Category: Weekly Reflections

As this semester draws to a close, we are prompted with an open-ended question: “Where do you see yourself in the year 2055?” I have spent some time pondering this, and in the end, I have come up with two, equally likely options.

OPTION ONE: This is a world that continues its dive into conservatism, capitalism, and consumerism. War and famine plague the world, while the ill cannot afford to heal themselves. This a dystopia, where math is replaced by survival lessons and teachers are few and far between. Perhaps a nuclear winter or perhaps climate change has made the world too hot to touch… either way, outside is dangerous. Teaching is an important profession, lost to the world around it.

OPTION TWO: This is a much more positive view of the world. In this reality, the world moves forward and countries focus on socialism and peace. Teaching is evolved to incorporate technology and artificial intelligence, while still having a primary focus of outdoor education, nature restoration, and environmental issues. In this future, I have a boat. And I drive that boat to the elementary school that I teach at, as a teaching principal. In this reality, I have a BEd and a MEd and my PhD in outdoor education. I take on a principal role, but I can’t tear myself away from teaching and still teach a couple subjects to Grade 5s.

This is my final weekly reflection. I really hope that my future ends up similar to option two. I hope, either way, I at least get a boat. This course has been one of my favourites in education so far; I’ve learnt so much. I walk away from EDCI 336 with more knowledge and confidence in both using technology and teaching it. Most importantly, I walk away knowing how to make QR codes in any tab. This is genuinely the best thing I’ve learned in this whole programme. I don’t know how I didn’t know how to make QR codes before.

So, this is the end of EDCI 336 and the end of Emma’s Archive. Thank you all for reading and thank you, Michael, for the wonderful course.

xoxo Emma Turner

If outdoor education has 1 000 000 fans, I’m one of them. If outdoor education has 1 000 fans, I’m one of them. If outdoor education has 1 fan, it’s me. If outdoor education has 0 fans, I’m dead.

I love outdoor education. I want to get my master’s in outdoor education. I think that nature can teach kids about the world faster and more efficiently than a classroom ever could. Outdoor education reinforces physical health, improves mental health, increases focus and understanding, and all around, makes learning more engaging. Educating outside supplies real-world applications to all things science, math, history, and creates a connection between students and the land they reside on.

Additionally, the mental benefits of being outside are far superior than spending 7 hours sitting inside a box with fluorescent lights. Being outside exposes students to fresh air, vitamin D, and reduces sedentary behaviour. Time in nature also has a calming effect, reducing stress and anxiety, while boosting mood and self-esteem.

Lastly, spending time learning in nature fosters a deep connection with the environment, creating a sense of responsibility among students. This leads students to respect the land around them, picking up litter, taking care of plants and animals, and overall fighting for the environment. In the time we live in, this is more important than ever. The environment can’t fight for or fix itself; instead, we must protect the environment ourselves.

Feminism: the idea that everyone is entitled to freedom and equality, somehow seen as “controversial” among certain political groups. Feminism was born from the oppression of women as a homogenous group, although we see today that intersectionality plays a large role in this unequal power dynamic. In our contemporary society, gendered power is not equally distributed but experienced differently by each woman, shaped by various overlapping factors. This, my friends, is intersectionality.

The modern feminist understanding states that the struggles of women cannot be reduced to a single monolithic narrative, as factors including but not limited to class, race, gender identity, religion, and sexual orientation also play a role in privilege. For instance, a rich, white woman would experience more privilege than a woman of colour or a working-class woman, as she might have more access to resources, educational and work opportunities, and beneficial social networks. In order to create a truly equal society, a comprehensive feminist movement must address how these dimensions intersect to shape each woman’s life.

Gender itself is a made-up system which serves to maintain the structure of inequality. Dismantling these confining gender roles would challenge the sexist power structure established in our heavily-gendered society. The idea of gender functions as a mechanism of control, limiting individual freedoms and conforming people to narrow definitions of femininity and masculinity, reinforcing this inequality.

Advocating for the rights, freedoms, and equality of women means advocating for ALL women. Not just a niche, privileged version of the 4 billion women who walk this Earth every day.

When looking at the history of teaching, there are two places where teaching had to change and adapt completely: 1998 and 2023. 1998 marked the birth of Google, which meant that learning was no longer centred around learning through teaching. Classrooms and libraries were not the only place to learn now, you could find any information you wanted through the internet. Access to knowledge was free and it was everywhere. Rote memorization was abandoned, replaced with critical thinking and personalized learning. A new tool, originally frowned upon, was embraced in education, forever changing the way we think, learn, and teach.

A similar change began in 2023 with the introduction of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) chat bots, like ChatGPT. AI swept the world like a plague, getting faster and more accurate with each new user feeding it information on how to better replicate human scholars. Most notably, ChatGPT found its way into schooling, learning how to forge essays, plagiarize art, and answer an entire math test in approximately 5-10 seconds.

Believe it or not, I’m pro-AI. Well, pro-in-small-amounts. Like candy.

I believe that AI is tool, valuable for everyone, but notably for my future profession as an elementary teacher. It is a tool that can be taken advantage of, for sure, but when used correctly, AI is helpful. It is your own personal assistant, happy to do boring, tedious tasks, lowering workload and decreasing burnout. AI is a tool to be embraced, for it is here now, and it cannot be squished down and put out.

New technology faces backlash and skepticism, no matter what. The calculator was originally seen as a replacement for learning, wiping out teachers and mathematicians. People believed that calculators would lead to future students with no basic math skills… and look at schools now. Calculators are a tool, embraced in school, embraced in society.

AI can write essays and make “art” and answer 100 math questions in 10 seconds, sure. The rate it is advancing and growing is scary, yes. But we were scared of the calculator too. AI is a tool and once it is accepted as one, it will benefit everyone and every profession enormously.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, I love iMovie. It’s not the best software, not the most advanced, or the easiest to use, but I love it anyway, for all its flaws. I’ve tried every free editing software in the book, and while some come close (like CapCut), iMovie reigns supreme. I think it’s less about the quality of the software and more about how this is an app I’ve grown up using, since I was an aspiring director at age 8.

I use iMovie for the grunt work of montaging. It’s a wonderful platform for getting all my videos into one place and editing them down to a respectable length, going with the beat of whatever song I think fits the montage. I use CapCut for aesthetics like captions, or filters/transitions if I’m really going all out.

Check out my most recent montage below!

As a girl who grew up in the age where saying “I want to be a YouTuber when I grow up!” was common, I know my way around picture editing. In the last decade, my friends and I have created numerous YouTube channels and I have had to learn video editing and picture editing to keep up with our ambitions. I created thumbnails, edited hundreds of videos, and to this day, my friends and I still post on our just-for-fun channel, ELK.

While I don’t really consider YouTube a hobby or anything, I do consider video editing a huge hobby of mine–in particular, montaging. I love making montages of my time travelling, or sometimes just summer in general. I think that montages are the best way to sum up a trip, and are so rewarding to watch back. I have all my montages in https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNR6WuzDon7GfS2Tfx80Otm5tuPLFqQXX and I think it’s amazing how much my video editing skills have improved from 2019 to now.

I guess my point of this entry is that basic skills in video/photo editing can transcend to new hobbies that teachers don’t even consider. I had to teach myself video editing off of a very slow version of iMovie on an iPhone 4, but I persevered. I think that this is a valuable asset to teach in schools, especially in the digital age. Teaching a kid video editing can turn them into a future movie director… or just a girl who makes montages. Either way, it is an important skill to teach and I’m happy to be entering a profession where I can make this possible.

The introduction of cell phones, the internet, and social media marked an irreversible change in our society. With these came the end of privacy, the end of solitude, and the end of authenticity. My little sisters are Generation Alpha and they’re being raised by screens, phones, and the internet. Gone are the days of all the neighbourhood kids playing outside after school, replaced with sitting on the couch and playing Roblox for hours. I don’t agree with how my sisters are being raised, but I don’t blame my parents either. The introduction of iPads and YouTube made parenting easier… If your kid is having a tantrum, just shove a game in their face!

Contrary to how I despise how play time is now replaced with screen time, I don’t agree with this all-encompassing phone ban at schools. I think that a phone ban in Elementary schools SHOULD be useless, as I don’t think any child under the age of 11 should have their own personal screen, let alone a cellular device, but unfortunately, this is not an idea that all parents agree with. In my Link2Practice 4/5 class, several of the 8 or 9 year-old students had cell phones… for texting, games, and social media as well. So while I think an Elementary phone ban should be unnecessary, experience shows that it is not.

For high school, however, I do not agree with a phone ban. Strict rules create sneaky kids, and I think that the stricter these phone bans get, the more energy students are going to put into getting around it. I remember having a phone ban in a few classes during high school (where we had to put our phone in sleeves at the front of the room) and I would always try to get around it, (even though I had a barely-working iPhone 4) I was fighting it for the principle. My friends and I would put calculators inside the sleeves instead of phones, or once it was further in the year and my teacher would stop checking the sleeves so often, we would just stop putting our phones in there at all. Sometimes we’d put our phones in there until the teacher took “phone attendance” then we would sneak them back out when they weren’t looking.

It’s not like we were even using our phones inappropriately. I find that music makes me focus, so I would listen to music during class in order to pay attention. It’s something I still do in University when I find my mind wandering during a lecture. Once I got Bluetooth headphones, I would turn on music before putting my phone at the front of class, and I know many kids would do that too.

Phones in a high school environment are not just a distraction. They are a tool so interweaved with our society that it is fraught to expect a school of 1200 students to go without their phones for 7 hours. If everyone wants kids to be less dependent on phones, then our society has to change as a whole to support that. Kids do not raise themselves. If we are raised in an environment where we are constantly connected and online, with a screen available to us at any time, then that is how students will expect schooling to be too, and breaking them from this routine will be exhausting.

Instead, I believe that teachers should work WITH students to be able to have access to their phones and also be attentive and learning. Instead of marking phones as this negative thing, they should be seen as a helpful tool that can be used in learning. This not only creates open communication about the internet and social media, but it prepares students for the world after secondary school–where phones are a big part of life and the workplace. In short, I think that this “phone ban” is a bandaid over a bullet hole, and in order to fix the root of too many screens and a distracted class, students need to have more freedom with their own property.

The year is 2025, and TikTok, a social media platform focusing on short-form videos, is everywhere. I personally do not use TikTok, but I have a tendency to scroll Instagram reels (TikTok’s evil cousin) in my spare time. The algorithm definitely knows I am in the Elementary B.Ed. Program, as many of the videos I get on my feed are teaching-related. Most notably, there are so many TikToks of teachers and their students.

Upon talking about this topic in class, it reminded me how strange I find this use of social media in the classroom. Some of these accounts are posting TikToks daily. While I can see the fun in filming a short video with students during pack-up time, the issues come in when considering whether these students and their guardians have consented to be all over the internet and how these students are not just being used for clicks and views but also for money.

TikTok is a platform that pays its creators, and while most of these TikTok teachers are not making a profit from these videos, it is beyond a doubt that others are. They are monetizing these kids and disguising it as a “fun break from learning.” While really, it is a scheme to use students to promote clicks, views, and profit.

Photo by Jordan Gonzalez on Unsplash

Recently, I watched a video where a teacher was sitting blindfolded in the classroom and one-by-one each of the ~25 students came up to her and said her name. The teacher then guessed each student’s name off of their voice (and got them all right). This video was a fun way to test her ability to recognize each student’s voice but the problem arises when considering that she has put her entire class, (their names and what each student looks like), online. Not just on one platform either, but TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and who knows what else.

After talking about this, FIPPA, and the BC school regulations around student data in class, it got me wondering about the consent side of this. Were students/guardians asked for consent for these videos? If so, was it verbal or did they sign a form? Was the frequency of filmed videos discussed, and the fact that student’s names would be shared? Was the monetization side of this discussed with the school administration and parents/guardians? Lastly, were students/guardians made aware that these videos are published on multiple platforms?

The ethical considerations are what stand out to me; I’ll probably never get an answer to the questions above. I’m glad I spent so much time thinking about this though–it allowed me to come to the conclusion that this is something I will not be integrating into my classroom. Ever.