Week 3 Reflection

During the last week at St.Patrick's Regional Secondary, I had the opportunity to teach a few classes outside my teachable areas and learn from those experiences.  I also would like to focus on one aspect of the system at the school, and how I could see myself using it.

At the school, a significant number of classes use an online learning platform called Moodle.  On Moodle, students can look up class notes, watch videos on each lesson, and also complete quizzes and/or tests.  First of all, to me it is interesting to see it being used at a non-online school, because I have only seen this being used at online schools such as VLN and Self Design.  It was eye-opener in a sense to see Moodle used alongside standard teaching.  Since the school implements a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy, students are able to use Moodle during class.  As a side-note, this is also my first time in a BYOD school.  The experience got me thinking about how I can utilize BYOD for my inquiry topic --- game-based learning (specifically for video games).  Coming from a background in programming, I could embed games or educational software into Moodle or other online systems.  One of the obvious downsides of using devices in class is distraction, but as long as clear expectations and goals are set out for each class, distraction will be minimized.

For the PE class that I taught, the most important thing I learned was how to efficiently organize and instruct the class.  For example, when numbering students off, in a standard classroom where everyone is seated, it works fine to go along each row/column numbering students off.  However, when students are sitting randomly on the floor at the beginning of PE class, going around to assign a number to each student was problematic in a few ways.  The teacher suggested that I could ask students line up against the wall, which is something I can do in a PE class but not in a math class.   The classroom management skills I learned were invaluable and can be applied when I have an outdoor class, or a field trip.

Over the three weeks at St. Patrick’s Regional Secondary School, I went from worrying about offending the community and somewhat unsure about the routines to getting immersed into this environment while learning about the religious aspect from my sponsor teachers.  I enjoyed teaching here and strongly recommend it to future student-teachers.