Time To Be Amused By Doing School Work

The actual making of my final project, entailed pairing up with Danielle Gomersall and making a Google Earth video tour with a rough basis on the beginnings of our Canadian history from Canadian Studies 30.
We picked the points of Cartier’s visits to Canada, Champlain’s founding of Quebec, Battle of the Plains of Abraham, War of 1812 and the British North America Act of 1867.
We researched the points and I put the tour together. My points could actually be researched and shown on a map so Danielle made videos with the information of her points for our project-very beautifully done I might add. My points included making lines that dictated Cartier’s trips, a place mark for Quebec and embedding a “Canada’s History” video into my place mark for the Plains of Abraham. I put Danielle’s videos embed code into place marks for the War of 1812 and the BNA Act.
I had to make the actual tour into 3 different points because I could not figure out how to pause the recording of the tour in order to allow the videos to play. So, with 3 videos, the Canadian Studies lessons came together in a Google Earth Tour.
If you wish to view it, just email me and I will send it to you.

For my final project, I was planning on setting up a wiki page with the help of one the teachers with my ECS 100 field experience. I found that this was actually much more difficult than I had planned it out to be and could not get it started until a teacher agreed to work with me to set one up for their class.
I was very relieved when Danielle Gomersall propositioned me to work with her on her final project as partners. It worked out better than I had thought as I was dealing with a new concept (Google Earth) and a familiar concept (History 30).
The plan was to make a video outlining the beginnings of Canada. When I joined the project, Danielle already had 10 points for us to cover. We divided the work in 2 and each worked on 5 points. I took the beginning of the points and Danielle took the second half of the points. We later cut this to 3 points for me and 2 points for her.
Each of us was to further research the points so we could put together a video tour.
My points for research were pretty basic, so I took it upon myself to explore Google Earth and find out how we were to make this video work properly. Making the actual video tour was easy, but when I made a practice test video, my place marks would not show up as part of the video. I figured out that I needed to put the points into a folder along with video so they would show up. Danielle was also fooling around with Google Earth and found out how to embed videos to the tour. All that was needed was to use the embed code and put it into the “Description” of the place mark. The rest of the project went very easily and fell into place until the actual handing in of the project. I made the tour on my computer and my email addresses would not send the videos to either Danielle or Dean. I needed to wait one day until my mother came home so I could send the video through her email account. If you would like to see this video, it is 5.5 MB in size and about 5 and a half minutes in length but if you need a refresher course on Canadian History, just ask and I will send it to you.

As part of my mentorships, I was to work with 3 teachers, Paul Wood, Michael Kaechele and Leeann Spillarkle. Unfortunately, I was not truly able to connect to the later two teachers just due to my lack of time space in my days. I was trying to do the things that they had asked, such as comment on their children’s’ blogs, create a lesson and create a university video but I just did not have the time to be doing these things.
I was however, able to make a better connection to Paul Wood’s Social Justice Classroom. I was making email contacts with him and able to Skype in with his class one day to introduce myself. The connection was not the absolute greatest and was lost a few times but I was still able to meet the class.
I was asked to comment on their blogs as much as I could and I found this still difficult due to time but I was able to comment on a few students’ blogs.
I found that their blogs had been pre-determined to be somewhat based on a single subject of their own choosing. I can remember one of them being about the New Orleans disaster and about people finding homes. Another was based on Christian ethics. Each student was to have made a wiki page about their topic, further describing their topic with much more detail.
I found this to be interesting but was not able to get very thorough with the entire class and all the different topics being covered.

I have noticed that I have been having a growing digital footprint that has shown me that I am being noticed by more than just the people that know me.
When I google my name, just in general, I find that there are 13,000 result. Of those 13,000 results only about 33 actually apply to me. These basically apply to my Edublogs posts and comments. There are also a majority of my athletic achievements on these pages which include my regional and provincial standings, my Tae Kwon Do tournament standings, my track placings and my cross country standings. I can also find my Varsity Wrestling profile information for the U of R. As another part to finding myself on the internet, I found my participation in last year’s “Robot Rumble” at SIAST, which was a fun experience.
When I google my entire name, there are mainly my Facebook friends and my Facebook profile found.
Overall, I am quite pleased that I am actually found on Google. I can actually be seen by my accomplishments and all that I need to do is to keep on doing my best in my activities and I will be noticed more by more people.

I thought that our guests from November 18th were very interesting and full of ideas about how they teach.

I enjoyed hearing from Darren Kuropatwa who is a math teacher from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Besides the fact that Winnipeggers are …(you know), Darren was quite interesting with his methods for teaching. I liked the fact that he had a different child make a scribe post about the lessons being taught each day as a kind of virtual textbook. The part of his talk that stuck with me most. is the part where he described his one student who made a scribe post and it was not done with the greatest efficiency because of a language barrier. But when the student further understood the concept, he/she went back and filled out a thorough post. This is evidence of social learning and the powers of critique. The student actually went back and made their post better so that everyone could understand it better. I like this example so much because as part of my EPE 100 class, we were introduced to taking self-responsibility(level four) as part of the Hellison Levels. This entitles working on tasks independent of the teacher and this is a prime example of this trait. I hope I can inspire my students to do the same.

Cathy Kassidy, was also a guest speaker and I enjoyed the fact that she introduced her students to technology so often in their lives (Gr. 1). I kind of thought at the beginning, before the presentation, that this was going to be able children using phones and iPods in the classroom. I am completely against children having a phone because there is no reason to have one as a 7 year old. Luckily, Cathy was not talking about that, otherwise I would have to drive to Moose Jaw and shoot her (KIDDING!). Anyways, I enjoyed her slideshare about the Five Myths About Primary Teaching and Learning and the balance between computer literacy and using a pencil and paper. The idea of using technology in her classroom to introduce her children to the world wide web is a great idea. Uploading videos of the kids learning and having the children develop their literacy through blogging, made me think more about grade ones using the internet as an connection medium. This helps them with their self-empowerment and helps them connect to people around the world and introduce the children to ideas that will be used in the near future.

Clarence Fisher, will probably be known to us as the guy who does not clear out his wiki at the end of the year. All the way from Snow Lake, Manitoba, is that all that we can remember about him? Well, I will just to elaborate on his idea. His main component of not clearing out his wiki at the end of the year is based on the common fact that even though the internet is a great resource material for people to find information and it is possible to find almost anything there, his main point is that the greatest resource for information is people. The internet was made by people and all the information that is on the internet is from people. He encourages his students to look at his past units and alter and build on the ideas that past students have had, to better suit the current class. If the ideas are right, then it would be better to just incorporate their own ideas into the comments so that future learners can benefit from the work of others. The benefit to this is that his students can find the resources they need instead of googling every single question that is proposed. The students can work together and build their social networking instead of doing everything by themselves.

I found these ideas to be a great starting point as an aspiring beginning teacher and this should help me to come up with better ideas for my students.

Late, but better than never.

When I went to Jen Wagner’s Wiki, I see that there are very few math applications that can be used as a math teacher and absolutely nothing that can be used as a Physical Education teacher. So, I went with the math part and the only one that seems to stick out in my mind is the Real World Math. Basically, there are lessons that are used to help solve real life examples that deal with using Google Earth for practical experience. The lessons that are available are based on concepts, project based learning, measurement and exploratory experiences of Google Earth. All these lessons are math based. The concepts include scientific notation, project based learning are group partnerships, measurement uses the ruler tool in Google Earth a great deal and the exploratory uses many other ideas that are not generally part of the math curriculum.
These lessons might be useful when I get out into the work force and want to teach my kids to use the Earth to help them understand math.

Yes, I went there!

So, we have this assignment due tomorrow and as I was going through it and checking my answers I came across some things in the text book that will help us complete it. The answers for all odd questions are in the back of the book. That means that if you are having trouble with questions 49 in 5.5 and 23 in 6.1, the answers are right there for you. This is my contribution to your math knowledge and I hope more than one person reads this before tomorrow. I am posting this because I can not text everyone this check. Hope it works for you. Have a great day.

I have been TRYING to get a picture like this for about 2 months!

This is the effect of so much light on the falling snow last night. My camera would not take a proper picture before of this effect so I luckily had my camera on me and took this quick snapshot.
Light pollution has been a major factor to why I do not like to live in the city, the country is so much better. I realize the picture quality is not the absolute greatest but please bear with me. I live in the country and from where I live I notice the light pollution that Regina gives off every night. Kelsey’s post gave the sense of being entrapped in Regina. I had blogged about living the country before and why I love it. Hopefully you can actually see why now.

Just like my title says, this is not about the Riders losing the game yesterday. This is about Facebook groups.
Talking with some of my friends, yes it is disappointing that we lost in the last second on the game but that’s all that it is. Disappointing. Can we really blame anyone? Obviously people try to blame this on someone. With groups on Facebook popping up within seconds of the end result it is quite funny how people can be so connected by this. Some of these groups are ranging all on the topic of the loss such as “Montreal did NOT earn the Grey Cup. Saskatchewan screwed up,” which is a group made by one of my friends(214 members) and just describes that there was a mistake made. Other more radical groups like “Pissed off Rider Fans” (900 members) and “I HATE THE 13th MAN ON THE FIELD!” (6,268 members) are honestly just hilarious at the overblown emotions of the day and how so many people can be united to a common result.
My opinion is this: Get over it! We had it, we lost it, let’s leave it at that. All the more reason to come back next year and kick everyone’s butts on the field. Or just keep improving our skills so that in 3 years for the 100th Grey Cup(2,610 members) we win it and set it in stone that after 100 years we are the best.