Author Archives: Sebastian

Feb 25 2020
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Tweeting for Tech

For the second multimedia reflection I responded to the Technologist Module of Ontario Extend’s website using the format of a Twitter essay. I am not a frequent Twitter user so this format was somewhat new to me outside of the limited experience I had during class. On the whole I found the experience to be fairly painless — despite the spotty Internet connection I experienced throughout creating the thread — and I enjoyed the fact that I could dig fairly deeply into the module itself.

One of the key points from my Twitter essay

Ontario Extend lists their outcome and objectives at the beginning of the module as a guide to keep in mind as one reads through the various sections. This I found to be a helpful lens through which to view the content, and having these outcomes in the back of my mind as I digested the material helped me synthesize the main ideas of the module as a whole. The entire idea is to provide resources for teachers to help them use technology more meaningfully in the classroom, as well as a system that can be used to help even the most technologically-inexperienced educator find ways in which tech can solve problems for learners in there classroom.

The system which the Technologist module uses is the Design Thinking Process. It has several stages which are easy to remember and flow extremely logically from one to the next. It is an excellent way to assess what the true challenges are in the classroom, and takes a very student-centered approach to finding or creating technology which addresses these challenges.

The 5 stages of the Design Thinking Process

The biggest strength for Ontario Extend’s module is that they link to a number of valuable and concise resources to help teachers follow the Design Thinking Process. For example, in the “empathize” section, the site provides a handy Empathy Map for teachers to print and use (as well as an example of a completed version). Throughout the other sections they also give suggestions for various tech tools one might use to help them along the process, as shown below from the “ideate” section. These links and downloadable documents ensure that there are no barriers to the successful application of their module.

A screenshot from Ontario Extend’s website showing their abundance of suggestions for tech tools

All in all, I think that the Technologist module is an extremely valuable resource for all educators in the 21st Century. Technology is an inescapable part of modern life, and it is our responsibility as educators to incorporate it into the lessons we teach in truly meaningful ways. It is very easy to use tools on a surface level, but few have unlocked the true potential that technology has in the modern classroom. This module is the perfect starting place to begin the journey of meaningfully integrating technology in lessons, and is a very clear step-by-step guide to achieve that end by asking the right questions and always keeping the students in mind.

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Oct 01 2019
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Teachers Aren’t Teaching Their Students How To Think

A Reflection on Ashley Hinck’s Digital Ghosts in the Modern Classroom

Sketchnote by Sebastian Bachmeier

In Ashley Hinck’s article Digital Ghosts in the Modern Classroom, Hinck discusses the various issues people face when working with technology in the school environment. For many students in the past and even today, the bulk of schoolwork is very cut-and-dry. There is one way of doing things; your answer is right or wrong. Worksheets are a classic example of this type of exercise: you fill in the blanks and you get a nice little check mark beside all the blanks you have filled in correctly. It is easy to see where you are successful and where you have failed, and it is not necessary to do much creative thinking in order to achieve top marks.

With the advent of technology, times began to change, however. Teachers began trying to integrate tech into their classes, but while the effort comes from a good place the technology is often misused. Hinck mentions such projects as creating one’s own website — a very valuable skill in this technological age! There are platforms like Wix or Squarespace whichmake building a site easy; simply follow the steps, drag and drop, and presto! A fully-functional website all your own! The problem, as Hinck mentions, is that creativity is severely limited on these platforms. She argues that these methods of creating content are not representative of what creation of web-based content truly is, and I have to agree.

Assignments which use these “Web 2.0” platforms in school only offer the illusion of creativity, always working within the platform’s constraints. They end up being graded in a manner very similar to the worksheets of yesteryear, where you either have a nice-looking website, presentation, etc. which checks all the boxes on the grading rubric, or you don’t. The problem with this kind of activity is that it does not represent true content creation, and does not teach students the skills needed to thrive in this working world: problem solving.

Hinck talks in her article about the countless students she has seen come into her classes ready to learn HTML or CSS, only to be caught off-guard by how hard these languages can be. They become concerned with all of the wrong problems, thinking that because their code or program is not working, they must be wrong. They believe they have failed because for their entire school careers they have been told that there is a set of steps to follow to ensure success, and they end up missing the point of learning these skills in the first place. The real key to these types of activities is the learning process. What matters is whether one is able to identify a problem, fix it, and continue learning. The process is the focus, not the product.

This concept is foreign not only to students, but to many teachers as well. As teachers, we aren’t doing our students any favours by creating product-oriented projects. They will not gain anything by following a set of steps until they reach success, but they will learn valuable lessons by working their way through problems, facing and overcoming failure, and documenting their progress along the way — even the messy parts.

I found this assignment to be very closely tied to the article. It forced me to get out of my comfort zone and try a different approach to an assignment which I had never attempted before. It certainly had its challenges — I had originally planned to do the whole sketchnote digitally using a digital art program and drawing tablet, but I couldn’t get the tablet to work properly and ended up drawing and colouring the entire note by hand. Then I had to find some way to get it from a physical page to a JPEG format on my computer, which was not a step I had expected to face. The process of dealing with these issues taught me about which skills I am already comfortable using (drawing by hand, using a scanning printer) and which skills I will need more time to master (using a drawing tablet successfully, troubleshooting digital art software). Regardless of how successful I may be in the end, the message in the article couldn’t be clearer: students need to learn to value process over product, and that needs to start with teachers (like us, hopefully) who teach their kids how to think.