ETEC 510 - Big Ideas in ELA Curriculum User Guide

By: Scott, Katie, Evan and Michael

Introduction

Our curriculum guide has been split up into 4 sections where each section aims
to incorporate aspects of blended learning, tagging, creative media and participatory
culture. The sections considered in our curriculum user guide include:

Course syllabus and project rationale

Overview of Canvas LMS
Activities and assessment
Modular Design

Course syllabus and project rationale

Rationale

It is an era of change for education in British Columbia, and with the rollout of the
new B.C. curriculum, learning has become “personalized, flexible, and innovative” (B.C.
Ministry of Education, n.d.). Educators are asked to rethink much of how they teach,
from general frameworks and modules of learning, to specific technologies and
literacies that help to support the 21st century student.

Our project aims to introduce elementary language arts teachers to one aspect of
the “Know-Do-Understand” curriculum model adopted by the B.C. Ministry of Education
in a way that promotes an understanding of the variety modern competencies and
literacies that learners will need to develop in the 21st century. The “Big Ideas” inherent
in the curriculum are the “generalizations [,] principles[, and] key concepts important in
an area of learning” and “​represent what students will understand at the completion of
the curriculum for their grade” (B.C. Ministry of Education, n.d.).
 “Know-Do-Understand” Curriculum Model. Source: ​https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/overview

As our focus user group, teachers will independently consider how the four
featured “Big Ideas” are evident in their lives, will collaboratively discuss and devise
ways to illuminate these ideas in their classrooms, and will innovatively utilize available
technology to illustrate how this curriculum model can be transformative through the
creation of authentic and meaningful learning artifacts.

Through the concepts, discussions, and activities presented in this course, we

hope to emulate design elements of the new B.C. curriculum that are meant to support
21st century learning. These elements include - but are not limited to - learning
environments that are collaborative, flexible, inquiry-based, and ICT enabled to help
“​develop the competencies required to use current and emerging technologies
effectively in all aspects of their learning and life” (B.C. Ministry of Education, n.d.).
Course Syllabus

Module One - “Developing our understanding of how language works allows us to use it
purposefully”
Design Focus: Blended Learning
Activity - Flipped Language Lesson

Module Two - “Exploring stories and other texts helps us understand ourselves and
make connections to others and the world.”
Activity: User provided content shared, tagged, and discussed (a la the Keyword activity
we do); this could be thematic, in order to set up the activities in the next modules

Module Three
- “Language and text can be a source of creativity and joy.”Design Focus: DIY and
Creative Media / Content Authoring
Activity: Create an artifact (story, video, slideshow, etc..)

Module Four - “Exploring and sharing multiple perspectives extends our thinking”
Design Focus: Participatory Culture in the Digital Age
Activity: Peer review

Overview of Canvas LMS

Canvas (​https://www.canvaslms.com/​)

Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) is an online shell for organizing

course content, attendance, assignments, grades, announcements, and all of the other
logistical tools necessary for delivering an online class. We chose Canvas due to its
ease of use, its free license for educators and students, and comprehensive online
support community.
Why use Canvas?

Canvas is a simple, reliable, mobile, and adaptable LMS that allows instructors to
create customized courses that best suit their course design. Canvas online space will
help facilitate student collaboration using the following tools internal and external to
Canvas: synchronous and asynchronous chat, asynchronous discussion boards,
collaborative word processing platforms (ie. Google Docs), YouTube videos for vlogs
and recording presentations, blogs for sharing and reflecting on their experiences, and
flash-card memory aid tools such as Memrise.

Canvas’ Features

•You can gather students work through online submissions

•Canvas quizzes give you the opportunity to provide online practice quizzes and
class surveys quickly and easily

•Canvas modules allows you to organize content

•Activity Streams: Global and Course.

a.Global Activity stream is part of the dashboard and provides recent
activity for all courses.
b.Course Activity stream is part of the course home page and shows
recent activity for that specific course to keep everyone up to date on what
has happened since they last logged in.

•Chat: The chat features provides synchronous video, audio and text
communication between students that are enrolled in the course

•Collaborations: Allows instructors and students to create and edit documents,

which can be accessed by the whole course roster, a subset of students or
individual students

•Conferences: Allows students to interact with their classmates and instructor in

real time using audio, video, desktop sharing and presentation tools. Students
can also create and host their own conferences.

•Course statistics: Allows the instructor to monitor participation of students

 •Discussion Forum: designed to facilitate informal communication between
students in a course. Discussions can also be created as assignments for
grading purposes. Students can also respond to information and graded
conversation in the context of a group

•ePortfolios: allows students to showcase their best work to colleagues and

prospective employers

Canvas’ Benefits

•Canvas can be used to help manage your course

•Content can be accessed from any devices with an internet connection

•Organize your resources into modules making resources like videos, images,
self-paced activities, presentations, webquests accessible

•Assess quickly with SpeedGrader

Activities and assessment

The activities you will be asked to participate in during the course of this project
will focus on the big ideas of the Grade 7 English Language Arts Curriculum. All
activities are designed in hopes of leading to a more universal understanding of the
Grade 7 ELA competencies. Each activity is proposed in a way that is meant to expand
the users knowledge on participatory cultures, blended learning environments, DIY
learning, multiliteracy and community of practice. Social interaction is also a large
component of the activities within each module as our design project focuses on the
constructivist learning approach. We also emphasize and reinforce the importance of
the process of design in each of our activities through using a functional system,
step-by-step instructions and a tutorial if need be. These facets of each activity are
important to help the user imagine, create, play, share and reflect to their fullest
potential during the course of each module. Most activities will take place at the end of
each module as a cumulative review on concepts covered in that module regarding
Grade 7 ELA big ideas.

There will be a variety of assessment tools provided to the user in this project.
The first is a simple review and star-rating verification tool that will give those using our
resource the option to quickly and simply respond to how useful they find the
information provided through the modules. The star-rating will serve as a quick visual
pertaining to the overall effectiveness and the implementation potential of different
lessons and activities in the Grade 7 ELA classroom. There will be a discussion forum
for users to participate in regarding comprehension of the course content as it connects
to the big ideas of the Grade 7 ELA curriculum. This will be provided at the end of each
module with a prompted discussion question where users will be encouraged to reflect
on their experience and learning. Our design team will monitor these discussions and
comments to evaluate user feedback as well as discussion contributions between
teachers/users.

Modular Design

Our project will follow the same structure as the Curriculum itself (drilling down
from big ideas, into activities and information). The overview will include an outline of
our project:

If you click on the Outline you will see the title and activities that will be included
in each:

Then as you continue to progress within the project you will see the big ideas
clearly listed as they are the basis for each module:
 Exploring an individual module, it is the intention of this project to make things as
hands on as possible and include many different formative activities for teachers to
engage with:

The flow of the project will be very intuitive and structured so students can simply
click the next button. Although the modules will have different activities they will follow a
similar structure and use the built in features of the LMS to give feedback to the users
and give opportunities to apply and extend their learning.

Although the intention was to create the modules using the Canvas LMS, we were
unable to gain teacher access which ultimately limited us in using a website to build our
design project. Weebly is the platform we decided to host our project on and the
following things should be taken into consideration while working through the modules.

The modules are laid out very similarly to how they would look on Canvas. To work
through the modules, follow the following steps:

1. Start on the Home page

2. Work your way through the modules by clicking the tab at the bottom of each
page
3. Complete each of the 4 activities within each module
 4. Post in the Padlet discussion forum at the end of each module to summarize your
findings or experiences. *Remember, the real discussions would take place
through Canvas.
5. Assignment submissions and group pages would similarly be enabled through
Canvas.

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