I am choosing to do my final reflection as an overall course reflection of Education Technology. When this course first started I was not too sure what to expect. My only experience with learning about technology was really only from what I had learnt throughout a process of successes and failures living in an online world. For example my social media platforms were always public in my teenage years and early 20’s until I remember looking my name up on google images and seeing photos I had posted on facebook shared publically. At that moment I changed all of my privacy settings with the hopes of this not happening again. This was a learning opportunity for me, however I hope for my students that they understand these platforms better to limit these type of situations to occur. In ed tech we talked alot about privacy, online learning and digital literacy as a whole. The word digital literacy was not really in my vocabulary and I did not quite understand what that word fully meant. After learning more about what digital literacy is (see week #5 blog post) and what it means I see the value of teaching students to become digitally literate and become well versed myself in how to navigate digital technology. I think as our society continues to expand online and digital technology becomes more apart of our day to day lives, safety and privacy online is something that is really important to teach students about so they can have positive experiences online.
One of my favourite speakers we had in was Cari Wilson who shared with us a fantastic presentation on artificial intelligence and digital technology. I did a weekly blog post (#4) that links some of the resources she shared with the class. A resource she shared was the Focus website which has a section on teaching students about AI. Their are lesson plans, slideshows, and activity recommendations provided for different age groups. I also really like something she touched on which was if we as teachers are using AI for our lesson plans but we are saying to students its unacceptable to use it, that goes against a lot of what most teachers strive to be which is honest, trustworthy, and fair. I think transperency with students is important on the topic of AI, and it doesn’t really seem fair if us teachers can use it but students are expected to not be able to. I think this is where the AI assesment tool could be helpful for classrooms to establish clear expecations and guidelines for teacher and student on appropriateness of using AI.
Overall this class has been much different than what I expected, which is a great thing! I have learnt more about how to be digitally literate, how to incorporate AI, and all of the complexities that come with classroom vs online teaching. I am also really happy and suprised at how many amazing useable resources I am leaving this course with! The lesson plans that Cari provided with the Focus resource are going to be extremely helpful moving forward, and all of the websites, documents and articles Valerie has shared throughout the course are going to be a huge asset as I develop my skills as a classroom teacher.