Today, we welcomed Janet Chow, program consultant of Burnaby, into our classroom via Bluejeans. Janet shared her love for ed tech with our class by outlining four key checkpoints within ed tech:
Purpose: how do you start with big ideas and weave in different modalities for multisensory experiences?
Transition:how might students move from consuming to creating?
Lighthouse:How might we embed assessment to empower?
Next step:What’s your next step as a teacher? What’s are your students’ next steps?
We started the class by creating our own stories. We were given a bunch of materials (buttons, popsicles sticks, buttons, etc.) and asked to build a representation of our journey and us as educators. Janet called this a “firestarter” activity, and I found that it kindled my creativity through hands-on learning.
One of the key points Janet mentioned is that assessment’s role is to motivate and inspire. Using assessment in this role allows students to question their own learning. I loved this take on assessment, and connected assessment to motivation and inspire to ed tech. For the learners that love technology, we can offer ed-tech as a modality option for assessment. For example, as we learned with Sandra MacAulay, you can use ipads to solve a math problem in numerous different ways. This is providing motivation to those students that enjoy technology, in turn, making learning an exciting opportunity.
Using ed-tech as an assessment option for students is an interesting way to motivate and inspire the students, as part of the lighthouse checkpoint with ed-tech. I appreciate how you place an emphasis on the students fully participating in their own assessment pieces- I keep going back to grade school never having this opportunity and thinking how beneficial it would have been.