Category: EDCI 336 (Page 2 of 3)

This is a category for the EdTech course. Please add this category in addition to the relevant edtech assignment category(ies).

Reflection 6 – The (not-so) secret powers of PowerPoint

October 27, 2022 / elliemcleod / 0 Comments

In the past, I’ve used PowerPoint in a variety of ways. The most common way I’ve used it is to make presentations, but I’ve also used it to make academic posters and figures. Something I like about PowerPoint is that you can change the size of a slide, which lets you make a poster of any size. I used this feature to make a poster for a research project in my undergrad (below). I also really appreciate how user-friendly PowerPoint is. Compared to other programs I’ve tried, I find that the learning curve required to make simple graphics in PowerPoint is much less steep than programs like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. If you’ve used PowerPoint to make a presentation it’s only a small step further to try graphics or posters.

In class, we were introduced to the power of PowerPoint to make simple graphics. Having used it for similar projects in the past, I felt like I had a decent background using PowerPoint going into this, but I learned a bunch of new things! It was awesome! I had no idea that you could use PowerPoint to remove the background of an image. I had also never tried using PowerPoint Icons or 3D models. This class was a great opportunity to play around with a familiar tool in new ways. I ended up trying to make a diagram illustrating how sediment deposition varies downstream following a river from mountains to the ocean. While making the diagram, I tried to use some tools that were new to me, like icons. This diagram is relevant to Physical Geography 12 or Geology 12. Knowing how the energy of an environment impacts sediment deposition underpins interpretation of the history of a sedimentary rock. Creating a diagram in PowerPoint could be one way to test student’s knowledge of a topic like this in a creative way.

Inquiry 5 – Adventuring in my Backyard: Experiments in Food-growing

October 23, 2022 / elliemcleod / 0 Comments

My partner and I are lucky to have a backyard and even more lucky to be able to grow some veggies in it. If nothing else, growing a bit of our own food has been an adventure! And right in our backyard! When we got home after a summer away, we were happy to find that our kale plants that we left had gone to seed. Not only that, but they had self-seeded! This left us with hundreds of kale seeds to save for the spring and, much to our delight, loads of tiny kale plants growing just about everywhere. Earlier in September, we also planted some spinach starts, mint, and arugula seeds. Since then, our garden has grown and is now full of a smorgasbord of greens and herbs. With a messy garden and garlic planting season upon us, I decided to spend an afternoon outside trying out some new things.

Project 1: Plant the garlic

We planted garlic last year and saved a couple of bulbs to plant this year. To add to the garlic mix, we also bought a couple of varieties from a local farmer. October-ish is usually garlic-planting season and it finally feels like October, so it was a great weekend to plant it. I also decided to try planting some of the garlic in an amongst our greens as an experiment in companion planting. We’ll see what happens come spring! I’m going to have to be careful to remember where they actually are… all part of the adventure!

One of our garlic cloves from this summer’s harvest ready for re-planting!

Project 2: Initiate leaf mulching experiment

Last year, when we planted garlic we left the soil bare for the winter. This year, we thought we’d try covering the soil in a layer of leaves, hoping that they’ll break down and enrich our soil while also giving our garlic cloves a little bonus layer of protection. We haven’t tried this before so we’ll have to keep an eye on it and see what it’s looking like.

Project 3: Attempt to propagate mint

We have a mint plant in a pot in our yard that has absolutely exploded, so I thought I’d try propagating it directly in soil. I have tried doing this in water before, but never directly in soil. Another experiment! I took a cutting from our mint and plopped in directly in another pot. We’ll see how it goes!

School Gardens and Backyard Adventuring

I think that school gardens provide ample opportunities for adventure and are a great way to bring an adventurous approach to learning about a host of topics. In my limited experience growing a garden, there has been plenty of curiosity, lots of challenge, a dash of wackiness, and most of all, lots of fun! When I worked on the Southern Gulf Islands running youth programs, one of our summer programs was centered around the school and community garden and involved all sorts of activities growing food and maintaining the garden space. During the school year, a couple of the classes at the school maintain the garden, planting everything they need for pizza, and harvesting it for a pizza making feast with their school-yard cob oven (coolest school ever). During the summer, we fixed fences, saved seeds, ate tasty berries, painted garden labels, played lots of games, and had lots of fun. I was lucky to be able to learn a lot from the garden manager and hope that in future schools I work in there is a similar space for incorporating a bit of food-growing adventure into learning.

Some of our summer garden activities! Painting labels for the garden beds and saving kale seeds.

Inquiry 4 – Adventurfication: Making Time for Backyard Adventures

October 22, 2022 / elliemcleod / 0 Comments

The past few weeks have been really busy and I’ve found it hard to find time for dedicated backyard adventuring. So, instead of carving out time specifically for backyard adventuring, I’ve taken on a new approach. I’m calling it adventurfication. It involves taking everyday activities and making them adventures. This process embraces the idea that adventure is more about your attitude and less about where you go and what you do.

“You can turn anything into an adventure by getting curious, coming up with a challenge, embracing a bit of wackiness, and having a grand old time.”
From my Initial Free Inquiry Blog Post

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to approach everyday activities with this attitude and realized that I actually already do a fair bit of backyard adventuring in my daily life. Here are some examples of my attempts at adventurfication:

Bike Trailer Ridiculousness – We have a bike trailer that we use to haul around all sorts of ridiculous things. During a chicken coop renovation project at my parent’s house a couple of years ago, we used bike trailers to bring massive pieces of plywood and 2x4s back home. Recently, we’ve used our bike trailer to go grocery shopping and just two days ago, we used it to transport a guitar. There’s something super fun (and also, sometimes quite challenging) about taking something that is much more convenient to transport by car and instead, transporting it by bike.
Running New Routes – I run pretty regularly and even before this project, I’ve used running as a mode of exploration. My favourite parts of runs are finding new streets and paths I haven’t been down before and stopping to look in little libraries and free piles for books and treasures. The other day, I found a French press in a free pile on my run and spent the next 20 minutes or so running with it . Talk about embracing wackiness. I got some weird looks.
Exploring my Literal Backyard – My partner and I are lucky to have a backyard and a small veggie garden. Most mornings, I go out and water our greens and take stock of what has grown. In the past week, I’ve been trying to spend some more time in our garden tending to our veggies and experimenting with some new things.

Adventurfication and the Classroom

Despite my best research efforts, I’ve had a hard time finding resources for adventurifying classrooms. This may be due in large part to the language I’m using. Google seems to think that adventurfication is not a word (silly Google!). So, I’ve been trying to come up with some ideas on my own. How can we take daily activities inside and outside the classroom and make them more adventurous? I don’t have all the answers, but I think there are lots of ways that this question intersects with other topics we’ve been learning about. I think that including inquiry in a classroom is one way to introduce adventure because it introduces curiosity and challenge into learning about something new (which in itself, should be an adventure!). In Earth and Environmental Science classes, I think that getting outside is a necessary part of learning and, undoubtedly, an adventurous part of it. For example, if you were teaching a class about glaciers, you could take them on a field trip to a place like Cattle Point in Uplands Park, where you can see some of the traces that glaciers leave behind (e.g. glacial grooves). This type of place-based learning is adventurfication in action.

An alternative term I’ve come across in this research is “microadventure”. This term was coined by Alastair Humphreys, a round-the-world cycle-tourist and advocate for making adventure easy and accessible. I think of backyard adventures and microadventures as roughly the same concept but by different names. And, I was actually able to find some examples of how microadventures could be applied in a school setting!

Reflection 4 – Where did I put that again? An exploration in content curation.

October 20, 2022 / elliemcleod / 0 Comments

Last week in class, we had a discussion about content curation. This discussion could not have come at a better time! At this point in the program, I feel like I’m being inundated with amazing resources that I want to save for later but I don’t have a good system for keeping things organized and find-able for future me. This week, I’ve spent some time trying to figure out a good system for organizing all of the links and lesson plans, readings and resources that come my way. Before this week, I felt like my content curation was all over the place. I had lots of things saved in my bookmarks and in folders on my desktop, but no unifying strategy. This sometimes made it hard to find resources later. I’m hoping that trying out some new systems make this a bit easier.

My goals for the this content curation exploration were to:

Find a system that is easy and convenient to use
Find a system that uses as few platforms as possible for saving information (i.e. everything in one place instead of all over the place)
Find a system that is automatically backed up somewhere so I don’t have to worry about losing everything

Here are some of the things I’ve been trying out and my thoughts on them.

Google Drive

I’ve used Google Drive for a long time but usually only for group projects. I’m used to using Microsoft Word and Excel and so tend to use Microsoft 365 and OneDrive through UVic for working on and saving my individual work. With the number of group projects in this program on Google Drive, I feel like I’m straddling too many platforms right now. So, I’ve been experimenting with moving things over to Google Drive and using it to save my own work and resources that I find. Right now, I am working on a plate tectonics unit plan for Earth Science 11. I’ve been testing out Google Drive as a way to save resources as I come across them and integrate them into my wider unit plan. So far, this is working okay. I like that everything is in one place and it is easy to add and save different types of files. I have some work to do still on migrating other projects I am working on to this platform so that everything is in one place.

Google Keep

The one thing I don’t like about how I’ve been using Google Drive is that it is not always convenient to move something from a web page into a Google Doc. I have to have the Google Doc open while I’m researching a topic and then switch between tabs when I want to save something. This is where Google Keep comes in handy. I’m thinking about Google Keep as a better way to do bookmarks. Like bookmarks, you can use a Google Chrome Plug-in to make saving webpages quick and easy. You can also add tags to the webpages you save so that they are organized much like bookmark folders. The difference is that when you save something to Google Keep, you can also add information to it. For example, I’ve been working on an annotated bibliography for one of our classes right now, and I’m finding this a really useful tool for finding and saving resources with a bit of a summary attached to them. As an added bonus, Google Keep integrates with Google Docs so that you can bring notes you make in Keep into a document.

Twitter Lists

I’ve never used Twitter before, but my mum, who is a teacher, loves using it as a way to learn about new resources and share them with other people. With the option to use it for this class and her experience in mind, I decided to give it a go. While working on my curation system, I thought I’d check out the ways that Twitter could be a part of this. Although I’m not super keen on retweeting everything I see that I want to save, I do think that the option to make Twitter Lists is something that could be useful to me. From my understanding, a Twitter List is like a sub-feed where you can group accounts you follow by topic and have all of their tweets show up in one place. I have an interest in environmental education, so I decided to make a private list where I can follow different twitter accounts related to this.

Concluding Thoughts

Although I don’t think I’ve perfected my content curation system, I’ve enjoyed exploring some different strategies for improving it. As the term goes on and I play around with this system, I’m sure it will evolve in lots of ways. For now, I am happy to have streamlined my system and bit and excited to see how it changes the ways I curate resources and information.

Reflection 5 – EdCamp and Student Voice

October 20, 2022 / elliemcleod / 0 Comments

This week in class we had an EdCamp. An EdCamp is an “unconference” where participants drive the professional development instead of organizers. Our EdCamp started with people writing topics on sticky notes and posting them on the wall. As a class, we then voted for the topics that we were most interested in discussing and the four topics with the most votes became the discussion points for the day. A facilitator took the lead on each topic, and the discussion began! There was no expert speaking at the front of the room and instead the discussion was driven by the experiences of participant. The video below illustrates what this might look like.

This was my first time participating in a conference with a participant-guided structure and it was really neat. I really appreciated the non-hierarchical nature of discussion, where everyone was welcome to participate and share their experience regardless of their teaching area, teaching experience, or other expertise. I found the structure also really conducive to building relationships between participants. As we chatted, some of us realized we had experiences in common or similar questions about a particular topic and were able to make connections over these things.

Using the EdCamp Model in the Classroom

Even though we were participating in an EdCamp in the context of teacher professional development, I think that a similar model could work really well in the classroom. For example, one of my teachable subjects in social studies, and I think that you could use EdCamp as a way to talk about current events in class. It could also be used as a way to find out what students are interested in and give them some space to self-direct their learning and teach each other. In one example I read about, a teacher has their students organize an EdCamp-style workshop for a younger grade at the school. This gave them an opportunity to not only explore their own interests but also take a leadership roles with younger students.

Inquiry 3 – Cycling to S,DÁYES (North Pender Island)

October 10, 2022 / elliemcleod / 1 Comment

With the long weekend on the horizon and the pull of family in different places around the Salish Sea, my partner and I crafted a backyard adventure plan that would ensure no turkey dinner was missed. My family was over on S,DÁYES (North Pender Island) and my partner’s family was in Victoria. In order to make it to all of the dinners and see all of the family, we needed to find our way out to the ferry, over to S,DÁYES, and back again in a two day span. Instead of taking the bus or hitching a ride, we decided to ride our bikes! Conveniently, there are all sorts of bike routes that criss-cross lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories, and you can pretty much stay on them all the way from downtown to the ferry terminal. This makes it super easy to get out there by bike.

Now, full disclosure, we visit family on S,DÁYES fairly frequently and have previously lived over there without a vehicle, so this bike ride was not new to us. In fact, we’ve done the same ride dozens of times. So, is it still an adventure? I think so. I don’t think you have to travel anywhere new to have an adventure, and really, the whole point of this project is to appreciate and learn more about the place I live. While this may involve visiting places new-to-me within my local area, I don’t think it always has to. Each time I do this ride it’s different, and in that way, each ride is a new adventure. The season, the time of day, the angle of sunlight hitting the trail, how busy it is, the quality of the pavement, the leaves on the trees, how many times I have to swerve to avoid horse poop – all of these factors change on the daily and on a bike, you are perfectly positioned to observe them. When we rode out to the ferry on Friday evening, the sun was slanted low in the sky, and the lighting was beautiful. There’s something special about cycling at this hour, side-by-side with your shadow, and with no one else on the trail. On the way back into town on Sunday afternoon, the sun was shining high in the sky and the ferry and bike trails were packed with cyclists. There’s also something special and really quite joyful about cycling in critical mass. Two different bike rides, two different experiences, two adventures, both special.

Sit-Spot-Cycling

Reflecting on this adventure reminded me of an activity I learned about while working with environmental education programs on S,DÁYES a couple of years ago. A pair of youth program leaders introduced me to the practice of sit-spots. A sit-spot is a place you return to regularly to observe your surroundings and cultivate an awareness of patterns in nature. Although, I haven’t really thought about it in this way before, the bike ride out to the ferry is a bit of a sit-spot (or sit-ride?) for me. I am familiar with much of the route down to the individual pot-holes on the trails and because of this I am attuned to how the route changes. For example, I know that a particularly bumpy section has been re-paved since I last rode the trail a month ago. I have observed the progression of one of the trail-neighbours veggie gardens throughout the seasons and the growth of native wildflowers in another garden just down the road. I also know that the pigs that live just off the route are even more ginormous than when I last saw them (which I didn’t think was possible). Maybe sit-spots don’t have to be stationary. Maybe we can also observe changes in our surroundings by moving through them at a slower-than-driving pace and maybe this is something that can be brought into the classroom.

One of the wonderful and ginormous pigs that live on the side of the Lochside Trail.

Bringing Cycling into the Classroom

Riding your bike is a great way to move through an area slowly and give yourself time to observe your environment. As you pedal, you quite literally feel the topography in the quickness of your breath and soreness of your muscles. It is also super fun! In one of the outdoor programs I have worked with, we take fifty or so ten-year olds on a bicycle and camping trip along the Galloping Goose Trail. It’s quite literally, the best. But beyond elementary schools, I haven’t heard of many programs that incorporate bicycles or cycling. I would love to find ways to incorporate bikes and cycling into the high school curriculum. Here are some programs I’ve heard of which either support youth cycling or incorporate cycling and bicycles into secondary and post-secondary curriculum:

Wild Rockies Field Institute Cycling the Rockies course – A university course that involves students undertaking a nearly month-long bicycle tour across Montana exploring energy infrastructure and climate change.
Project Bike Tech – A high school course offered in several states in the USA which teaches students the skills they need to work as bike mechanics. In a similar way to how many schools offer auto-shop courses, this is a bike-shop course. Similar programs are offered in some high schools in Toronto.
Capital Bike – Organization which offers bike skills and safety courses in the Greater Victoria region. They have courses designed for youth and adults.
Bike Works Seattle – A community bike-shop that offers bike repair skills courses and an earn-a-bike program to youth, youth riding clubs, summer programs, and job-skills training.

Reflection 3 – Technology Integration Using SAMR

October 10, 2022 / elliemcleod / 0 Comments

The SAMR model provides a framework for integrating technology into a classroom. The model was developed in 2010 by Rueben Puentedura, a chemist, expert on technology and education, and a former teaching fellow at Harvard University. The model progresses from enhancement to transformation of educational experiences using technology in four stages: substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition. Using technology to enhance an educational experience, can involve simply substituting the technology for existing methods (e.g. writing an essay in a word document instead of on paper) or augmenting existing methods using technology (e.g. using spelling/grammar checkers to improve essay). Using technology to transform an educational experience can involve modifying existing methods (e.g. using google docs to write essays in small groups and then share between classmates for feedback) or redefining them all together (e.g. creating video/podcast based on essay topic in group).

CLICK FOR Examples of SAMR in Action

SAMR Model Sketchnote by Sylvia Duckworth

In the video below, Rueben Puentedura, the creator of the SAMR model highlights an example of how this model could be applied moving from the enhancement to transformation stages. In this video, Rueben highlights that in moving from enhancement to transformation, a key change is that activities students normally complete individually become social activities as well. For example, an individual assignment could become a group project. Alternatively, the outcome of a project could be shared with the wider community.

Applying SAMR in the Classroom

Example: Learning About Seismic Waves

When an earthquake occurs, seismic waves are released. There are different types of seismic waves which behave in different ways. These waves can be detected and recorded by an instrument called a seismometer. Learning about different types of seismic waves and their detection is part of the Geology 12 curriculum in B.C.

Substitution: Instead of drawing a diagram of different seismic waves on the board, use a diagram from the internet on a powerpoint slide.

Augmentation: Instead of a diagram, use a simulation to demonstrate the differences in behaviour of different types of seismic waves.

Modification: In groups, ask students to create a short video clip simulating the motion of the different types of seismic waves through dance.

Redefinition: Introduce a seismometer into your school so that students can see how seismic waves are detected and recorded in real-time. In groups, students could analyze some of the data from the seismometer and compare it to the data coming from other school-seismometers in the region. More resources here.

Inquiry 2 – A Running Tour of the Signs of lək̓ʷəŋən

October 3, 2022 / elliemcleod / 0 Comments

I think that a key component of environmental education is nurturing a sense of place. In order to learn about environmental systems and approach environmental challenges, we must also understand our place within the web of the wider world. Cultivating this foundational sense of place involves learning more about the land you are on. As a settler living on unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) territories, learning about the land is inextricably tied to learning more about the Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples. In 2008, the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations and the City of Victoria collaborated on the The Signs of lək̓ʷəŋən, a series of seven spindle whorl (tool used to spin wool) statues marking places of particular cultural significance to the Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples around the inner harbour of the city. The development of the city actively obscures the ways in which the Lək̓ʷəŋən have interacted and continue to interact with this land. This installation serves to make visible the culture of the Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples and educate people about the cultural significance of this area, something that gets hidden behind colonial infrastructure.

The-Signs-of-lək̓ʷənən-Informational-Brochure Download

Although I have visited some of these site markers before and knew a bit about them, there are some I’ve never been to and I’ve never visited them all in one go, so this seemed like a good starting place for my backyard adventure project. Now to decide how to do it. Cycling seemed a bit too fast for this endeavor. I wanted to have time between sites to reflect on the land I was moving over and on how colonialism has shaped the reality I see today. So instead, I decided to run. In total, the run was 12km and I managed to see six of the seven spindle whorls. It’s quite moving how different the land is now than what is described on some of the signs. For example, outside city hall, skwc’әnjíłc (skwu-tsu-KNEE-lth-ch), the area is described as having been full of “willow-lined berry-rich creeks and meadows [meandering] down to the ocean.” What was once a rich ecosystem has now been paved over. Having now learned a little bit more, I think I will think of these places differently every time I visit them. I am really grateful to have had the opportunity to learn a bit about the cultural significance of each of these places to the Lək̓ʷəŋən and also to learn a couple more Lək̓ʷəŋən place names. I intend to continue this learning in future components of this project and beyond this project in my own personal and professional life.

Unfortunately, after running in circles for 20 minutes or so, I concluded that one of the site markers must have been removed as part of a soil remediation project at Laurel Point (Lək̓ʷəŋən name not known). This in itself was interesting to learn about and reflect on. The area around Laurel Point was a burial ground for the lək̓ʷəŋən until 1850. A short while later, it housed a paint factory and the land was infilled with hazardous materials (hence the soil remediation project). The work to remediate this site is ongoing, and the city hopes to use this project as an opportunity to meaningfully engage with the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations about what they would like to see done with the land. With this history and the ongoing efforts to remediate the site and repair relations, this place is not only interesting to learn about, but I think that it could be a great case study to talk about in a future classroom. From colonial dispossession and environmental contamination, to Lək̓ʷəŋən culture and reconciliation, this place is full of learning opportunities.

How could this be applied in the classroom?

Single Site Case Study – As was discussed above, the location at Laurel Point has a really interesting history that could be tied into multiple topics relevant to the B.C. curriculum. This could be a really great case study to investigate as a class and learn more about the cultural significance of the place to the Lək̓ʷəŋən, the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism, dispossession of land, environmental contamination and remediation, and ongoing processes of reconciliation.
A Tour of the Signs of lək̓ʷəŋən – Like my running tour, you could do a similar tour with a class. The entire route is easily bike-able, so it could make a good cycling tour, but obtaining bikes and taking kids on the road with them may be difficult to pull off. The distances between the site markers may be too far for a walking tour, especially if you have limited amounts of time. If it’s possible, you could break the class into groups and have each group study one of the sites and present back to the class.
Uncovering Place Project – During my undergrad I took several Indigenous Studies classes. In one such class, we undertook a project called Uncovering Place, where in groups, we identified a location within W̱SÁNEĆ territories, learned it’s SENĆOŦEN name, and learned about its cultural significance to the W̱SÁNEĆ people. At the end of the project, each group presented the place they studied to the class. I think you could do this same project in a high school social studies class relating to whatever territories you are working on.
Colonial Reality Tour – I’m not sure if these tours are still running after COVID, but before COVID, Cheryl Bryce (Lək̓ʷəŋən) ran tours around the city stopping at sites with significance to the Lək̓ʷəŋən and teaching people about each site. This could be a great field trip for a class.

Reflection 2 – A Framework for Inquiry: PSII

October 2, 2022 / elliemcleod / 1 Comment

The Pacific School for Innovation and Inquiry (PSII) is a high school on unceded lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) territories in downtown Victoria dedicated to learning through inquiry. In a similar way to High Tech High, subjects are integrated and the B.C. standard curriculum is “uncovered” by uniquely combining different subject areas across the curriculum. What’s neat about PSII, is that learning is highly personalized. Learners guide the inquiry based on their own interests, and teachers support them in this journey. There are no grade groupings, and students are grouped dynamically based on shared interests or similarities in projects or differences, depending on what makes the most sense in each context. Learners are encouraged to engage with the community in “real” projects that contribute in some way to their community and wider society. It all sounds pretty fantastic, but how does it work in practice? How do students come up with inquiry topics? How do teachers best support this inquiry? Is there any guiding structure that inquiry at PSII follows? These are the questions that this blog post will explore.

A Guide for Inquiry

So, how does one start an inquiry project? And where does it go from there? PSII follows a five-step model of inquiry. These five steps are as follows:

Starting: What are my initial questions? What types of questions can I ask?
Deepening: How can I answer these questions? What else do I need to know?
Refining: Can I improve my questions from step 1? Do I have any new questions?
Planning: How can I address these questions in creative ways? What are the best modes to address these questions? What will I need to answer these questions? How long will each of these questions take to answer?
Learning: Am I achieving what I set out to do in my planning stage? What is going well? What could be improved upon?

These five steps are built into a standard framework that learners at PSII are able to follow. An example of this framework put into action is animated in the video below.

Applying this framework to my own inquiry

For my free inquiry project, I am exploring urban environmental education by engaging in backyard adventures. These are adventures that are local to where I live, within a radius limited by my own abilities. Through this effort, I’m hoping to explore my own environmental education, learn a bit more about the place I live, and make connections to how I may apply similar principles in the classroom (and outside of it). To familiarize myself with the PSII framework and as an example of how it may be applied to an inquiry project, I’ve laid out the five steps in the table below. I may come back to this throughout my project to modify and refine it as I learn more.

Starting	– What is urban environmental education? – What are backyard adventures? – How can I bring adventure into the classroom?
Deepening	Environmental education at it’s core is an opportunity for people to learn about their environment. It involves learning skills, making observations, and cultivating values and literacy related to the environment. Environmental education is intimately tied to place, and an important part of it is understanding your relationship to place. This is where backyard adventures come in. Since they are hyper-local, these kind of adventures allow you to learn more about the place you live by travelling (relatively) slowly through it. Another key part of environmental education is action. By learning about their environment at a local level, people can also develop the skills necessary to tackle global challenges.
Refining	– How is environment education best applied in urban areas? – How can we cultivate a sense of place in the city? – How can we adventurify our classrooms? – How can we bridge the gap between adventure and action?
Planning	My plan is to engage in a backyard adventure once per week during the fall term. These adventures do not have to cover large distances or be super time-consuming, they just have to be undertaken in the spirit of adventure. For me, this involves being curious, challenging myself, embracing a bit of wackiness, and having fun. Importantly, they also have to be completely under my own steam, which with limited time between classes and other life commitments, puts limitations on what I can do (e.g. as fun as it would be, I probably will not be paddling to school). I will write weekly reflections about my adventures, what I learn, and how I think I could apply this to my future teaching practice. Some ideas I have for backyard adventures: -> A running tour of the Signs of lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) -> Following my drinking water from source to sink on my bike -> Running the length of the Bowker Creek Watershed -> Acquainting myself with my literal backyard -> Running a mile-an-hour long run
Learning	In progress…

Reflection 1 – Project Based Learning at High Tech High

September 25, 2022 / elliemcleod / 0 Comments

The movie “Most Likely to Succeed” is about High Tech High (HTH), a school on unceded Kumeyaay territories in San Diego, California with a radical and innovative approach to education. At HTH, students engage in semester long cross-curricular projects designed to prepare students to be citizens and leaders in a high-technology world. The original school, which is featured in the film, was opened in 2000, and has since expanded to include six high schools, five middle schools, and five elementary schools, all following the same innovative approach. Examples of some of the projects that students engage in at HTH include:

Exploring the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history and articulating the key factors influencing the rise/fall of civilizations through a mechanical art installation (Social Studies/Physics/Engineering)
Exploring themes of justice, genocide, refugees, and the treatment of women through the reading and performance of Greek plays (English, Social Studies, Art)

More projects can be seen on the HTH website here.

The trailer for “Most Likely to Succeed” a film about High Tech High.

The way that teachers combine subject areas at HTH was really interesting, and frankly, quite amazing. As a teacher-in-training, I found it incredibly inspiring to see these examples of cross-curricular inquiry in action. HTH seemed like a real-life example of a lot of what we have been talking about theoretically in PDPP classes, combining concepts of inquiry, experiential learning, multiliteracies, and interdisciplinarity. Within the new B.C. Curriculum, where there is a focus on broad concepts and competencies rather than specific curriculum, I think that there could be some opportunity to explore this type of teaching and learning. One of the challenges I foresee with applying the HTH model to a classroom in BC is that most high schools in BC offer subject-specific classes in siloes (e.g. Social Studies, Science, Math, French, Art, English). This means that being able to cross the divide between subjects requires collaboration with other teachers in different subject areas who teach in separate class times. In our Social Studies methods class, we learned about Hood River Middle School, where teachers collaborate between different subject areas to approach problems or topics from different ways in their different classes. For example, while students were launching a weather balloon and analyzing the data it collected in a science class, they were also coming up with different types of stories about where the weather balloon may have travelled in an English class. This could be one way to approach something similar to the HTH model within the current B.C. public education system.

It was also evident from the movie that students are incredibly engaged and invested in their learning. In part this may be because the projects they are working on look incredibly fun, but I think part of it may also be a result of the focus on exhibiting their work at the end of the year. The public display of class projects at the end of the term provided them an opportunity to share what they had learned with their community in a spectacular showcase. I was really impressed by this mode of assessment because I think it’s a great example of education not only engaging the community it is a part of, but also being accountable to it. This is something that I have not seen explicitly explored in any of our classes yet but is something that I think is really important. Educators should be accountable to the communities they are teaching in, both as an aspect of professionalism and as an act of citizenship. By displaying their work in a community showcase, students are also learning the importance of being a member of a community and their role as citizens within that community.

I left this movie feeling inspired. It was really cool to see a school taking such a unique approach to education, that not only appears to be really successful, but also looks super fun! It was also neat to explore the HTH website a bit more, learn a bit more about some of the other projects they have taken on, and think about how some of the same ideas could be applied within the education systems we will be working in.