On Friday November sixth I took part in the Ed camp 2020 through UVIC and was able to “bounce” around workshops which made the experience extremely enjoyable. I love going to workshops on any professional development day, but this Ed camp had some workshops that were just topics that everyone could jump in on and comment, discuss or debate on. I really loved the direction that took us within the group because as future teachers, we have all seen different ways of doing things within classrooms. The first workshop I was a part of was about integrating phone use into the classroom. This is a hot topic right now and a constant struggle with teachers because it is impossible to go a full class without at least one student looking at their phone.  I learned about positive and interactive ways electronics could be used in the classroom and one idea was playing the game Kahoot. I played this game often during my first university degree when other students would add media components into their presentations. A problem that I had never heard of was red list and whitelist sites. Someone in the room warned about students finding ways around websites that are red listed and not deemed appropriate because their personal device does not have the same controls that a class chrome book has.
I am very new to what’s in classrooms today regarding electronics because when I was going to school we had computer labs and phones were not yet able to access the internet at all hours of the day and if you did, you had to pay an astronomical amount of money. Before this block I did not know any of the rules pertaining to cellphones and the confiscation of “personal property.” One way a teacher got around confiscating phones was to have an IKEA shoe rack hanging in the class for phones to go into right when the students came into her class and this shoe rack doubled as attendance, so if a phone was missing it meant the person wasn’t in class or “reading to learn.”
There was another idea that came up addressing the culture of accountability in the classroom. One teacher asked 20 full minutes of attention from her students and for every 20 minutes they were on task they would get 3 minutes of phone time. BUT if she saw even one person on their phone then they all lost phone privileges. She realized that after a day or two she didn’t have to tell students to get off their phones because if another classmate noticed they were giving them a nudge and telling them to put it away before the teacher took away their 3 minutes. I thought this was interesting to look at from a screen addiction point of view because this teacher is using phones as a bargaining chip for them to pay attention and learn, which is smart, but also kind of sad because some learners don’t understand yet how awesome learning can be.
The final workshop that I popped into was called Cross Curricular Inquiry in High School. The main take away from this workshop I was able to resonate with was how limiting grading can be. Grading can limit learning and limit students potential because grades can be identity forming and can hold power. When there is a gradeless system it allows the students to ask themselves the “WHY” to reasons they are learning this knowledge. They can then say, “I am acquiring this knowledge to further myself not just get a grade.” What does this mean for future teachers who grew up in a grading education system? It means we LEARN – UNLEARN—RELEARN, this means we are learning the “unlearning” which is the ways we were taught in our childhoods, in a more traditional setting. And then we finish off by re learning the new innovative ways to teach or spread knowledge. These new innovative ways may include cross curricular inquiry, which allows for the promotion of student connection to explore and contribute to their own strengths. It is about inviting students to create their own “whys” and teaching according to those “whys” so that the students are getting as much learning as they can out of the class.
I was ever so thankful to be included in this WONDERFUL day and am so excited to bring some electronic knowledge and cross curricular ideas into my future classroom.
