Webb of Thoughts

Next week, I will be attending the WestCAST (Western Canadian Association for Student Teaching) 2012 conference being hosted by the University of Calgary. I attended the conference last year when it was in Brandon, Manitoba and shared a session called “Google 2.0 – More Than a Search Engine” and met many other student teachers from across western Canada.

This year, the conference challenge is “How might we rethink the focus and practices of teacher education to explore emergent insights into learning?” and I’m excited to hear what other universities are doing to investigate this.

(Click image to enlarge.) Does this sound familiar? I don’t know where this image originated, but if you do, let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.

I made this video for my EPS 350 class this semester. Instead of writing a final reflective paper, we created mini documentaries to show our growth over the semester. The video is just under fourteen and a half minutes long and can be viewed by clicking play below or here. I used iMovie ’09 and a FlipCamera to shoot all of the film. I originally had over three hours of footage that I clipped down to the 14 minute video.

This semester has brought about a lot discussion around assessment among my classmates. This is what I have found: As university students, we don’t care about learning.  We care about getting a good enough grade to move on.  It wasn’t until my class Skyped with Joe Bower that I began to realize this.  Joe challenged and pushed our thoughts on grading and what impact is has on real learning. So I decided to stop caring.  Those who know me might [...]

To kick off our Winter 2011 semester we attended a conference covering many different education topics.  For one session I chose to attend a presentation about physical education assessment, mostly since I know nothing about physical education and thought that perhaps I could get some ideas that could translate well over into math and the sciences. To kick off this particular presentation, the presenters posed a question to us;  Should effort be included in assessment?  I immediately thought to myself, [...]

A few weeks ago, I finished up my finals for the year.   Luckily, I only had to write two finals because all of my education classes had final projects instead.   This meant I had a great deal of extra time to prepare for my two difficult math finals.  I’m used to having to prepare for five finals in the same time period, so I had plenty of time to get ready for these two. Did I use this [...]