Welcome To The World of ECI 834

Hello everyone! Welcome to my online space where I will share my thoughts and ideas regarding online and blended learning with Katia’s class. For those of you who have never visited my blog site before, welcome! I enjoy sharing information that I have learned from class and my classmates as well as my personal experiences from the classroom, colleagues, and teaching over the years.

I currently teach grade 5/6 in Regina, Saskatchewan and I have been teaching for five years so far. My Twitter handle is @msmihial and I enjoy sharing things that are going on in my classroom and school there as well as topics we are discussing in this class. This is my fifth educational technology class and I have always enjoyed them because I have gained so much practical knowledge that I can use directly within my classroom. I enjoy using technology in the classroom and implementing technology use with my students in an authentic way that benefits their learning and supports various learning styles.

Photo from https://www.iste.org/areas-of-focus/teacher-online-learning

My personal experience with teaching online and blended learning are strictly thanks to Covid-19 protocols. I taught online from March-June of 2020, and a few weeks in December 2020 and April 2021. Additionally, I taught a bit of blended/remote learning in the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years as well due to students isolating for multiple weeks at a time and being away from school for longer periods. This included sending home a combination of homework packages and digital assignments and trying my best to help students and answer questions over teams when I had the chance to check in on them. The platforms that I am most familiar with are Seesaw and Office 365 including Teams, OneNote, Word, Powerpoint, and Sway. In addition, I have enjoyed using Canva, Minecraft EDU, StoryboardThat, Mathletics, and Mathigon for supplement learning.

This year I am fortunate enough to have been accepted into my division’s connected educator program, which provides my students one-to-one devices in my room specifically from year to year. This allows for ample access to technology and I am looking forward to utilizing it for our Course Prototype Development assignment.