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Showing posts from July, 2020

Back to School. But How?

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Back to school?  But, how? Prepared by Josephine Scavuzzo I am both a teacher and a parent.  I spent the last few months of the school year teaching my students online and supporting my son with his own classwork.  That experience was emotionally and physically draining in a way that I have never experienced before, as I wrote in my previous blog . Of late, my focus has been the return to school in September.  To be perfectly blunt, the thought of going back to work in my school building terrifies me. My son would also be returning back to his own school (in another board).  That means exposing ourselves to an unknown amount of bacteria, germs, viruses, microbes, parasites...this may seem like an overreaction but that is my perception. In my estimation, there are too many variables that cannot be controlled.  In our province, masks are required in indoor spaces but will not be necessary at school.  We will need to rely on the honour system, with parents ultimately making the decision t

What if Learning Were a Delight?

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What If Learning Were a Delight? During a recent conversation, someone said the word, “delight.” And it was… delightful. It made me remember the power of delight when it comes to learning. Delight, through the vessel of discovery, is what drives the Curiosity-Based Learning process, Discovery Learning . The idea behind Discovery Learning is that learning is a gift so, what if we started packaging it as such? What if, rather than presenting learning as work or for an existentially distant score, we delivered it in a way that was anticipated with the enthusiasm of a birthday present?  What if the objective of our teaching is to lead our students to learning, but the goal is to leave them filled with wonder… and delight? And what if, this delight wasn’t a sticker, star, or platitude as existentially distant as a score, but a delight that one feels only after truly learning something? So, from this day forward, what if you do your students and yourself a favor by finding ways to bring more

WebXR: A New Look at Augmented and Virtual Reality

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WebXR: A New Look at Augmented and Virtual Reality Virtual Reality is quickly becoming a game-changing technology. That said, not everyone can afford or access the more powerful hardware that has made virtual reality an incredible experience for millions of people.  One of the longstanding barriers to VR going mainstream has been cost and accessibility.  That is where the investment of companies like Mozilla and Google has found an entry point into the market. These companies have created web-based Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences that are changing both the cost and accessibility factors for creating and experiencing immersive technology. WebXR at its core is a collection of code that allows your browser to identify Virtual and Augmented Reality user experiences. You may have started playing with this without realizing it. If you have ever used Google Chrome's Animal AR (like using your mobile device to look up Tiger ) or if you have seen one of our previous blogs about M