• As discussed in class, the majority of share the experience of transitioning to online teaching modalities during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Reflect on your experiences as a student studying in this new format. What aspects of online learning did you like? What issues did you encounter? If given the option to pursue a programme offered either in a F2F (Face to Face), online, or hybrid format; which would you pick and why?

I dislike learning in online formats. Personally I find screens distracting and have trouble connecting with peers and an instructor over video, synchronous, or asynchronous communication methods. I found that if I fell behind it was much harder to catch up in an online learning setting when there were deliverables more often and consistently. I had to drop a lot of my online classes. This sounds sad but the only part I liked was having an excuse to not pay attention to the classes I didn’t like. I don’t know why but my biggest issue was that I would literally just fall asleep all the time during online classes or asynchronous classes too. I would always pick Face to Face because I just can’t pay attention to a screen.

• As we saw with Covid-19, transitions to new modalities are not always expected nor thoroughly prepared for in advance. As a new educator in the secondary system, what advice do you have to yourself and other new educators in how they can best prepare themselves for such a transition if it were to happen in the future? Share two learning activities you plan to have “in your back pocket” that would be useful for leading a course in your specific teachable area during such an emergency transition.

I think having emergency screencastify lessons is useful for an emergency transition or even for when we get sick for a TOC to play. I know something said we shouldnt have our face on the screen because its distracting but I think it is invaluable for students to see a familiar face in those circumstances. I personally cannot focus without the face.

For humanities, having students work in google docs together is an amazing resource and seriously undervalued. It works for both sychronous and asychronous group work. During Covid me and my friends would run entire model UN conferences for hundreds of teens solely off zoom and group google docs.

This week, I created an AI-generated design (Below) for the first time using Microsoft Designer.

The process was frustrating and concerning. For example, the auto-generated prompts were themselves against their guidelines, and thus, an error message was delivered. Furthermore, prompts that I thought were harmless generated content that I did not intend and would consider harmful. I tried to avoid this by telling the AI not to include certain words and images, such as “no Guilt,” but I learned it steadfastly sticks to its language, switching to “guilt-free.” I played this game for a while until I had explicitly prohibited five words. It ended up being beautiful and low effort once I was finally happy with the generation. I would try it again but would be hesitant to have students use it, especially in an independent, self-directed context.

Reflection in progress…

I decided to look deeper into the liberating structures resource website this week as I have been combating an apathy and often resentment for technology in classrooms. I see (and hear directly from students) that in classrooms that rely heavily on technology there is a great sense of disengagement. Quite litterally the scilence speaks volumes. I sadly always expect some students to be disengaged but was really not prepared to see huge portions of classes either distracted or completely zoned out when a screen is in front of them. Surprising but understandable, when its time for students to talk about the digital material, I’ve observed to discussions to be strained or non-existent.

I think, practicing oral discussion skills in relation to technology and structuring these discussions using liberating structures strategies is a way to promote flexible, creative and critical thinking while maintaining guidelines that foster a healthy incorporation of technology in secondary classrooms.

The Min Spec structure in particular sparked my interest as it aligned with critiques I have heard from students about there being an imbalance between rules and freedom in their assignments. They have voiced that they feel a lack of guidelines actually hinders their creativity. The idea behind Min Spec is to reduce rules/specifications until it reaches a point where it would hinder a students ability to participate. The website suggests at least two to five Min Specs (must-dos) to boost productivity, progress, and freedom. I think the process of deciding between Max Specs (maximum specification) and Min Specs as a group would invest the students in the activity and teach them valuable life skills in regards to prioritization and collaboration.

All in all, I plan to look further into liberating structures and incorporate them in my classes to combat my hesitations about integrating technology in classrooms. So that classes can go from looking like

this:

Photo by RDNE Stock project from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/students-sitting-inside-the-classroom-while-using-their-smartphone-6936147/

to this:

Photo by Zainul Yasni on Unsplash

This week has given me new knowledge on protecting my students’ information and privacy. Specifically, it has made me question ways to use social and alternative media ethically and safely in my classes. Social media and novel presentation methods are very useful in teaching and learning public history.

It reminded me of a project I did in university to present Vietnamese history to the public in a fun and accessible way. I wanted to utilize social media in my presentation, specifically twitter, but I do not use twitter, did not want to provide my personal information, and did not want to go to the pain of making fake accounts. Ultimately, I found a website called TweetGen which allows you to create fake tweet reply threads. The website does not require the user to make an account and has a clear privacy policy and terms of service accessible from the homepage.

Here is a section I did for my project:

This project could be further improved by added profile pictures for the fake twitter accounts using open source images.

I’m happy to have come to find this privacy safe digital history lesson and look forward to discovering more!

Here are the references I used to create that tweet thread:

Therese Guyot-Becker, “An Introduction to Cham Law based on 18th Century Legal Documents,”
in Griffth & Hardy.
Lam Thi My Dung, “Champa Settlements in the first Millennium,” in Griffiths & Hardy.
Nicolas Weber, “Securing and Developing the Southwestern Region: The Role of the Cham and
Malay Colonies in Vietnam (18th-19th centuries),” Journal of the Economic and Social History
of the Orient (2011) 739-772.