Author: alyssavanstone

Pacific Schoool For Innovation & Inquiry

This was an exciting class. I did not even know this school existed before we had this discussion. I thought that it was fascinating how other types of schools out there that I do not even know about. It reminded me a lot of our philosophy class last semester. I did a project on the Montessori school, which is also a different type of school. I think that it is important to have different types of schools because all children are different and learn differently.

We also learned a lot about inquiry-based learning last semester. We had to make a few different inquiries, and I can see how important it is to learning, especially for children. Like the Montessori school, it gives children the responsibility for their own learning and chooses how they want to learn. I noticed that the Pacific School for Innovation and Inquiry that a lot of the work is done with technology. As a student, I never really dealt with much technology growing up. I think that it is really interesting to see how learning is developing in this decade for children.

I thought that this Ted Talk was extremely intriguing and definitely gave me a different insight on learning. “Learning is not something that comes to us from the inside, but it’s rather something already inside us, a spark that needs to be nurtured and sparked into a flame.” This quote really stuck with me watching this video and learning about this school. Learning truly is something that we all are intrinsically motivated to do but needs to be nurtured by giving students different approaches and ways to satisfy different needs. External sources are important, but getting information from somewhere and actually knowing about it is very different, as Jeff Hopkins said. This class gave me a different view on learning and education in which I will use in my future career.

The Media Reality

This week’s class was a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of us. This class was so influential to my future career.

It was crazy listening to how unsafe most social media sites are. Information, pictures, anything can be shared without knowing where it is being sent to or posted to what website further. It was a reality check with what I should be posting on social media to protect my identity and career.

https://www.mediatedreality.com/

This website is really important for any future teacher to read. It is so important we protect ourselves, and our students from anything internet-related. The only way we do this is to be educated on privacy settings, privacy rules that may be in place, and protecting our student’s privacy.  I would use this in any job company that uses social media, or anyone applying for a job.

During this week’s class, we had a guest speaker talk to us about social media and privacy within the education system. I learned so much, to say the least. We learned about how teachers are responsible for keeping their students safety in mind whenever we are taking pictures, videos, or using our phones in the classroom. In my Wednesday visits, my mentor teacher used a website for the student’s families to use. Within this website my mentor teacher posted videos and pictures of the student’s progress, keeping the families updated and involved. I think that this is really important to do and creates an important sense of community. With this being said, I also remember sorting paperwork and seeing one about this website. My mentor teacher made sure to create a paper to be signed on if the parents wanted their children’s picture taken and to be included on this website. I think that this website is really important but also needs to be done properly, as my Wednesday teacher did.

I currently work at a job in child care and I had no idea even taking a video of something and having their voices in the background was a violation of privacy. It was really eye-opening to fully understand the privacy and the expectations that are set for teachers to keep our students safe.

We also learned about what we as educators on social media looks like. It was really interesting to learn that we will definitely be looked up on social media by families and future employers. This was a reality check that I need to make sure my social media is secure and appropriate. It was also interesting to know that whether or not it is private, students, coworkers, employers, and their families will be searching for us on the internet. As I googled myself, I was surprised to see that a few of my social media accounts came up. I will definitely be taking this into consideration for my future.

During week 3, we learned about Multimedia Learning Theory / Image, Video, & Audio Editing in this weekly class. This was very interesting to me as I have always struggled with editing pictures, video, and audio.

A big part of my after-school care job is providing the children I care for with sources of drawings, coloring pages, and art. I always struggled with correctly converting these images onto Microsoft word, so seeing how this is done correctly and all the different ways it can be done was beneficial to me.  I also really enjoyed all the images of Bernie. It was a really uplifting class to take some time out of our hectic schedules and have some fun during our class with picture editing.

Knowing how to do this is important for teachers to know because we as educators could make so many engaging yet fun activities for our students to do.