Mack's Blog

All about school

December 6, 2019 / 0 Comments

Music Lesson Reflection

I though that the lesson went really great! I was really happy with all of my groups  involvement and I think we all had really good ideas to contribute. The part of the lesson that Josh and I taught was really simple to teach but I felt like it would be a perfect activity for grade 1 or 2 students. The whole class seemed to enjoy it and I really appreciated all of their feedback. Im glad that we video taped the lesson because as much as I hate watching and listening to myself on a recording, it was helpful to see what i actually looked like while teaching. I have never actually seen myself teach so it was really interesting to hear and see what my tendencies were. I didn’t realize how much I used my hands while talking, that was one of the biggest things I noticed. One thing I know I can definitely work on is being more direct in the word choice I use while I teach. I know I said that that was my goal on the lesson plan but I noticed that I still didn’t do a very good job of it on Tuesday. I will just have to work really hard next semester and at home to improve my word choice in order to polish it for the Spring practicum.

One thing I can truly say I enjoyed was how engaged our class was for these music lessons. I can definitely see how someone could just not want to participate in a grade 2 themed lesson but for every single lesson that was taught, not just my groups, the whole class was involved and fully engaged. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that that made it so much easier to stay professional up at the front and continue the lesson. This just speaks volumes about how much our cohort has grown over the course of this semester and there’s another one to go!

FPPL

  • Learning involves patience and time 
  • Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors 
  • Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place) 

Taken all together, these principles are very important to keep in mind as a teacher. The 1st one is detrimental to be mindful of or else you will always be frustrated in yourself and start to question your teaching skills. This is especially important in the younger grades when everything they are learning is brand new. The second principle speaks for itself. As teachers we hold the power to teach the people of the future so we must always give our all and that will ultimately create benefits for us as well. As for the third principle, we really tried to focus on making our lesson holistic, experiential and relational and I feel like we did a good job of that.

November 26, 2019 / 0 Comments

Music Final Eve

This is it! This is what I’ve been working towards all semester. I feel pretty accomplished, way more accomplished than I did at the midterm. I definitely put in a lot more work leading up to the final than I did for the midterm and I think it shows.

I would like to discuss my final video a little bit.

At the start of my video I played the major chords just as a little recap of the midterm content. I was pretty proud of myself because from the midterm until now, I knocked 3 seconds off my time when going through the major chords. I then went into the minor chords. I played all of these forwards and backwards in the same way that I played the major chords on the midterm. Next i went into the song Still Beating by Mac Demarco. Here is the youtube video that I learned the song from:

I found this video and the instructor very helpful. The first time I watched the video I thought that there was no way I would be able to do the pick section but here I am at the final and I did it. As for actually playing the song, its literally just a repetition of G6, D7, Am, and C so instead of repeating that for 3 minutes i simply just played 20 seconds of the chords and played the audio of the pick section overtop. This was the best way I could incorporate the two sections. I also added the video of me playing the pick section at the end of the video just for proof.

Well thats it! I can definitely say that I have learned WAY more on ukulele than I ever have in the 5 years I’ve owned mine. Overall, I enjoyed this assignment and I’m glad I did it. It feels good to have a new skill.

November 25, 2019 / 0 Comments

Coding

We had Rich McCue come into our class today again and this time he was speaking about coding! I have a little bit of experience in coding. I took CSC 100 and we were required to do a lot of assignments centred around web design and using cyberduck.

In Rich’s blog post he outlined a couple different coding programs used in classrooms right now. His blog is linked here: https://richmccue.com

An this specific blog post is linked here:https://richmccue.com/2019/11/22/introduction-to-coding-4-educators/

The specific programs Rich outlined were:

  • Scratch
  • Grasshopper
  • Hour of Code
  • TinkerCad
  • Code BC

We had the opportunity to use one of these programs during class time and I chose Scratch:

https://scratch.mit.edu/

Here is a little video on how you can create the infamous flappy bird game on Scratch:

From my experience:

It was pretty easy to use and very fun. There is a lot of freedom to create what you want and all of the coding options allow you to do all sorts of things. Here is the link to a little animation I made:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tutorial=getStarted

Coding in the classroom:

I can definitely see how something like scratch can be used in the classroom. The amount of things you can do on there is amazing. Since there are so many different backgrounds, characters and prompts a teacher could use this program for any class; history, science, ELA, social. It is very engaging in my opinion and I only used it for a couple minutes. I think that introducing coding into the classroom is a very good idea and it is exciting to see it being implemented. Its stuff like this that makes me excited for the future.

November 20, 2019 / 0 Comments

Crunch Time

So these last couple weeks of school are starting to heat up. There is a lot due but i think I’m handling it pretty well so far. I’ve actually been able to use practicing ukulele as a stress reliever and a way to relax at the end of the night. The minor chords are going pretty well. In my last blog post I mentioned that I was having trouble with Dm and Fm but I’ve gotten those down pretty good and now I’m having trouble with Bm. Bm requires you to bar the bottom 3 strings while simultaneously holding down the top string on the 4th fret. I have trouble keeping my finger that is on the 1st string from touching the 2nd string which makes the chord sound awful. I just have to arch my fingers more and that will just come with muscle memory and practice. Since I said on my final growth plan that I would like to play at least 1 song, taking all the other course into account, I will just focus on playing “Still Beating” by Mac Demarco instead of both that song and “Im with You” by Vance Joy. Right now I am just focussing on the Mac Demarco song and the minor chords but before Tuesday i will have to polish up on my major chords. I don’t think that it will take me very long to refresh myself, I remember the chords I just will basically have to give my finger muscles a refresher. Im doing my best right now!

November 16, 2019 / 0 Comments

$$$$$$

I was doing some research the other day on different video cameras and equipment just out of curiosity. I was blown away. I knew stuff like this was expensive but I didn’t think it was THAT expensive. Heres an example. I went to Chris Bryan’s professional website. He is one of the lead cinematographers on mostly all of John John Florence’s videos. This is the URL to his website:

http://www.chrisbryanfilms.com/

and here is one of his latest videos:

MOCEAN. A film by Chris Bryan from Chris Bryan on Vimeo.

He has a really cool website, it was very aesthetically pleasing and at the bottom of the home page he can a continuous rotating gallery of the equipment he uses to shoot his videos.

Lets look at the first 6 cameras listed (all retail prices based on google):

  • Phantom Flex 4k
    •  Retail Price: $109,000 – $164,000
  • Red Epic-W 8k
    • Retail Price: $49,500
  • Red Weapon
    • Retail Price: $50,000
  • DJI Ronin 2
    • Retail Price: $10,000
  • ARRI Alexa Mini
    • Retail Price: $36,000
  • Gates Phantom 4k
    • Retail Price: $20,000

So in review, that is only half of his camera collection and that is $274,500. More than a quarter of a million dollars in cameras and that isn’t even including all the different customizations and accessories. I know that Chris Bryant had to start somewhere and that he is a professional now but its just hard to imagine how he got started and what he first used to get started because me trying to improve my cinematography skills looking at how expensive these cameras are is very discouraging. I know I just have to keep doing my thing but its just crazy to think of.

 

November 16, 2019 / 0 Comments

Basically Professional

I have been making progress in my ukulele journey since the midterm. I have began to learn the minor chords Am,Bm,Cm,Dm,Em,Fm,Gm. They all seem pretty straight forward and are way easier to play that than the major chords in my opinion. The only two that are giving me  problems are the Dm chord and the Fm chord. I just find it tough to quickly put my fingers into those positions. Since part of my goal was to learn 1 or more songs, I have started to work on the songs I chose at the beginning. The song I have made the most progress on is “Still Beating” by Mac Demarco using the chords G6, D7, Am, and C. These chords are very easy to transition into from each other which makes the song fairly easy to play. I have also gotten the strumming pattern down and it really sounds like the song which is promising (haha).  There is also a “pick” part of this song that i have learned and it sounds really cool but in the real song, the pick part and the strumming part are played simultaneously so I’m not sure how I’m going to incorporate that into my final but maybe ill just have to play both parts and then layer the audio or something. Anyways, I am happy where I am at right now and I am feeling good for the final! I can only go up from here!

November 4, 2019 / 0 Comments

Minecraft!

This class was so much fun! Who would have thought you could do so much with a game like Minecraft. This is what our society looks like now a days in terms of technological advances and using technology in classrooms and Minecraft is a perfect way to learn while using technology! On my Wednesday visits i quickly realized that a strong interest the class shared was in Minecraft. I also realized that gaming on youtube is a huge interest of this kids. Here is one of the most popular Minecraft youtubers:https://www.youtube.com/user/TheDiamondMinecart

Here is one of his most viewed videos:

This video of his has 2.4 MILLION views on meaning 2.4 million people have watched it. This is a crazy number to think about and i can bet that most of those 2.4 million were young kids.

 

I havent seen much of Minecraft being incorporated into education but what these young students were talking about it sounds like SD61 has successfully done just that. I thought this was the coolest part about the whole class: One of the students we had with us today said that they used Minecraft to create an ancient world for social class. They were in survival mode so they had to sleep, eat, and fend off predators which i thought was so cool. Thats just one of the ways this game could incorporated into schools and classes but i think its a pretty good example of how far you could take this.

This is the resource they use, it is called Minecraft EDU:https://education.minecraft.net/

Here is a youtube video outlining how Mincraft EDU works:

October 28, 2019 / 0 Comments

PSII

Our PSII visit was very cool! Meeting the principal, Jeff Hopkin, was very informative and interesting. He obviously knew a lot about his school and it helped me understand the motivation behind the creation of PSII as well as the interworkings of it. I was very surprised at how small the school was but it was amazing to see the types of things they fit into the space. There was the sensory room which was very neat, they had multiple secluded group study rooms, a couple large meeting areas and of course it was very technology oriented.

I do think the whole inquiry technique of teaching is cool. I can definitely also see how it works for students in some cases but there is a limit. I really dont think that this type of learning and teaching is for everyone. This is true for me because i know that if i was in a school like this i would be completely lost. I would really like to learn more about the implementation of schools like these but i do not think that they should become the norm in the future. Making these schools the norm not be very beneficial to students as a whole in my opinion.

This may be my lack of information and experience talking but all that being said, i am very open to learning more about this and i am definitely open to incorporating it into public schools just in a toned down way. (Kind of like in Rebbeca Bathhurst Hunt’s class from what i heard)

Check out what PSII has going on here: learningstorm.org

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