Week 8

This week we had the principal of Minnedosa Collegiate Bryce Ridgen as our guest speaker. At Minnedosa Collegiate the school is 1 to 1, meaning that for every student at the school there is a device. Whether it be a tablet, ipad, or laptop all students have some device available to them. My last placement was in Rivers and the school there was set up in the same way. Both schools are in Rolling River School Division so perhaps it is a division wide initiative. Being the principal of a 1 to 1 school Bryce had many good ideas to share with us. One idea that I really liked was using Padlet so that students can anonymously collaborate as a class. So you could create a discussion on Padlet and put it up on the smart board. Then students would be able to share their ideas anonymously up on the board. I like the of being able to share anonymously, I think that it could bring up some really good conversations. As a phys. ed. teacher I could see it being really good for some difficult topics that come up in the health curriculum. Things like sexual health and mental health are topics that not all students are willing to talk about openly in front of their peers. Padlet would give students a venue to share what they want to share and ask questions that they want to ask, without that fear of being judged by their peers.

The part of the presentation that I really liked was when Bryce talked about rethinking summative assessment. This has kind of been an ongoing theme with a few of the guest speakers that we have had. I really like the inforgaphic that Bryce showed us, "101 ways to show what you know", which I have shared below. This is an image that I would like to put up in my class or hand out to students. I plan to give students plenty of choice in class. This graphic would give students all sorts of different ideas of things they could do to show me what they have learned. Bryce showed us some example of things that students had done for him. It was amazing the creativity and knowledge that was achieved by high school students.  I look forward to the unique projects that my future students will take on.