What does it look like to lead a course using Google Classroom? So far I have been a student in one course, meaning I have some experience with the platform, but to use it as a teacher does require some practice as well.
For fun, I started a fake course of my own:
Starting a Course
Turns out you need to sign a release to do so, since an actual school system requires additional security:
At least there is additional security
I designed this one to fit the needs of memory techniques:
A memory course
For my first assignment, I decided to make a brief memory quiz:
So far it is blank…
The process of forming questions works as follows:
Question one
Each question has a variety of options, ranging from multiple choice to short answer. To test it out, I invited a colleague to practice the digits of pi by sending him the Google Classroom course code:
What is strange, however, is that his attempt does not register. I witnessed him complete the quiz, so the fact that nothing appears is concerning. To see what happened, I tested it myself:
My quiz attempt
Despite completing the quiz, I was unable to find this submission either. For some reason the files do not appear after the quiz is completed. I will have to test the platform out some more to work this out!
How do you make a useful bestiary? First, it needs to have vivid images. Second, it needs to have images related to letters of the alphabet. I will be following Lynne Kelly’s method, as described in her book, Memory Craft:
So I decided to create a bestiary based on the first two letters of a name. Instead of using just one letter of a visual alphabet for all ‘M’-name people, I would be splitting them into ‘Ma’, ‘Me’, ‘Mi’, ‘Mo’, ‘Mu’ and ‘My’-name people. Every animal has a significant feature: Aardvarks have fleshy noses, herons have elegant necks and macaws have heavy lines around their eyes. I would instantly know what animal to imagine during our initial conversation, and this meant the key feature I was looking at when I met a Mary or a Martin or a Max would be the same–the lines around their eyes.
Once I was sure I had memorised the first two letters, I could then reinforce the rest of the name at my leisure. My system would work for any name or surnames. In fact, the bestiary works as a memory aid for anything you can spell. I often use it to remember an unfamiliar word or the name of a cafe for a meeting.
I created a list of all possible word beginnings–‘Aa’, ‘Ab’, ‘Ac’, ‘Ad’ etc–which became disturbingly long, especially when the first letter was a vowel. I ended up with 264 pairs. If I couldn’t find an animal starting with those two letters I sought out a mythological beast, a plant or even (when desperate) an object. Medieval bestiaries were fairly relaxed in their definition of an animal, with mythological beasts and the real thing all merrily mixing, so I felt justified in stretching the concept just a little further.
Lynne Kelly, Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most powerful methods in history (pp. 25-26)
For my purposes, I will try to stick to animals, but I can see what Kelly means by how difficult this task can be. Without knowing many animal names off the top of my head, I struggle to think of creatures for the variety of combinations. That being said, I might have an advantage: I am combing through the Oxford English Dictionary. Whereas Kelly could not find a beast for the “Ae” combination (p. 26), I can resort to prehistoric animals.
To keep this task manageable, I plan to create a list of ten animals each week. Over time, after having amassed the whole list, I will memorize it and see how it works. Clearly a long term project! Here, at least, is my first ten:
The next stage of my memory exploration will be a highly practical side of teaching: remembering names.
My experience with this practice is quite inconsistent. At my work I try to remember names of regular customers as best I can, but sometimes they do not stick. My recollection of how accurate I tend to be is surely also problematic, but I am pretty sure I struggle with common names, especially if I know a lot of people with that name from the same context. Likewise, I have struggled more recently to remember names with the introduction of masks indoors.
What these difficulties suggest to me is that I need to find strategies to address two issues:
To connect particular names to particular people.
To connect them to features that are visible outside of masks.
Ransom Patterson has some advice that may come in handy:
Use the person’s name in conversation
Rehearse the name (practice retrieving it)
Use mnemonic devices
I struggle with the first approach because I find saying people’s names during conversation somewhat awkward. Lynne Kelly suggests in Memory Craft, however, that she turns it into a game with each new acquaintance, a practice that likely allows her to say others’ names without social embarrassment (2020, p. 28).
I have already started working on the second approach with student names during observations. So far the practice has been quite successful, though I still forget to do so occasionally. If I get a chance to write down student names in a notebook, this practice helps as well.
The only practice I have not developed yet is a mnemonic system. Simple ones might involve the keyword method. The difficulty with this is how time consuming the process is to commit a name to memory on the fly. Lynne Kelly has what sounds like a more durable and consistent system, however–a “bestiary” (2020, p. 25)–which allows her to create a visual system based on the first two letters of every name. When meeting people, she can just memorize the first two letters and commit the rest of the name to memory later on at her leisure (p. 26).
For this reason, the rest of the semester I will build my names bestiary ten letter-combinations at a time, providing small illustrations or descriptions each week. Over time I hope to develop a large, sophisticated system with which to commit names to memory for the rest of my life.
Along with the theoretical standpoints on using technologies within classrooms, Michael shared with us a particularly simple and effective strategy for transforming simple graphics into interactive lessons or activities. I decided to try out this feature, though I added animations to make the transitions smoother:
Interactive Lessons Using Simple Graphics
I got the images from the Victoria City website and the Snohomish Health District. Both were simple to use, and I can imagine going through this process with either of them, depending on the lesson.
Jeff Hopkins presented today on the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry, an independent high school he developed after feeling disgruntled with the forms of education available in the public system. Having run a school district before, he was able to navigate the bureaucratic processes required to develop an accredited institution, and the results are phenomenal. What is so great about this type of schooling?
Student Agency
He designed his school with the Strong Start program in mind, a type of schooling in which children generate their own learning opportunities in carefully curated environments. Student agency is therefore central to his model of education, and it anchored he planned for a school location, the modes of instruction, and the methods of assessment.
Located in downtown Victoria, PSII allows students to be in the hub of human activity. For Jeff, this location allows him to generate authentic learning opportunities for students. Students can participate in real community work because of their proximity to the institutions and businesses that define the working world.
Free inquiry defines the mode of instruction. Students decide themselves what they want to produce, and the teachers provide guidance and support in achieving results. The school does not run on a particular time table but shifts and changes as students plan meetings and sessions for exploring topics of interest. Central to this process are two questions: (1) what would we like to do together, and (2) what do we need to accomplish separately?
Finally, teachers provide assessment by supporting their learning goals (formative assessment) and connecting what students do to the BC curriculum. Although teachers have to provide grades, students largely drive the pace of assessment, and teachers are responsive to how students are progressing at any given moment.
Results
A big part of Jeff’s presentation focused on the results this kind of schooling has for students. Some questions pertain to accessibility and how well such forms of education fit with neuro-divergent individuals, and he has strong responses for all of these concerns.
For example, he notes that people with high anxiety tend to thrive in this environment because of how much agency they have in the process. Likewise, their students tend to succeed well and move into other contexts with ease, even if they approach those contexts in ways differently. Some students, for instance, have gone to university and dropped out after they have learned everything they feel is applicable to what they want to accomplish. While they may not achieve an undergraduate degree, they are typically already ahead of the game and running their own businesses. Hence, the degree may not be as important given their ability to navigate the business world with skill.
Tuition costs are probably the most prohibitive dimension of this school. While they try to fundraise as much as possible, as a private school they cannot guarantee spots to anyone. Likewise, the school is limited and has a long waiting list, meaning many youth cannot benefit from this style of instruction by definition.
Overall, the program sounds lovely and practical, the most important component being the way it combines authentic learning opportunities with student agency. Perhaps with more provincial funding, models like this could become wider spread.
Memorizing Emily Dickinson’s Because I Could Not Stop for Death has proven to be difficult for a couple reasons. First of all, I missed an entire stanza when first creating my series of icons! This made my mind map fairly awkward. When I first placed the images in a certain order, they became somewhat fixed in place. Trying to augment the journey has proven difficult, and I have had to add a loop through some mental gymanstics.
Second, I have found the process of connecting precise words to the icons more difficult than with Robert Frost’s poem. Two factors seem to be at work. On the one hand, Dickinson’s poem is far more abstract than Frost’s, meaning the icons are more difficult to anchor to the terminology. I have to spend more time establishing strong associations between the images and language because the words are not necessarily as evocative by themselves. On the other hand, because I spent little time memorizing word order, the lines come out a little garbled on occasion. Rote repetition, which I used to memorize Frost’s poem, seems to provide a better anchor for linguistic precision. Turning each line into an image later on simply reinforces that order, and the spaced repetition cements them in my long-term memory.
Here are a few attempts over the past week:
Attempt 1
Once I realized what happened with the second stanza, I played around with the imagery of the carriage and made it run slowly. The “slow-motion” cadence now cues me and I can keep most of the other imagery in place.
Attempt 2
The second time through, I realized that my icons were not working as well as I’d hoped, especially in the fifth stanza. For some reason I had mixed up the order of the ground swelling and the house, thus confusing me about which line should correspond with “swelling.” My icons were not particularly strong in this case. The other issues showed up in the fourth and six stanzas. My hunch is that the images were so strong that they ironically drowned out the more abstract words. To “surmise” something is hard to see; the same is true of subordinate conjunctions like “for.”
Attempt 3
At this point, I have the poem mostly in mind. I will need to try it out a few more times before it sticks, but the wording will work with time. Needless to say, I have learned a great deal about how to commit poems to memory for the long term. By combining two techniques, I should be able to do so confidently with most any poem.
I had used PowerPoint to play around with images before, but I was excited to try out unfamiliar features. For example, I had not realized you can remove the background from images using this software. For fun, I also thought I would showcase this process using the Google Chrome extension, Screencastify.
More Cats Please
The most finicky element by far was the background-removal feature. Despite allowing for some precision, the program clearly “guesses” what to remove according to what you select. I am not sure whether it uses colour values, but the tool is far from perfect. I can imagine other programs would have superior means of removing the backgrounds from images.
Nonetheless, I was able to play around enough to get this:
Catocalypse
Artistic Effects
To clean up the image, I tried a few more features in PowerPoint. In particular, I used the “Artistic Effects” tool to create a more holistic picture. The result is actually pretty impressive!
More Cats Please 2
After these modifications, the final product looks like this:
Catocalypse 2
Image Links
Please find links to the images below, as per the Creative Commons licenses:
The process was fairly easy, and I could follow all the steps. Thank you to UVic for making these tutorials available! However, certain features were beyond my control and the free software can be finicky at times.
One thing I struggled to use was the “fade-in-fade-out” feature. While I could get the process to work for middle clips and transitioning between segments, I could not seem to fade in or out of beginning or end portions.
Another element that was difficult to control was the zooming function. I could not really tell what exactly the effect was in the finished product, except for a shift towards a somewhat closer view during the specified segment. I am not confident I understand precisely how the software augments the visuals in time.
Videos
That being said, the process was enjoyable, and I can see using this software for simple videos in an educational setting. The videos I made during this process demonstrates some interesting features, to say the least:
Video with Ocean Background
I also tried to use some music from the Free Music Archive under their Creative Commons licenses. Unfortunately, many of them had restrictions on modification, so I could not use them for the video. However, I found a few for which I only needed to share alike. For my second try, I used the start of Swan Song by Paper Navy.
I look forward to practicing a few other features and using them for these reflections in the future. Out of respect to the artists whose music I used in this post, please follow the following Creative Commons license for this post:
I had to think a little about Jesse Miller’s presentation on web safety and adolescent education. His ideas challenged some of what I took for granted: that confiscating cellphones would be a good idea, or that scaring students into web safety will work. Both turn out to be wrong, or at least a little misguided without some critical caveats.
Smartphones
So far I have heard conflicting advice about smartphones in the classroom. Some say they discourage or prevent students from using them, not just for their own sake, but for the sake of everyone else’s learning. To make classrooms free of such devices is to provide a sanctuary from their potentially toxic impact. Doomscrolling is not just one of the big 2020 words, it is also a practice credited for the emerging trend of adolescent anxiety about climate change.
Others have said they feel uncomfortable with the idea of policing students’ use of smartphones in their classroom. Confiscating devices can be dangerous, especially if the teacher breaks the item accidentally. Because many devices cost hundreds of dollars (if not thousands) today, any potential damage can cause financial stress. Questions of liability are also concerning.
Needless to say, we need a balanced perspective with strategies that allow students to learn how to live and focus without their phones, albeit without costly side effects to their property.
Paternalism
The other issue pertains to strategies for supporting youth as they use online media to express themselves. Originally I would have thought it useful to tell horror stories about stolen identities or mob mentalities on the web, if only to start conversations about Internet safety. Jesse Miller challenged this misconception, however, by suggesting that such an approach can come across as paternalistic, especially since most students are probably already intimately aware of these dangers.
Digital Citizenship
A strong alternative seems to include providing guidance on ways to act as a digital citizen. Here is an example of engaging the discourse at this level:
How to Be a Good Digital Citizen by John Cowan (CC BY)
Pros
Cons
The idea of being “proactive”: a useful term for anchoring a type of behaviour worth cultivating in a highly collaborative society
Could be more nuanced about the public/private concerns in a digital space
The idea of “curating” your online presence: clearly identifies the disparity between how people see us online vs. in physical spaces
Fails to address legal sides of being online
Explains how “following” can be perceived as a kind of endorsement
Talks about behaviour in general ways, but does not provide guidance on concrete tools for curating your online presence
Video Pros and Cons List
While I appreciate this video, the approach may be a little too general. Brevity can be fine, but teachers should also model what it looks like to think through online decisions and provide students with opportunities to curate their online presence in conscientious ways. In other words, this advice should implemented through student work in the classroom, albeit with due respect to legal requirements and thoughtful consideration of how to protect student confidentiality.
Memorizing the digits of pi with the loci method has had a lasting impact. I still recall the numbers precisely in the locations I have placed them. I was even able to add three numbers in relatively little time. Should I need to, I could extend this pattern indefinitely with locations in the building:
Bathroom – metal 1
Recycling – cardboard 4
Elevator door – crowbar 1
Lobby sign – springing 5
Lobby bench – sleeping 9
Showroom welcome desk – shouting 2
Showroom cash drawer – crinkled 6
Supervisor cupboard – springing 5
Hallway door handle – dangling 3
Mezzanine keypad – popping out 5
Moen no-charge parts – hiding 8
Delta tub spouts – spinning 9
Aluminum roof stacks – slotted in 7
Grohe cartridges – wrinkled 9
Shower rods – hiding 3
American Standard cartridges – dancing 2
Toto Washlet adapters – stretching 3
Lunchroom fridge – shivering 8
Lunchroom locker – springing 4
Lunchroom television – pixilated 6
American standard faucets – cutting 2
Laundry faucets – smoky 6
Flush valves – spinning 4
Poetry: Frost
Memorizing poetry remains difficult for me. My recall of Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost was spotty to say the least. I was able to remember the first two lines without a problem, and the second two came after a bit of thought, but I needed to check the poem to recall the first few words of each stanza. The rest seemed to come relatively easily with these first few words. This suggests to me that I have the stanzas largely memorized as units, but I struggle to link them together.
Memory Attempt 1
For this reason, I am going to start associating simple icons with each of the lines of poetry and imagine them interacting in my mind. I will also create a simple mind map using the method of loci to place them.
Poetry Mind Map Icons
Locations and icons
Front door to building: trees and K’s shooting at door and breaking the windows
Community book library: little community free library is shaped like a house, and thousands more being popping up next to it like a village
Place where smokers congregate: I use a stop sign to smash things
Bank windows: I take off my glasses and see trees inside with snow filling up and people struggling to get out
Coffee shop: a tiny rainbow horse crashes out of the windows
Red barn market: a red barn falls onto the store and crushes the store
Walkway between trees and pond: I slip and fall because of all the ice between the trees and pond
Exercise room: it is pitch black and I cannot see anything inside
Coffee shop: a horse carriage with bells ringing crashes into the coffee shop during an earthquake
Crosswalk: a big question mark and a large “X” are sword fighting above the traffic
Bus stop: a guy sweeping the bus stop rigorously while whistling produces notes above his head
Four-way stop: the guy gets blown easily a four-way stop with snow coming down
Hotel: a forest of flower trees emerges, pushing a dark shadow off the hotel, only to fall into a large, deep hole
Bay: I find a giant ring on the bay wall railing, and I try to hold onto it as it floats into the sky
The sky: I look up and see “Z”s floating around in the air above my head (this counts for two lines)
With these locations and icons, I was able to recall the poem relatively easily:
Memory Attempt 2
Poetry: Dickinson
The next poem to memorize will be Emily Dickinson’s Because I Could Not Stop for Death. I will start by forming icons for this poem from the start. Perhaps this method will take longer, but I can imagine it will stay in my mind longer. Here is my start.
Poem Mind Map Icons (Dickinson)
With this piece completed, I will start building another mind journey with locations to anchor each icon. Once those structures are complete, I will memorize the poem and test my recall of it next week.
.jpg){kind=link}
#/media/File:Red-headed_rock_agama_(Agama_agama)_male.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
