Leahs Teaching Journey

Week 1 Reflection: Intro

January 11, 2025 / westcoasteducation

This week we were introduced to a lot of intro information and what the course will look like. We had the chance to take some surveys on mentimeter.com with questions like, “what comes to mind when you think about technology in education,” and personal feelings, interests, and beliefs connected to technology. I found it super interesting and insightful seeing my peers’ answers to the first question as some of the biggest connections were with engagement, accessibility, ai, distraction and it’s other challenges. It’s nice to gauge the feelings of other educators on such an important and relevant topic that we will most likely be incorporating into our careers moving forward.

I have also started my WordPress website as you can see and have been trying to navigate it and edit some of the layout. During our first class meeting we also took some time to discuss some different teachers or educators that we might connect with on social media and at the time I couldn’t recall her handle but one educator in particular came into my mind as I find her work quite relative to today’s changes and challenges especially around ai and technology. Her name is MacKenzie Price but goes by @futureof_education on instagram and is the founder of 2HourLearning where students basically spend 25 minutes working in each core subject (through an AI tutor) and the rest of the day is spent doing life skill workshops or pursuing projects differing depending on age groups. I find her work fascinating and love seeing educators innovative and out of the box ideas to help students succeed in such impactful ways.

Lastly this week has my mind swarming with ideas to use for my final Inquiry project. I am currently deciding which to choose and how I might approach this moving forward. I’m excited for what’s to come in this course and to see everyone else’s ideas flourish as well.

Welcome and Introduction

September 9, 2020 / edtech

Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:

Do you want to be online vs. offline?
Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.

First tasks you might explore with your new blog:

Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “EdTech” category or sub-categories, Free Inquiry and EdTech Inquiry). We have also pre-loaded the Teacher Education competencies as categories should you wish to use them to document your learning. If you would like to add more course categories, please do so (e.g., add EDCI 306A with no space for Music Ed, etc.)
See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the course categories assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
Add pages
Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works)
Under Appearance,
- Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, etc.)
- Customize menus & navigation
- Use widgets to customize blog content and features
Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep for reference)

Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to use the course topic as the category as opposed to the course number as those outside of your program would not be familiar with the number (e.g., we use “EdTech” instead of “edci336).

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging: