I very much enjoyed the Physical Education expo we had at Vancouver Island University. Here are the various workshops I attended:
Education Expo Recap
Yesterday I had the privilege of taking part in an Education Expo at VIU: a trade-fair-style show on the topic of education, with several booths and exhibits in which people could participate.
Let’s Get Impractical!
Having been an educator for years now, I hear one particular question more often than any other:
“But when am I going to use this concept in real life?”
I’m not going to lie: this question bothers me.
I’d like to propose that there are better questions to ask than whether everything in class is practical.
Self-Assessment: In Detail
In a few short weeks, my knowledge of self-assessment techniques for the student has been significantly augmented! I recently finished my first of two practica at John Barsby Community School, and my sponsor-teacher has been a wealth of information. His insight seems to correlate quite nicely with the academic literature I’ve reading on the subject, so I thought I would share some of our ideas here. If you’re an educator, I hope they’ll be useful to your practise.
Read more Self-Assessment: In Detail
Self-Assessment
When students appear disengaged and can’t connect to your subject matter after days or weeks of explanation, how do you encourage them to take that next step in their learning? Do they even care? What if the answer goes back to the beginning of the term and what their own goals were?
Struggle in Education
Earlier today I watched a video about struggle and challenge in education, and I’m very divided regarding its message.
Teacher Burnout and My Experience with Stress
Here’s an interesting video on teacher stress: Read more Teacher Burnout and My Experience with Stress
Introduction to Technology Integration
What Does Technology Integration Look Like?
Technically, every classroom uses technology, in that pencils and paper are rudimentary pieces of technology. That’s not the type of technology to which I’ll be referring to here. For the purposes of this blog, the term technology refers simply to digital technology and electronic devices of various sorts.
Free Writing
As a man who writes poetry as a hobby, I am continually in search of new sources of inspiration and new techniques to be able to remove creative blocks. I have found the free writing activities our class has undertaken to be extremely enlightening. In most of these exercises, I have felt as if I was able to produce respectable work in a relatively short period of time. However, there was one free writing activity during which I felt my quality of writing dropped significantly: the group writing exercise where we would begin with a character sketch and pass our work to a classmate who would continue the story. Read more Free Writing
What Is Most Important?
Lately I’ve been wondering about what the goal of education actually is: are we solely in the business of educating, ensuring that our students learn the “correct” strategy, or are we in the business of student confidence?