Presentation with Tyler Letkeman

Jan. 25, 2023

CoryB

Tyler Letkeman is an English teacher from Vincent Massey who tries to make things more interesting and relevant for his students by using different social media apps and other apps such as Microsoft Teams. Throughout his presentation, he took us through his philosophy, e-Classroom, Writers’ workshop, and Shakespeare and memes, as well as other aspects that we could use in our classroom to keep things new and interesting. He recommends using technology as an enhancement to learning but not the end all be all for taking over everything that you will be teaching because some of the things we do in the classroom still have their benefits from using technology. 

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The first tech he recommended to us was Microsoft teams to save time from printing and writing out assignments. If we have everything documented in one place it is easy for students to look up or post their work once they complete it, which helps both students and teachers organize everything in a much simpler way. Something that Tyler notes he does is, "He posts what he does each day in class, uploads all handouts and presentations, plus recordings of essential lessons. It even allows for asynchronous collaborative projects." Teams also make sure the students are accountable for their learning by making sure to check their teams for lessons and assignments that they missed if the student happens to be away for some sort of reason. However, the option should still be available to do things as a paper copy because some students might still prefer to do it that way but also some students might not have the internet to do things at home. So, at the start of the year to potentially avoid this would be to have each student tell you in some way that if they do or don't have access to a device that has internet to do their assignments or check teams. 

A tech project that Tyler does is Writer's Workshop, which is an intensive project where students write every day, evaluating their writing, revising and peer editing, ultimately creating one piece that is their best work. His goal for the workshop is to be a publication and not a graded assignment. Tyler recommends a blurb as an option where students can do their writing. He likes this site because it lets his students write in a more authentic and real way instead of only writing in a school setting. 

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An example of tech integration he has done is with Shakespeare. He tries to open their eyes by asking them to reinterpret the play in their language such as by using social media. This is how they share the story of their lives with the world. Seeing the characters in their context makes Shakespeare more relatable and meaningful to the students. Another way he does it is by highlighting topical themes, such as by using Othello to look at the prevalence of racism within our society. So, he uses both the play and real-life aspects that are both related and in turn makes it relatable to the students because they have examples from their own everyday lives. Then as a final project, he has his students create a public education campaign, using social media as an option. So, the key concept I take away from this is to always have multiple options for assignments to let the students express how they learned the topic that you taught them during your lessons because this will make the students excited about completing their assignments. 

Throughout his presentation, I learned that Microsoft Teams can be used to make a teacher's life a lot easier by having most things done in one place like google classroom. There is no wrong choice in which of these you prefer to use other than that your school division might already be using one of these and then you will likely work with that one either way they can be both used as ways to help enhance efficiency in the classroom. I also learned that the use of social media can be another way to make interesting assignments for students to be able to relate to and use to their own liking when being given as another option to use for an assignment. There were many things to take away from this presentation and things I will consider using in my future classroom.

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