Workshop Six Blog

"Information technology is identity technology. Embedding it in a culture that supports democracy, freedom of expression, tolerance, diversity, and complexity of opinion is one of the decade's greatest challenges."


• What role could multimedia instructional materials and student multimedia projects play in bringing about this culture?

This quote struck me as somewhat ironic, considering that the country I live in realizes the validity of how information technology transforms identity and supports freedom of speech, etc. To that end, many information and social networking technologies end up blocked by the government. Even this blog that I write in is inaccessible without a VPN. As part of a culture that is trying to censor their population, in the classroom efforts by Western teachers often suffer. A use of a wiki to share who our class is and what our class is learning just isn’t always feasible due to internet blocking and other issues beyond our control.

• How can teachers' use of multimedia support the development of such a culture?

In an international school setting, students are constantly searching for their place and where they belong and who they are. Technology allows for students to connect with other TCK students around the world.
In my experience, when students feel as if who they are is valued both inside and outside the classroom, they perform better and have higher motivation to learn. Multimedia in the classroom helps these students be able to express themselves in a way that they might not otherwise be able to do – both academically and socially. I think this is especially important when you live in a culture that is trying to reverse this trend.

• What are the challenges in your classroom?

In my classroom, the language barrier is of course huge. In some aspects, we are asking these children to put aside for large amounts of time per day who they are. Language is one of the biggest ways that they identify themselves and we tell them they must put that aside and communicate in English. Once a basic level of proficiency is obtained, this too is used to identify themselves (I speak English and he doesn’t), express themselves through opinions (I want to do this instead of that), measure diversity (Bob can speak three languages and Sally can speak four). Technology is very helpful in scaffolding my student’s language development but it also presents challenges as the technology is not equally distributed to all students.

Workshop Five Blog

Questions, questions, questions. Six year old's ask questions every other sentence. They are curious about the world all around them. This is probably my favourite thing about teaching first graders, especially as their English grows and the questions begin to never stop.

"How do you spell help?" "When is it lunch time?" "Do we have to stop science class now? We're having fun!" "When will we have the fire drill?" " Do you spell heart h-e-a-r-t?" "Can I use markers to colour?" "Will we get to go to the treasure box tomorrow?" "Do I turn this into the box now?" "May I go to the bathroom?" What does brave mean?"

All these questions make for lots of opportunities to ask them questions to help guide their learning.


1. After you have explored the Questioning Toolkit websites, what types of questions do you generally use when you teach students?

In science and reading classes, we daily use esstential questions to guide our discoveries and to set purposes for our reading and our experiment outcomes. My students are all on different levels of English language learning, so clarification questions are also a daily type of question used in my classroom by both myself and my students. Grade one is where children are transitioning from kindergarten and into formal schooling. The overall goal of this year is independence in completing common routines and procedures. Thus, we have a lot of telling and planning questions.


2. What kind of questions would lead students to think critically and at higher levels?

Elaborating and inventive questions are two of many types of questions that can help primary grade children to think critically. Strategic questions also help guide them to think at higher levels while providing structure for them to not become discouraged easily.

3. What kind of questions would complement the integration of technologies in your classroom?

Elaborating questions would really complement integration of technology in my classroom. It is a natural step from ‘What does it mean?” to “What does this mean in relation to me?” and “How can I use this effectively?” Sorting and sifting questions allow my students to determine a technologies personal relevance to their lives.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the word brave in Chinese is 勇敢[yǒnggǎn].

Workshop Four Blog

My student reading selection this week was about Johnny Appleseed. One of the things that we discussed was Johnny’s life-style– he did not wear the same types of clothing as others, and he did not live in a house like others did. He did not even stay in one place for very long. He was different from others. This caused some people to not trust him although many people still liked him and knew him to be a good man.

I feel like I have the same type of relationship with technology and its uses for it in the classroom. Our school does not have a “technological lifestyle” similar to the schools of friends in my cohort. I cannot pull up a video on my interactive whiteboard or dazzle my students with a PowerPoint created to teach them about collective nouns. The technology I use is different from others, and at times I do not trust it because of these differences. This however, doesn’t mean that many other people can’t also use it or know it to be good for integrating into their classrooms.

The learning activities that I’ve completed for this education in technology course have opened my eyes to the many possibilities for their use in education. I have especially thought over the blogs and social networks idea and have found it very helpful. I would really like to integrate it as a form of student portfolio.

I feel like the work my students do is worthy of being displayed and could provide a link to other schools across the globe. Education in China is much different than education in Canada, or even education in Australia. All educational technologies have good application and if we combine these ideas and collaborate with others, I think I could really see something amazing come out of it. I’d love to be able to present how I’d used blogs in the classroom at a educator’s professional development conference, similar to the ICEC conference I attended in Hong Kong.