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Week 8 Inquiry

March 1, 2024 / chloeritchey / 0 Comments

Photo by Prasanth Inturi

Over the reading break I had enough time to watch and follow along with a new YouTube yoga video. I chose to try Short Wake Up Flow By Yoga with Adriene, and I really enjoyed it. This yoga session video made me feel more energized in my body and mind!

I skipped my yoga session on Friday that week, as I had a busy day spending time with family and friends. Surprisingly I didn’t feel guilty about missing a session. Although I didn’t take care of my mental health by using yoga, I strengthened my mental wellness through social interaction. As I’ve said before, the whole point of this inquiry is to improve my mental health, so I am not going to stress myself out over missing a day of yoga, (especially if its just because I had fun plans and was busy).

Over the last couple weeks, I have been noticing that my overall mental health has been really good lately. Looking back at my tracking document, I definitely can see that I have been feeling better mentally more often than before. This is the case even when looking at how I feel before doing the yoga. So although the yoga sessions don’t always make me feel way better mentally right after, I think they might be making me feel better in general.

Lastly, I talked to my learning pod this week and everyone’s inquiries seem to be going well! Michael finished reading a book on talking to strangers, and it sounded very interesting. Rick and Emma’s inquiries also sound like they are on track!

Week 6 Reflection

February 26, 2024 / chloeritchey / 1 Comment

Photo created by Craiyon by inputting artificial intelligence in the classroom

AI is a topic that I am a little wary of, but am also interested in. There are so many pros and cons, but I think that at the end of the day, it is a valuable tool when used properly. In the context of teaching, I think AI is better used as an aid to help teachers edit and extend their resources, rather than as a replacement for teachers’ ideas and plans. In other words, I think that teachers should use AI after they’ve already made at least a draft of a lesson plan, and then use AI to enhance/perfect it. I don’t think it is a tool that can/should make lesson plans all by itself without much teacher input. Teachers need to be content curators, and part of being a content curator is being very deliberate in the resources and information that is chosen and used. When a teacher has AI come up with a lesson plan for them, the teacher is no longer being a good content curator!

One other point that was especially memorable to me in class was that AI has an inherent bias. It is trained off of specific data, and we need to think about this when asking it to produce things. On a more positive note, I loved using craiyon. It was easy, free, and very fun to use! I’m not sure exactly when it would be useful, but I am sure I will use it in the future.

I signed up and tried ChatGPT for the first time this week. I wanted to see what it would have to say about itself. I told ChatGPT to “write a short paragraph on why AI is helpful”. This is what it came up with…
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is immensely helpful because it has the potential to transform industries, streamline processes, and improve decision-making. Through machine learning algorithms, AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and trends that humans might overlook. This capability is particularly valuable in healthcare, where AI can assist in diagnosing diseases, predicting patient outcomes, and personalizing treatment plans. In business, AI can optimize supply chains, enhance customer service, and automate repetitive tasks, freeing up human workers to focus on more complex and creative endeavors. Additionally, AI-powered technologies like natural language processing and computer vision are revolutionizing how we interact with computers and devices, making them more intuitive and accessible. Overall, AI has the power to make our lives easier, more efficient, and more productive.”

The response is pretty good! It is crazy what AI can do.

I am curious to know what you all think about artificial intelligence in classrooms! Are you as teachers planning on integrating AI into your classrooms? If so, how? When do you think it is appropriate to use AI as teachers, and when do you think it is not? Please let me know in the comments!

Week 6 Inquiry

February 24, 2024 / chloeritchey / 0 Comments

Photo by Elina Fairytale from Pexels

This week’s yoga yielded very similar results as last week. After almost every yoga session, my body felt very relaxed and calm. This is not the case when I do a workout and then my yoga session right after though. This pairing, when done back to back, usually makes me feel more energized than calm. Regarding my mental health and the yoga, sometimes after doing yoga I feel slightly better mentally, but not every time. In addition, sometimes I find that meditating during the session helps me feel better mentally, but I am still not very good at it, (and so even when I do it, it doesn’t always help). I find that it is easier to meditate when I don’t have very much on mind and am not very anxious. When I am very stressed or anxious, it feels almost impossible for me to meditate, and then I don’t feel any benefits from it. Obviously when I am anxious is when I would benefit most from meditating, so I’ll just have to keep practicing.

I haven’t been able to follow along with a yoga video this week, but next week is reading week so I know I’ll have more time for that soon. I think I want to watch a different video from the last one and see if I can find one that I like even better. Some options that I think could be fun to try next week are Fill Your Cup Yoga by Yoga with Adriene, Short Wake Up Flow by Yoga with Adriene, and Morning Miracle Flow with Jessica Richburg. I think all of these videos would be great options for me to try in the coming weeks.

Week 5 Inquiry

February 16, 2024 / chloeritchey / 2 Comments

I finally did a morning yoga session and followed an energizing yoga session from YouTube! The video I followed was called 15 Minute Energizing Yoga Flow. I really enjoyed it, although my body still felt quite relaxed after doing it. Despite the fact that I didn’t feel exactly energized, it was nice to have a routine to follow along to. I always find it little bit challenging to follow a yoga session for the first time, as I am always a little confused about what moves I am suppose to be doing and when. Next time I do this routine I know it will be easier to follow.

All of my other sessions throughout the week went well too. I ended up doing my yoga sessions later in the day (either before bed or after working out) for the rest of the week. Similar to last week, I have found that yoga definitely helps my body to feel less anxious and more calm. My mind after doing yoga usually feels similar to how it feels before going the yoga, but sometimes my mind feels a little more calm after. I often try to meditate during my yoga sessions, but I find it especially difficult to meditate when my brain is busy or anxious. I’m practicing it though, so hopefully I will get better at it. I think focusing on practicing meditation (in a addition to practicing yoga) might be helpful in reducing the anxiety I feel in my mind.

Week 5 Reflection

February 15, 2024 / chloeritchey / 0 Comments

I really enjoyed learning about why it is important for students and teachers to learn how to be good content curators. For teachers, it helps them build their personal learning network (PLN). For students and teachers, curating content makes them interact with the materials they choose and add their point of view to the presentation of knowledge. They learn what is the most important knowledge to know, and think critically about what they are learning. I also loved that the two sides to curation are celebration and critique!

Content Curation Process by Beth KanterAttribution (CC BY 2.0)

Notion was super easy to sign up for, and was pretty simple to figure out! I explored around and it seems like a cool resource! I think I would use Notion for when I need to organize my research and use some more complex things that Microsoft Word doesn’t create easily (like to-do lists, tables, embedding videos, etc.). I appreciate how straight forward it is, and how organized the whole layout is. It also helped push me into the world of AI, since it has an AI function. I have never used AI before, but I have been wanting to try it out. I tested it of course, and I was pleasantly surprised! I put in “write a paragraph about the pros and cons of the bc curriculum” and it did a pretty good job of completing that task. I definitely won’t be using it all the time just yet, but it was a good way to try it out for the first time.

Lastly, this week our learning pod tried out Padlet. Honestly, I find it a tad confusing but I am still exploring it. I’ll talk to the group next week and ask for their thoughts on it. Maybe they’ll have some tips on how to make it work better for me!

Week 4 Inquiry

February 8, 2024 / chloeritchey / 0 Comments

_{Inquiry by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images}

This week of yoga went well for me. I found time to do it every day for at least 15 minutes, and I enjoyed it most days. I know I wanted to try watching and following an energizing yoga session this week, but I ended up doing my yoga before bed or after my workout everyday this week. So it just didn’t work out. I will try again next week for sure! As I did my night time yoga sessions, I felt very relaxed after each one. My mental calmness/anxiety before and after the yoga sessions were usually similar, but my body always felt more relaxed after.

Also, I did yoga after my workout on Wednesday and thought it would energize me like it did last week, but instead I ended up just feeling tired after that session. I am curious now about whether my hypothesis from last week was correct or not. I am not sure if doing yoga after my workout actually does energize me…I will do it when I can, and write down how I feel after. I’ve been keeping track of my inquiry process by writing in a journal how I feel before and after my yoga sessions. My journal entries can be found here.

My Friday session was a notably good session. I went into it feeling anxious, but came out of it feeling quite a bit better after. I tried meditating during my session since I was stressed and overthinking, and I felt better both mentally and physically after that session! I think I will start doing that more and see if that helps my mind feel more calm.

Unfortunately I had to skip my Sunday session because I was sick. I started to feel disappointed in myself about missing a session, but I reminded myself that I am only human, and life happens! Hopefully I will be able to get back to it soon.

Week 4 Reflection

February 8, 2024 / chloeritchey / 0 Comments

_{By Free Nature Stock in Nature}

I really enjoyed the discussion with the guest speaker this week, Jesse Miller. I did not realize how harsh some of the regulations are revolving teachers’ social media outside of the classroom. I have a picture of me and my family out for dinner as my Facebook cover photo. We happen to all have wine in our hands, and this talk really made me reflect on that and think about if that is something I would want professional contacts and/or students to be able to see.

I also found it incredibly interesting to find out that schools can see what goes through their networks, so sending things on social media are basically public (at least to the school). Obviously this means teachers need to be very careful with what they post or send when at school.

During our learning pod meeting this week, we talked about how we are enjoying the course, and our posts are going well so far! We also noted that being a teacher comes with many responsibilities and so it is important to know what is expected of teachers inside the schools they work at, but also outside of the schools they work at. The school act, on the bclaws.gov website goes over some of the responsibilities that teachers need to know and upkeep.

Week 3 Reflection

February 1, 2024 / chloeritchey / 0 Comments

Image showing person walking in pre-marked footprints

I liked the fact that we went over ideas on what to do when we have no idea what to do in a classroom. There are a few good resources one could use, such as teacher pay teacher, google, AI. Unfortunately, AI takes a lot of information and resources from the Internet that people do not want to share for use to the public, which is very interesting to me.

I liked learning about creative commons licensed images, because I had learned about them in a first year computer science and they talked about it, but I didn’t remember much about it now. I liked getting a refresher about what I can and can’t use when creating my own content for students. Something that was completely new for me was the topic of fair use/dealing. Fair use/dealing allows educators to use material for purposes that benefit society then it is okay. Open education resources “are reusable, adaptable, and useful educational content is available if you know where and how to look.”

My screencast went well! It took me a pretty good chunk of time to figure everything out, but once I did, it wasn’t too difficult! I will definitely be using this in my future classrooms for sure. Of my learning pod group members, only one other person has finished their screencast so far, (Emma) and she said it took her a long time to do as well. We warned our other group members that it may take longer than they think it will. We also mentioned some key tips on how we made ours!

Week 3 Inquiry

January 29, 2024 / chloeritchey / 0 Comments

_{Creator: Ketut Subiyanto | Credit: Photo by Ketut Subiyanto}

This was my first week doing my yoga everyday, and I realized a few things I’d like to share. Firstly, I will admit that I completely forgot to do yoga on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday hit and I felt so annoyed with myself that I’d forgotten. Regardless, I decided that I need to put yoga into my schedule (I always stick to my schedule), and also not be so strict with the amount of yoga I am committing to. When I give myself more freedom to spread out the yoga throughout the day and not be so rigid on the exact timing of it, I feel a lot less stressed and overwhelmed about it. I want to take this inquiry seriously and still aim for 15 minutes per day to see if yoga can give me benefits mentally, but I don’t think it can give me those benefits when I am stressed about fitting in doing the action itself. . The point of this inquiry is to see if I can lower my stress levels with yoga, so I don’t want to stress myself out more by putting pressure on myself to do things that sometimes just aren’t attainable.

When I did my first session on Wednesday, it was easy, because Wednesdays are my days off of school. I ended up doing 20 minutes instead of 15 since I had the time. Thursday rolled around though, and I was so busy that I felt stressed to fit in the yoga. I got home late and just wanted to go to sleep. I ended up doing 10 minutes instead of 15 that day, and I felt even more tired after the session, and I slept really well. Then I did my 15 minute sessions on Friday and Saturday, I felt especially relaxed and tired after. On Sunday, I did the yoga after my workout, which made me feel exhausted right after, but then energized after around 10 minutes. The point of sharing this information is that after almost all of my sessions this week, I felt very relaxed and pretty tired after. I have been doing my own yoga moves and not following any yoga videos, but I am wondering if I followed an energizing yoga video that maybe I would feel less tired after.

So the plan is to stick with a daily goal of 15 minutes, but to not stress if I do a little less one day. Next week I will try an energizing yoga video like this to do earlier in the day and see if my body feels more energized after!

I really liked hearing about my learning pod’s inquiry projects! Everyone’s inquiries are so different from one another’s and I am super interested to continue learning more about everyone’s findings. I am in a group with Emma (her inquiry is on growing her social media), Michael (his inquiry is on how reading affects our perspectives), and Rick (his inquiry is on how to be a better parent).

Week 2 Reflection

January 21, 2024 / chloeritchey / 0 Comments

_{Creative Commons Image}

I found the conversation about inquiry based learning to be especially interesting this week. There are pros and cons when it comes to inquiry projects in classrooms, but I personally like the idea of inquiry projects because they can foster creativity and create the opportunity for authentic student learning. A con to inquiry projects is that when given full autonomy, some students will not work as hard or feel as motivated to create a quality inquiry project. This might be because there is usually less of a strict structure on what needs to be done in an inquiry project. Regardless, I think that with the right support, any student is capable of feeling motivated to produce a quality inquiry project surrounding their interest(s).

I feel nervous but also excited about my inquiry project. I am especially excited about my inquiry project because I’ve picked a topic that will hopefully help with my mental health and the feeling of balance in my life. As stated in my inquiry post, I will be doing my inquiry project on seeing if doing 15 minutes of yoga per day will help improve my mental health.

I also wanted to mention that I think the Terms of Service Didn’t Read website (https://tosdr.org) sounds incredibly helpful and I will be using this from now on! I didn’t realize anything like that existed and I think it will be very useful for me to use as a teacher and to also share with students (with permission).

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