Teaching

I was accepted as a substitute teacher with Edmonton Public Schools immediately after graduating from the University of Alberta in 2011. Within a few weeks, my first temporary contract opportunity arose at Jasper Place High School teaching Mathematics 10 C and 20-2. This contract ended at the end of the semester and I continued to supply teach throughout the remaining semester. I substitute taught throughout my second teaching year and then taught Physics 20 at Lillian Osborne High School during the latter semester of the 2013-2014 year. The following year was also primarily substitute teaching. At the end of the year, I was a supply teacher at Old Scona Academic High School for a computer science teacher who was on sick leave. I finished the final three months with the students. While I am flexible with teaching various courses, my teaching experience centered on high school science and mathematics courses.

Currently, I am a Computing Science teacher with Edmonton Public Schools. The courses I teach include Computing Science 10, Computing Science 20, Computing Science 30, and Networking 20. I developed the computing science program at Lillian Osborne High School in 2017. It started with six classes and now has over 14 classes each year. The program includes the International Baccalaureate Program at the Higher Level, giving students the best opportunity to excel in future programming endeavors.

With student-centered learning becoming mainstream, I provide my students opportunities to take responsibility of their learning. By recording my lectures and publishing them to YouTube., students are able to watch these online lessons for review or if they were absent from class. Furthermore, because YouTube’s analytics, I was able to identify the lessons that many students re watched and targeted those lessons during review sessions.

During class-time, I promoted student participation by incorporating Google Forms as concept checks. Students would use a mobile device to answer questions and the Google Forms summary graphs would provide immediate feedback regarding student understanding. Near the end of the semester, this process was further refined to use Moodle, a Learning Management System, that would provide each student with a variation of the questions so that they could not simply ask their neighbor for the correct answer. While teaching Computing Science, students have access to a self-hosted code repository where they can learn and implement Git, an industry standard version control system.

In a growing digital age, incorporating technology into my classroom is central, but not the focal point of my teaching. I firmly believe that technology, when used as an educational tool, can benefit the classroom and student learning. My goal within the classroom is to promote a paradigm shift that technology can be educational as well as entertaining, and that these two qualities can be mutually exclusive.  With increasing technology competence within the workforce, I encourage students to not only learn with technology, but to learn about new technologies so that when they are exposed to new intranets or management systems, their skills as a life-long learner will lead them towards success in the working world.


Mike Zhang