Last class, we carried out an exercise that I think should be a staple in education.

The instructor explained the concept of self-directed conferences and asked us all to submit an idea. One by one we jotted something down (a discussion topic) and brought it to the front. Following this, everyone posted a dot on the subject that piqued their interest.

To my surprise, my idea ended up being one of several that was selected. As a fairly shy person, once the group gathered I asked one of the group members to take over the reigns of the discussion. But I soon found myself wanting to get in on the action and began asking questions of my own.

As with many large group activities, the discussion was a bit unwieldy, and I had to do my best to focus it on the task at hand, to generate specific ideas on the somewhat controversial topic being discussed.

I ended up getting a giant thrill from this. I felt that it really drew on my background as a reporter, as I jotted down in bullet point form what everyone in the group was expressing.

Going forward, I think I will definitely utilise this concept — of having a classroom generate topics they want to discuss.

For one thing, the Social Studies curriculum is very open ended, largely listing broad occurrences in History, rather than providing a prescribed curriculum for students to follow. For example, an instructor may be asked to teach about a coup d’etat in a certain grade, rather a specific coup d’etat. There is built in flexibility, making it easy to tap your classroom.

I can foresee myself asking mt students to submit specific coup d’etat’s for discussion, and then voting on their favourite. (This may involve a bit of prompting, not sure how many of them they may know about… but you get what I mean.)

The other place I could see this working is in reviewing material. Rather than simply have students re-read their notes, why not ask them to work together to generate questions about what they study, and then answer this question with the material they have learned?

According to a recent edutopia article, this can have terrific outcomes for students. The article looked at a study in which 82 university students were assigned to three groups. One of the groups employed the aforementioned method (employing a study question). It ended up scoring significantly higher than the other groups. You can read the full study here.

This to me isn’t all that surprising. Allowing students the opportunity to generate their own questions and then pursue it doggedly is a recipe for success.

• Joel

Jesse Miller’s recent talk in class made me think about just how divisive any discussion on technology and more specifically social media has become. As he notes in his Tedx Talk, discussions around social media use have become loaded, with many feeling extremely worried about social media’s determinantal impact on our collective attention spans and body politic.

I would count myself among those who are concerned with it’s impact. I have experienced how addictive social media and the algorithms that govern Youtube can be, and I’ve read widely on the subject from experts who have drawn a link between increased rates of mental health crises and the advent of the smart phone. I’ve also seen first hand how students’ phones can and often absorb their attention while they are supposed to be on task.

While I may quibble with what I saw as a Miller downplaying the addictive nature of social media, I agree with his central message wholeheartedly. Social media education and guidelines for *relatively* healthy use should be paramount to any well-rounded high school or even elementary school education. Students should learn to recognize and fully appreciate the harm that can come from putting yourself out there too much or spending too much time on your phone. In his Ted Talk, Miller raises the question as to why a student may pull out their phone during class, but wouldn’t dare to do so during a sports event. He also points out that students are going to use the technology and that what’s important is that they use it in a sound way.

One thing I am thinking is that perhaps it is possible to combine Miller’s practical approach to teaching reasonable social media use, while also discussing the ways in which the technology is gamed to absorb our attention. I believe knowing these things would benefit students, as they would have a greater understanding of how their attention is effectively being monetized by these companies. Maybe if they knew this they would chose to use their phones less!

In this week’s class, we learned all about copyright law and what the implications of it are for teachers.

This is great suff to know about. My initial thought was that things were a lot more prohibitive than they actually are.

Because of something called Fair Dealing teachers can use short excerpts of copyright protected law.

Teachers can copy an expert, meaning up to 10 per cent of a copyright-protected work, whether that be a book or album. This material can be distributed digitally or via a handout.

Teachers can also use an entire newspaper article or blog post. (This is especially helpful for me, as I plan on teaching social studies!)

There are some handy online guides on all this, including this one.

With less than a month in teacher’s college, what’s clear is that there are many ways to approach education and the educational landscape is rapidly changing.

My technology class (EDC 336) recently watched a film titled “Most Likely to Succeed.” The film profiles a public charter school in California known as High Tech High.

The school embraces an inquiry based learning model, and encourages students to take on challenging projects and learn from their mistakes and triumphs.

The dominant message of the movie is that educators need to move away from the old paradigm of high school – with standardized testing and teachers leading the learning – and embrace a new model in which the focus is on building skills, such as working in teams or programming.

The movie is very compelling, showing students highly engaged by the various projects they take on, whether that be a play or visual representation of a historical event/phenomenon.

I liked the movie and was impressed by the passion of everyone. But I was concerned about the devaluation of knowledge and book learning that was apparent in the film.

At one point, one of the featured experts said there is little need to recall certain events as if a student ever wants to know about them they can simply look them up on their phone.

Maybe so. But I can’t help but wonder if they would be less likely to do so in the event that they never learned about the event in the first place.

What I’m trying to say is that students don’t recall everything they learn and that’s perfectly fine. What’s important is that they are exposed to these events and phenomenons and can therefore have an understanding of how we got where we are.

I also felt that much of the handwringing about the rapidly changing nature of work was overdone. Things are certainly changing, and there is a need for coders and people with strong facility with computers.

But we will see need regular, everyday jobs for the foreseeable future. Garbagemen, police, nurses and teachers, to cite but a few examples, will continue to play important roles in our society.

Overall, I’d give this movie a B-.