriate content or change settings in any drastic way. This is understandable, but requires a lot of management by teachers as a result. Any time a device needs updating the district based IMS team has to come and do that... and there are updates all the time. Admin passwords are required for other changes, but they often don’t work. Adding new apps require those same passwords and space becomes limited as apps get larger and more sophisticated so that your tech becomes obsolete quickly. We use FreshGrade as our reporting system and out of 3 carts of iPads, only one can successfully upload student content. You can imagine how frustrating that is for a grade 3 classroom teacher to manage, when having a class full of students on iPads is no small feat in the first place.
• A few resources that would be useful are as follows:
• Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Trends Shaping Education 2013 (Links to an external site.) https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/trends-shaping-education-2013_trends_edu-2013-en
• BC’s new curriculum https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/search?type%5B%5D=big_idea&type%5B%5D=concept_content&type%5B%5D=curricular_competency&keys=digital#results
• Resources for digital, media, and information literacy http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/infolit/InfoLitMod/

            I try and combine text based literacy with a digital or media component in my teaching practice. I would like to be more well versed myself in digital and media literacy. I may have an instinct that certain sites are more reliable than others but I am confident in being able to break that down into digestible steps for elementary school students. Communicating that to students so they can confidently navigate the digital world is key to our teaching.