Category: Education
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Building a Digital Escape Room
What is an Escape Room? Escape rooms are a whole new way of experiencing storytelling and of adding gamification to your classroom. Typically, they are a room in which people are locked in order to play a game requiring them to solve a series of puzzles within a certain amount of time to accomplish a…
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Creating Dynamic Content
Creating dynamic, interactive content is about more than looks or fun – it’s about good pedagogy. Using dynamic and interactive content promotes social-emotional learning, increases engagement, decreases cognitive load, and learning science supports these assertions. Social-Emotional Learning Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the…
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Increasing Student Voice, Creativity, and Technological skills with Multimodal Writing
I recently attended an engaging and impactful multimodal writing workshop led by Angela Stockman. While I’ve included multimodal writing in my high school English classes for a while now, the workshop reinforced its importance. The typical focus on the alphabetic mode as being better or more important than the other modes (haptic, aural, visual, gestural,…
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A Multi-pronged Approach to SEL
Starting a new school year always prompts me to reflect on previous years. What can I do better? What do I need to implement? What do I want to continue? What’s different this year that needs to be addressed in a distinct way? One thing that I keep coming back to as a paramount need…
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Teaching The Skin We’re In
As part of my Grade 12 University level English course this year, I decided to create a unit on the book by Desmond Cole – The Skin We’re In. Over the last few years, our department has been updating our book choices, and last year my colleague, who was then teaching ENG4U, did Stamped: Racism,…
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Bringing a Fruit Roll-Up to a Knife Fight
I was not expecting to talk about fruit roll-ups and knife fights, but who knew how impactful and informative that would be? I had the pleasure of attending a Symposium on Teacher Wellness hosted by the Ontario Teachers Federation a little while ago and am still reflecting back on the learning that took place. I…
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The Future of Online Learning in Ontario
Online learning and educational technology have enormous potential for good and We can level the playing field if we recognize the need to implement appropriate systemic support and have a progressive vision with students at the core.
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Digital Promise’s Instructional Design Tool
Last month I wrote about the Learner Variability Navigator created by Digital Promise – my new favourite tool I have to say. And just when I thought it couldn’t be any more brilliant, they go and knock my socks off with a great new addition to ramp up the awesomeness. Digital Promise, an independent, bipartisan non-profit,…
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Learning About Ourselves and the World
The participants of the global collaborative project, Single Voices, Global Choices, have been immersed in a multitude of learning experiences focused on the many international days of recognition. October and November have offered rich experiences to learn about ourselves and others ranging from investigating our own mental health and wellness to understanding the issues faced…
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Learner Variability
What is the one constant in education today? Well, it varies. Something I’ve spent a lot of time on lately is learner variability. This focus grew out of my interest in supporting social emotional learning. In learning about supporting student’s emotional health and incorporating practices and strategies to encourage social-emotional growth I began looking carefully…