So over the entirety of this course we have highlighted numerous different multimodal technology applications and features that can be helpful in our future careers as teachers. We learned things that include; Zoom Conference Calls, Minecraft EDU, Audio Editing, Screen recording, Kindergarten Inquiry, Social Media safety, iMovie, the Pacific School for Innovation and Inquiry, Copyright, and Trello! These are quite a few different things we covered throughout our class, so if you want to learn more about any of these topics, scroll through my blog as I have covered all of these in more detail.
The one thing that is extremely cool about all of these is that they all have their own unique applications for the classroom or even be collaborated together. We saw this being the case when we visited the Pacific School for Innovation and Inquiry because they make the Trello checklist mandatory for all projects while using all other forms of media listed to complete projects.
The one thing that I never really understood the severity of until we learned about the rest of these media’s is copyright infringement. This is always changing and teachers (like us) have to vigilant on the ever changing rules and restrictions. It is also a really important thing to teach students early on because of plagiarism reasons which is extremely important later in life such as university or the work world. If students can learn this early on it will save them lots of time and effort in the future. This applies specifically to iMovie, Screencastify, Social Media safety and Audio editing as it is important to create your own unique content, or utilize free online content to enhance your original work.
This class as a whole has been an eye opening experience for me as I had experience in these regions before, but never to the extent that we covered through this course. Especially in the eyes of using these tools in an educational format. Every time I have used these tools, applications or strategies it has been for my own benefit for personal joy, never for the sake of learning from a teacher’s perspective. This has been very optimal for my personal growth as a teacher especially the EdTech Group Inquiry where we discussed Vlogging (see my past blogs for more information).
Even the media we learned about that I was a bit nervous on integrating into my future class is important to know.Just by understanding that way it works, I now have the ability to show other teachers in case they want to do the project or if a student is really into that sort of thing and it could help their inquiry. There is no con to understanding many forms of technology, especially in the world of education.
The only thing that I would say about this class, is that making it a 3 hour class was a bit much. All the content I really enjoyed, however by the final hour it was really hard to keep focussed on the task at hand. So if I could make any suggestions it would be to change the 3 hour class format into 2, hour-twenty classes. Just so for this we can focus soul on one thing for a condensed period of time and put our all into that task instead of doing unfocussed busy work at the end.
Overall, this is one of the classes I enjoyed the most out of my second year experience! The work load was really manageable although sometimes it felt like busy work, but I rather write 30 blog posts than research papers so I am really not complaining. The material felt very directed at our future professions, whereas some other classes did not so I was more engaged at the beginning. I would recommend this class to anyone coming into education as it is really fun and you get to learn such a wide variety of tech mediums.
Riley
