Author: Tara Avenia

Using the Design Cycle & SketchUp for Schools

I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of engaged and talented educators at the annual Independent School Association of BC, Professional Development conference. If you work at a GSuite School, you will find SketchUp for Schools in the Google Marketplace. It is free to use, easy to learn, and has limitless potential. My husband and I introduced teachers to the software during this workshop. Take a look at our presentation and get in touch if you would like to collaborate on an exciting project.

Learn Book Creator, for iOS 

I had the pleasure of teaching Grade 3 students how to create their very own eBook using the iOS app, Book Creator. To support the students through their journey, I created this 5 minute Book Creator tutorial. In it, you will be shown how to edit pages and styles, copy text from Google Drive, add photos, record audio, export, and share your eBook.

Computational Thinking Scope And Sequence

I’ve analyzed the curriculum for students in Grades Kindergarten to 7, compared that to the public school curriculum in the United Kingdom, and have created a Computational Thinking Scope and Sequence that integrates all the core subjects in the province of British Columbia. This document is meant to support teachers in their efforts to teach every student how to code.

A Theory of Online Learning

I created the attached online learning conference with two of my peers in the Master of Educational Technology course, ETEC 512, Applications of Learning Theories to Instruction, to summarize my belief that online learning environments are best designed from a constructivist perspective that is learner, content, community, and assessment centered. A teachers role in twenty-first century education is (in my opinion) far more complex than it once was. Anderson (2008) argues in his article, Toward A Theory of Online Learning, that online learning is “often limited by bandwidth constraints, which limit the users’ view of body language and paralinguistic cues” (p.47). I think that the onus falls on a teacher in an online classroom to plan activities that make a learner’s pre requisite knowledge known, (such as self-assessment activities, surveys, and questionnaires) and thus rely less on body language and paralinguistic cues; which in actual fact could be easily misunderstood and are at best a subjective form of assessment. Online learning may be more challenging to design, and to facilitate, but it is also far …

Explain Everything

To support the use of iPads in a school that I have worked with, I created a tutorial to teach users how to use the iPad application, Explain Everything. Explain Everything is a screencasting and interactive whiteboard tool that lets a user “annotate, animate, narrate, import, and export almost anything to and from almost anywhere”(Cook, para.1). I created the tutorial displayed below on an iPad using the recording feature embedded in the application. I hope this tutorial helps you when creating your next beautiful presentation. References Avenia, T. (2014) Introducing Explain Everything. Cook, M. (n.d.). Explain Everything. Retrieved March 19, 2015 from iTunes preview website: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/explain-everything/id431493086?mt=8

The Future of Technology

The History, Present and Future of Educational Technology: Web 2.0 and Beyond: The Masters of Educational Technology course, Text Technology: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing, introduced me to the debate that is concerned with the role that technology has played to modify both reading and writing processes. I began the course with a simplified definition of text, something that is written, and technology, a tool that aids production. Thirteen short weeks later, after reading “Orality and Literacy” and, “Writing space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print”, among others, I would argue that text is no longer something that is written. Text is technology, it is a thought process, it is a picture, a video, a podcast, and is represented everywhere in everything. Technology is another ambiguous term, it has been defined as  “an application of … knowledge for practical ends” (Dictionary.com, technology). Educational technology is a conglomerate term that suggests an updated teaching pedagogy, a transition to a student centered classroom and a combination of tools that are meant to facilitate learning. …

The Effect of one-to-one Technology on Students’ Engagement and Approach to Learning

I designed a mixed-method, causal-comparative action research project to determine how one-to-one technology affects students’ engagement and approach to learning when it is introduced into a Grade 7 classroom. This action research has been designed after noticing that one-to-one technologies are gaining popularity in elementary and secondary education, and also remarking on the need for educational technology research that focuses on elementary aged students.