Author: scottgordonuvic (Page 2 of 3)

Free Inquiry Blog – Week 5

November 15, 2023 / / 0 Comments

As mentioned in a previous blog post (https://scottgordonblog.opened.ca/2023/11/02/week-4-free-inquiry/), this week I tried to create something by following a video tutorial with audio as well. I had previously noted that having audio has its pros and cons, though I suppose even those with audio can be muted if need be. The video I used is linked below; it was created by Easy Origami, which is one of the larger origami tutorial channels on YouTube (as evidenced by its whopping 1.33 million subscribers!)

Origami: Pigeon – Instructions in English (BR) by Easy Origami

I did find the audio instructions in this video to be somewhat useful, especially since the audio instruction would often come a few seconds before the physical demonstration; this gives the audience a bit more time to prepare and look down at their paper beforehand to ensure they are able to follow along successfully.

The finished product is below. In my defense, I used too small of a piece of paper for this pattern, but even so, many of my folds were quite messy and imprecise. I think having audio made me feel more obligated to follow along (less pausing and skipping back when I could have used it) but that may not be a universal response. For me personally, I think I preferred the channel I used on the last blog post (with no audio) but I would need to try out a few more channels before I conclude if that is a result of the individual style and pace of each channel or if it is due to the presence or absence of audio.

“An Almost-Recognizable Pigeon” by Scott Gordon 2023

Week 9 Reflection

November 15, 2023 / / 0 Comments

The passage below was generated by ChatGPT with the following prompt: Summarize and rewrite the following notes into a brief blog post [followed by the notes I took on our Nov. 3rd class]

Title: “AI in Education: Unleashing the Power and Navigating the Challenges”

Date: November 3rd, 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has firmly embedded itself in the realm of education, revolutionizing the way teachers teach and students learn. In our recent tech notes session, we explored the fundamental concepts of AI and its applications in the educational landscape.

Understanding AI for Teachers

At its core, AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, particularly computers. It encompasses learning, reasoning, and self-correction. We delved into the fascinating world of neural networks, a type of machine learning inspired by the human brain. Neural networks enable pattern recognition and can be predictive, employing back-propagation to reflect and learn from experiences.

Key AI Concepts

Machine learning, deep learning through neural networks, and natural language processing are integral to AI. Large language models like ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, utilize massive language input to learn patterns, making probabilistic guesses word by word. Notably, AI is not without its fallibilities, as it can sometimes be incorrect.

Big Players in the AI Landscape

OpenAI, with its groundbreaking ChatGPT, stands as a pioneer in the field. Microsoft, holding a 49% stake in OpenAI, integrates AI into various aspects, notably Bing. Google boasts Bard, and AI-powered chatbots, often leveraging ChatGPT, have become prevalent. In the gaming world, AI has ventured into powering video game NPCs, with Origins as a prominent example.

AI in Education: Opportunities and Challenges

AI’s impact on education is profound, offering personalized learning, intelligent tutoring, automation of administrative tasks, data-driven insights, enhanced engagement, accessibility, and global learning. However, challenges loom large, including concerns about evaluation and assessment, plagiarism, misinformation, hallucinations, IP violations, and appropriation of content or aesthetic styles. A crucial reminder: always check your sources!

Conclusion

The Pandora’s box of AI has been opened, and it’s here to stay, fundamentally transforming the educational landscape. As we embrace the opportunities AI presents, it is equally crucial to navigate the challenges responsibly, ensuring that the benefits of AI in education are harnessed while mitigating potential pitfalls. The journey of AI in education is both exciting and challenging, and staying informed is key as we step into this new era of learning.

—-End of ChatGPT generated text—

I use ChatGPT occasionally, primarily for helping to find repertoire and to structure some ideas. In my experience, it often takes many different prompts (contantly refined and reworded) in order to get the exact outcome I want, but in this case I was impressed by how good this summary was on the first try! I take very chaotic notes for lack of a better term, but this summary takes all of the important points and distilled them into a succinct blog post.

I find it interesting that, perhaps, ChatGPT has a bit of bias towards itself – I did not use the word groundbreaking in my notes but that program thought it was the most appropriate term to use. This makes me wonder (and worry) about the possible issues when it comes to biases that different AI models may have. There have been some highly-publicized issues in the past with other (admittedly less sophisticated) AI chatbots picking up some pretty disturbing biases (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)) and I am curious as to how these issues are prevented and addressed when they come up, aside from just shutting a service down.

Free Inquiry Blog – Week 9

November 15, 2023 / / 0 Comments

For this week, I wanted to learn a bit more about the history and cultural significance of origami folding. After doing a bit of my own research, I decided to use ChatGPT to write out the information for me, as I have not yet used it as a tool in this context before. Between ChatGPT, MS Designer, and a premade Canva template, I was amazed at how fast it was to create this infographic! I’m glad this technology class has introduced me to some of these tools (and encouraged me to use some other tools I already use, but in more creative ways) as I believe I will be able to find many ways for these to help streamline and support some of the prep work involved with being a teacher.

Week 4 Free Inquiry

November 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

As alluded to in my last free inquiry post, I am trying to learn different origami patterns through a variety of different mediums in order to assess which ones are best (both in general and for me specifically). This week, I will be reflecting on a tutorial I found on Youtube, “How To Make a Paper Jumping Frog – EASY Origami” by the channel PPO, which is one of the more popular origami tutorial channels on that site.

Notably, this tutorial had no verbal instruction, so I had to purely copy exactly what I saw in the tutorial. The pacing was good, but I found that if I got distracted for a moment or looked down to fold, I would get lost and have to skip back a few seconds. So, despite it being a 6 minute video, it ended up being closer to 8-10 minutes to get a finished product. Now that I have done this pattern once, I am confident I would be able to follow the whole video while folding without getting lost.

This particular medium, namely a video with no audio, fills an important niche as it requires the creator/teacher to slow down their process and make every fold very clear and obvious; this slower pace can be very helpful for newer learners or for anyone who benefits from having a bit more time to learn or complete tasks. Additionally, since it it purely visual, there is no issue with a language barrier for this video. Another more niche benefit is that anyone can slow down this video with the built-in “playback speed” function on Youtube without any real audio distortion – having to hear someone speak at 0.5x speed can be very uncomfortable at times for some people, so having no audio works well for slowed-down videos. With all that said, I believe having verbal instructions would have been nice for me personally so I would be able to look away from the screen without getting lost every time, but I will test that out next week.

Photo: “Wow! Look how cool this frog is! I bet the person that folded this frog is a really cool person!” by Scott Gordon, 2023

Week 8 Reflection – Gamified Learning

November 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Gamification is a topic that has been rapidly growing in popularity in the education field over the past few years. It can take a more literal form, as in literally using games in a classroom to help teach or support important concepts, or it can be used in the sense of transferring the concepts and strategies that make video games appealing into a classroom setting. I believe that, when used in the correct manner and context, gamification can be a powerful tool to help engage learners. I attended a seminar a few years ago where Chris Leeson, an excellent Victoria music educator at the middle school level, explained the particular way he integrated a gamified approach into his band program, which largely included RPG-inspired elements like experience points. One of the most important points he made was that these kinds of approaches can only be successfully used if the teacher really buys into it; as with all other things, students can sense when teachers are being ingenuous and this will completely undermine any benefits. Interestingly, many of the concepts of gamification, such as rewards and a gradual progression of difficulty, mirror concepts we have talked about in our educational psychology class as being beneficial to learning and engagement.

Games in the Music Classroom:

There is a wide variety of games that can be used to help teach or reinforce specific concepts that are relevant to the music classroom. One of the most prominent examples I have seen is the use of rhythm and dance games to help build internal pulse and a mind-body connection in the context of rhythm; though not something I personally enjoy, many of my peers have talked about the value of using dance games like Just Dance in the music classroom to support these concepts (as well as being a fun and engaging activity for students). Other prominent examples include Guitar Hero, Trombone Champ, and Rock Band. In my own personal music study, I have found the app “Perfect Ear” (which has some gamified elements) to be an incredibly powerful and engaging tool to improve my ear training and musicianship. For context, it reminds me in some ways of Duolingo (which, rumor has it, will also be releasing a music-focused “language” learning program in the near future). I would be interested into finding more games and gamified tools that can be used in both an individual and a group setting – if anyone has any suggestions, please send them my way!

Sample screenshot from Perfect Ear app; accessed via https://www.perfectear.app/#screenshots

Free Inquiry Week 3

October 17, 2023 / / 0 Comments

This week I spent some time looking up background information on origami and looking for different ways to approach learning it. So far, I have only really used the guide that came with the paper, and it was not a particularly enjoyable experience. Admittedly, it was quite a cheap stack of origami paper so I should not expect much, but I did find that the guide lacked detail and was hard to follow even though I was just following basic designs. I think trying to represent a 3d object in 2d space is not particularly conducive to learning this art. I have a strong feeling that direct instruction and video tutorials will be more effective, but I will start testing that out for my next inquiry post.

I enjoyed creating this Canva graphic for this post – this was my third time using that particular tool and I feel like I am a lot quicker with it now. My main issue is finding templates I like, so if anyone has any suggestions for how to sort through the templates more efficiently, let me know!

Week 6: Reflection on Online Learning

October 17, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I find it fascinating to look back on the craziness of the past few years and how it has drastically changed what we believe about education in regards to online learning. Online learning has existed in some form for decades (originally just the logical next step of traditional distance education) but it had not gained wide usage until the covid-19 pandemic made it a necessity for schools around the world. As a music education student, my classes were completely changed from what I had expected; performance classes became lectures and experimental composition groups, theory classes largely went asynchronous and became a task to do every week, and music education classes became meetings where we would all take turns struggling to do our mock teachings over zoom to a screen with all the cameras off. It was a strange time, but it gave me a lot of free time to explore and develop my other musical interests. Notably, during this time I started playing bass quite a bit and spent a lot more time working on jazz vocabulary and repertoire. I believe online (synchronous and asynchronous) certainly have their merits and can provide benefits, like increased flexibility, but the drawback of not being able to play in large ensembles and losing out on the social aspect of university was difficult to overcome. I would be open to online classes in the future, both as a teacher and a student, but it is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of those methods and tailor your course to meet them. 

“Doctor with stethoscope and globe in his hand” by focusonmore.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

As with other professions, it is important for educators to reflect back on the pandemic and be prepared for a similar event in the future. It is important for us to consider what went well, what went poorly, and what new options are available for us. As a music teacher, online learning arguably has the most significant impact on music than any other subject due to almost all music programs being based on real-time collaborative ensemble playing. An online learning environment fundamentally changes the way our classes are run, and naturally affects the content and assessment as well. For me, if we are unlucky enough to have another event that keeps us all isolated (or if I am teaching online for any other reason) I would shift the focus of the class away from performance and repertoire and move it towards (largely inquiry-based) projects. A specific project that I like is an album review, which will allow students a considerable amount of freedom to critique, discuss, and share any album of their choosing; this will help students feel engaged as well as helping to teach valuable skills like discussing subjective matters like artistic expression. Additionally, I would like to do a project where students research the music and biography of various musicians and composers and share them with the class. If you took the time to read all this, I would love to hear what other ideas you have too!

Week 4 Reflection: H5P and Flipped Classrooms

October 1, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I would link my H5P video here, but it does not seem to want to work! Regardless, I spend around 20 minutes or so adding elements to my screencastify video, as well as exploring around the site quite a bit to see what options were available, and I now feel like I have a grasp of the basic concept of H5P interactive elements. It took me quite a while to figure out this resource, but it seems to be very powerful and can have a lot of possible uses. I am interested to find new ways to utilize this in the future, especially in a music context. There is an endless amount of high-quality music education content on the internet, but often it is focused on concepts that may not be perfectly applicable to a music classroom. With editing tools and H5P, as well as screencastify, it can be easier for me as an educator to better curate and tailor this content to the needs of my students and to the content outcomes of the course I am teaching.

In our last class, we also discussed the idea of a flipped classroom, where students are expected to learn or interact with the material before class, allowing the class time to be used for higher order thinking (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). This is in contrast to a more standard model where direct instruction can take up a majority of the class time, and students often need to do additional work outside of class on their own in order to practice or demonstrate the concepts covered in class. As a music teacher, a flipped classroom is both perfectly in line with the standard way an ensemble is run as well as being opposite of what is needed, depending on the situation and content. Being a performance-based course generally, there is an expectation that each player/student should be practicing their own parts at home and within the band class the teacher/conductor facilitates putting those parts together. However, at the same time, it can be very difficult to find ways for students to learn some of the higher order concepts and ensemble skills in their at-home practice and thus requires in-class direct discussion. So, the nature of music classes in some ways encourages both flipped and non flipped classroom models at the same time, though it is good to be aware of the distinction.

Reflection: Screencastify

October 1, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I really enjoy this tool! I find it surprisingly easy to install and use, and I can see how this can be an effective way to share resources, websites, etc. with students. I am curious about how to continue using this tool on both sides of the classroom; I can see a lot of value in it for creating resources for students, but it also could be an interesting way for students to present projects (keeping in mind FIPPA compliance, as it is stored on Google Drive).

Here is a video of me trying this extension for around the 3rd time. My apologies for the abrupt cut off, I decided it was best to spare everyone from hearing me ramble even more about the advanced stats from this page. For my next post, I will try to embed things from h5P into this video!

Reflection Week 2: FIPPA

October 1, 2023 / / 0 Comments

One of the concepts from week 1 that stood out to me the most was FIPPA as it relates to the legal responsibilities of educators. In a world where many of us blindly check off “I agree” on dozens of Terms and Conditions agreements per year, it is easy for data storage and other considerations to slip our minds. However, this can cause many issues, particularly legal, when it comes to data storage as educators.

The main point factor of FIPPA as it relates to educators is that we are not allowed to store any personal student data on servers outside of Canada. There are ways around this, including anonymizing student information or having students/parents/guardians sign a waiver, but the most common solution is to use services that store Canadian data in Canada. This can sometimes block our access to significant educational resources, such as some google products.

FIPPA is something that educators need to be aware of. If there is ever a doubt, it is best to err on the side of caution and talk to an administrator for guidance when uncertain. Online educational tools are a phenomenal resource, but it is important to ensure we are following the the law in order to protect students (and protect our employment).

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