The Teaching Textbook

How do I know if I’m doing it right? This is a question that I know I have been guilty of asking many times throughout my student life, as I suspect many other students have and will continue to ask. This question is especially important for how it relates to technology and digital spaces. I often find myself delving into these new digital spaces, trying to interact and engage with them, before being hit with those initial thoughts of “What am I doing? Is this right?” So that leads me to the question of how can I, as a future teacher, ensure that my students can answer these questions on their own? Recently I have been learning about using, analyzing, and creating in different spaces, understanding that to work effectively in digital spaces, we must ask questions about the tools we are using to better understand their benefits. This ability to ask questions is what I have come to know as the process of analyzing (Heinrichsen & Coombs, 2014, p. 9-11). Analyzing takes place before

The topic of how to teach students to use technology and attain meaning from it is often circling throughout my brain in one form or another. I find myself questioning how I’ll be able to teach with technology if I don’t feel comfortable enough using it on my own. Sure I consider myself to be relatively “techy,” when it comes to my personal use of technology, but how does that translate into my ability to incorporate it into the classroom? Over the past couple of weeks, I have discovered two key terms that can help in my ability to use technology in the classroom. Code breaking is the ability to understand how a technology works. This idea is closely tied to meaning making in that we have to understand the ins and outs of how a technology works before we are able to effectively find and take away meaning from it. To put these concepts into practice, I have spent some time creating in various digital spaces that were unfamiliar to me. I started off with creating a Bitmoji cha

Everywhere you look digital media is impacting our lives in one way or another and if this rings true, should we not, as teachers include digital media teaching in our classrooms? These past couple weeks I have spent some time delving into this topic of ‘critical digital literacy’ and what that really means for me as a teacher. What I have discovered through a reading of pages 4-6 of Mapping Digital Literacy Policy and Practice in the Canadian Education Landscape , was that critical digital literacy is the parts of digital media that are essential for one to learn and become familiar with in order to interact in society. To become digitally literate, people must be able to use technology and all the tools and components of it, be able to understand the content of it that they are viewing and be able to create and communicate in an informed manner via those technologies. What I think this means for me as a future teacher, is that I need to educate my students on digital media so that t

Shoes. What might they have to do with our identities you might ask? Well if I were to let my Blundstone boots briefly tell you about their experiences in my life, it might go something like this:  Hi! I am a young pair of Blundstones, but don’t let that fool you! Since I was brought home I’ve been everywhere my owner Megan has adventured to. I’ve touched every type of terrain you could imagine, from rocks to mud, water to grass, and everything in between. I’ve explored all over Ontario at various national and provincial parks because she loves to Canoe trip, hike, and camp.  Although I’ve seen a lot of the outdoors, mainly because that’s where Megan always is, I’ve also been to school, work, and anywhere else she needs a comfy pair of shoes. Even when I’m not on her feet, I’m packed away in her bag to be used later in her adventures. I don’t even have a spot in the closet or on the shoe rack because I’m hardly off her feet long enough to need any other home. She is always go, go g