This week we did not have a live class, but had the exciting opportunity to partake in a virtual professional development day! I signed up for 3 sessions. It was really interesting and valuable to learn about all of these unique resources that teacher candidates would typically not know about or get the opportunity to explore. All of the sessions were great and super informative. It was nice to learn about these sources from teachers/retired teachers and people who work in education. I feel like due to it being online on zoom, I didn’t engage with actual teachers as much as I would have hoped but it was nonetheless a really good experience and I learned a lot about new online learning resources!
My first session of the day was “The Digital Classroom for K – 7), I wasn’t too sure what to expect but it was kind of a review of what we discussed in class last week. We had access to online Focused ED resoruces and had the opportunity to test them out an explore them. I really liked learning about all the resources. My favourite resource was all of the WORLD BOOK ones. I liked how they had all these cool features. Students and teachers could translate a lot of the media into a vast majority of languages, has imagery and icons to help navigate, and even the ability to use text-to-speech so students can listen to their readings supporting UDL and accessibility in learning environments. All super great things! The main concerns I had with this is that the voices for text-to-speech are not always the nicest sounding (most were pretty robotic) and although the resources had quite a bit about Canada, it is a resource from the United States. I liked the Digital Classroom resource list but wish that access could be provided to student teachers full-time it would be nice to explore the resource more and actually learn more about ways to apply it in our teaching practice because I believe, it is only available to practicing/registered teachers.
My second session was on Live IT! BIlingual Place-Based Learning K – 7. This session was all about the Live IT Earth online learning platform that allows teachers with resources to teach students about different modules/topics that closely connect with place-based learning. There were topics like learning about Old growth forests, salmon, or the deep sea, and then provides teachers and students with resources that go alongside the educational videos provided that share the information. I liked how interactive the modules were. My favourite feature was that teachers can search based on their curriculum and get a lesson that will meet the big ideas. competencies in the curriculum for many provinces, not only British Columbia. One question I had, which was eventually answered was how have hands on activities or engaging activities that get students outdoors in nature because these are great informative modules but how should teachers get students to apply their learning in place-based/outdoor learning settings.
Overall, these resources were all great, and wish I could have longer access to them, it would be a nice to use in creating lesson plans and practice using it as a student teacher so I would feel confident and prepared to use it in my practice as a teacher. The final zoom session I attended was “I Am Because We Are: Grade 6–9 Black Canadian Learning Resources” This session was very informative and loved the website that we got to explore. I unfortunately had challenges with zoom during this session so did not get to fully attend the session, but had the opportunity to check out the website and suggest that others do too! I also think it’s important that educators reading the introduction letter that discusses a vast amount of important information and references about using the resource and information in classrooms!
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