Genius Hour Update

Another week has gone by in which I have had the opportunity to work on my Genius Hour project. I have learned many new basic signs which encompass the categories of family, places, time, temperature, food, clothes, health, feeling, requests, amounts, colours, money and animals. I have been using this great website that has everything from basic signs to sentences and grammar. It focuses on teaching individuals ASL and has been very helpful in my journey so far.

I recently discovered on the above website a self-study guide for those who are learning ASL, and I am now going to start using this. This has been a difficulty for me so far, often encountering questions such as "where do I start?" and "where do I go next". I am a person who likes plans and lists, so I believe no that I have found this resource, it will organize and speed up my learning of ASL.

In my last post, I said that I needed to continue practicing so I do not forget the new signs I learned, and over the past week I have both learned new signs and remembered ones from the previous week as well. This definitely makes me very excited in that I am retaining what I am learning...I hope this continues as my vocabulary starts to grow even more!

Thanks for continuing to follow along with my Genius Hour project, and feel free to leave any comments or questions that you may have!

Stone, D. (2004, December 18). American Sign Language alphabet [picture]. 
Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_manual_alphabet

My Technological Journey Continued

Another week, another awesome Tech class! This week we explored making PowToons. PowToon is another amazing tool on the Internet that can aid students in expressing their ideas. PowToons are also a treat tool for teachers to engage their students in what they are presenting. You can also use PowToon to enhance your flipped classroom, if that is something that you are experimenting with! Providing the information on PowToon for students to learn at home will really engage them, compared to a document with writing on it. I have had minimal difficulties with PowToon, most of them arose from no having enough experience using it! Now that I have used it a few times, I can correct my mistakes and hopefully use it with ease! Here is the PowToon that I made about Genius Hour:

We also had more time to work on Genius Hour this week (see my previous post about my Genius Hour topic). I learned that I definitely have a large task ahead of me. American Sign Language (ASL) is very different grammatically and syntactically from English, which I discovered is a hard mindset to get into after speaking English for my whole life. I have started to learn individual signs corresponding to English words (i.e. how to sign "dog" or "mother"). A question that arose from this weeks work is; should I re-evaluate my goals for my Genius Hour project? I think that I should focus more on words and basic sentences. I have picked up more words faster than I thought I would so I might need to adjust this now. I need to continue practicing signs that I have already learned so I do not forget them, and continue to learn more signs!

Talk to you soon! 

My First Genius Hour Project!

Today in Tech class, we began our 7 week Genius Hour projects! If you do not know what genius hour is is, or would like a refresher, check out this great video! 

My topic for my Genius Hour is learning American Sign Language (ASL). This has been of great interest to me recently however I had never quite found the time to pursue it...what better way than Genius Hour! My goals for this project are to become more proficient in conversational ASL. Seeing as I only have 7 weeks to complete my project, I have narrowed down my goals to learning 30 new words overall, and creating 5 new sentences with these words. 

I am very excited to incorporate a passion with school work, I think it is a really great way for students to engage with creativity and critical thinking which are two very important 21st century skills. This is definitely something that I can use with my future students. Seeing my colleagues get so excited about pursuing their Genius Hours project is really authentic and amazing! 

My experiences leaning sign language so far have been very positive. I seem to be picking it up fairly quickly so far, however I am nervous for understanding the grammar and syntax of the new language! My next steps are to begin learning new words, according to my timeline, and to continue considering how I will be recording my progress of learning ASL! 

Stay tuned for more updates on my Genius Hour project by checking out the different pages on my Blog for different types of information regarding my project!

Parhamr. (2007, September 17). “A-S-L” signed with American Sign Language. Retreived from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Sign_Language_ASL.svg

Copyright & The Classroom

Copyright is an increasingly relevant issue as technology continues to envelop our homes, schools and world. Children are on technology such as laptops, tables, iPads and computers from very young ages, and therefore exposed to the complicated world of copyright without necessarily knowing it. Consequently, many of these children do not have knowledge surrounding proper use of Internet material and the matters regarding copyright, leading to possible issues and poor internet etiquette. Similarly, many parents may not have this knowledge to share with their children. Therefore, as teachers, it is important to model proper copyright standards and educate our students.

Plougmann, L. (2011, January 20). At the computer [photograph]. 

Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2c3jYad

Teachers are responsible for educating themselves on copyright laws, such as reading and understanding documents like Copyright Matters! Documents such as these make it easy to learn about copyright laws and demonstrate proper practice in the classroom.

Based on what I learned from the readings, I feel that there are three very important aspects of copyright that I would want to teach my students. 

1 First, making them aware that there are copyright laws in place and that they cannot just take anything, anywhere, from the Internet. This is important because as I previously mentioned, coming into school, most students will not be aware of this facet of the internet. 

2 Secondly, I believe that teaching students what they can and cannot use, and how to properly cite what they use is important. Knowing where to find pictures and videos they can use, identifying the copyright symbols and interpreting what they mean is very important to this process.

3 Lastly, I think that it is important to provide them with resources to create their own pictures and media. This will allow them to work more freely, as well as involve the creative process to create something, instead of just finding and citing from the Internet. For example, in the picture below, instead of creating comic strips with images from the Internet, these students took pictures of themselves, uploaded them and inserted text bubbles. This is a very creative and safe way to create a comic strip; there are also many important skills that can also be learned from this process, for example, technological, teamwork and creative skills. 

Flickinger, B. (2012, January 4). student_pad_school-164 [photograph]. 

Retrieved from  http://bit.ly/2ccpe9f 

Welcome to Tech Class !

Today was the first class of Teaching & Learning with Technology in the Primary/Junior Classroom in the Faculty of Education. I am very excited for what this class has to offer because technology is a very present aspect of a 21st century classroom, and learning how to integrate it as a teacher is extremely important. 

We completed "QR Bingo" which was a really novel and fun activity for me because I have never used QR codes before. With this one little activity, my brain started exploding with possibilities of how I could use this in my own future classroom. Different types of assessment, getting to know each other activities, scavenger hunts, and many other ideas flooded my thoughts. I was so excited that on the first day, I already learned something that could be so substantial and engaging for my future students. 

We also explored Genius Hour where we saw an awesome project by Caine, who pursued his passion of building an Arcade: 

Mullick, N. (2012, April 9). Caine’s Arcade [video]. 

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faIFNkdq96U 

Genius hour is a great way to incorporate students interests, and potentially technology as well. Giving students the opportunity to explore what they are truly passionate about is a very eye opening experience.

Overall, I am very excited for this Technology class, I am ready to learn the multitudes of skills that can help me become an effective teacher!