Sunday, August 1, 2010
Group Work
This week seemed very productive. We all posted our thoughts on the case study and answered the questions. It seemed like we all found a couple of different things that were wrong with the course, but for the most part we were unified in our opinions. I am enjoying working with this new group and am ready to complete the project this week.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Podcast Reflection
I personally liked listening to the podcast. I am an auditory learner, so I absorb a lot more information by listening to information than by reading it. I vote listening to the text without visual modality. To prepare for an exam with a lesson or topic that is delivered by a podcast, I would listen to the podcast repeatedly until I felt confident that I had a good grasp on the material. I think that in a perfect world, every student would be evaluated in a way that suited them: orally, written, or maybe with a project of some sort instead of a run-of-the-mill paper/pencil test. Teachers would also have to get paid a lot more for the overtime they would be putting in creating that many different assessments. It is great to teach to different learning styles, but when it comes to evaluation, it’s not practical. I also think it would do students a disservice unless high-stakes testing, such as the TAKS test changes their format. If a student has never taken a standardized test, then they will not be as successful since they are not used to it. Could you imagine taking the SAT or ACT if you had never taken a standardized test in your life, let alone any paper test at all? If testing changes all the way up to college entrance exams, then I would be all for evaluating according to learning styles. Until then, I say teach and study according to learning styles, but do your best to learn how to take a paper/pencil test.
You Tube Videos
The video I liked the most was, “Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?”
The three videos, “Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?”, “A Vision of Students Today”, and “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Using Us”, all had one thing in common: they talked about students. The first video was my favourite. Sir Ken Robinson was an amazing speaker, one that kept your attention and had lots of examples to back up his claims, for example, the story he told about Gillian Lynne, the choreographer from the musical “CATS”. When she was younger, she had trouble in school, and a doctor, instead of telling her mother she had a learning disability or to put her on medication, told her to enroll her in dance lessons. She might have never had the career she had if her talent for dancing had not been indulged.
In schools today, instruction is not designed for learners like Gillian. Many, not all, classrooms consist of a teacher lecturing at the front of the room, not allowing for kinesthetic, musical, or any other types of learning besides auditory and sometimes visual to occur. There are so many students who need to have hands-on learning, or learning through music and art. Teachers can incorporate many of these into their lessons and reach all types of learners when planning their instruction. For example, they could take a science lesson and include group work to be completed at stations.
This would give the students a chance to interact orally, move around, and the activities can be things like, creating a song to teach the scientific process, a game where they have to race to see who can order the steps of the scientific process first, and an activity where the students choose which sentence belongs with which step of the scientific process. Technology can also be incorporated into the lesson to allow for differentiation, such as making an interactive power point game that deals with matching the steps of the scientific process to their definition. It can include graphics and have the questions can be read aloud.
The second video, “A Vision of Students Today,” dealt with the issues students of today deal with. A teacher had his students take a survey about their habits in class and outside of class. They came up with different figures that were sobering. Only 49% of students read their textbooks and many students had spent over $100 dollars on textbooks that they had never opened. It also talked about the large class sizes and how the chalkboard where the information is written is so far away.
This video alludes to making instruction more accessible in college classes.
When planning their instruction, professors should choose books that would be helpful in the student’s actual career and helpful in learning the objectives of the specific course. Also, making power points available online helps so the student has the information in front of them as well as on the blackboard. Using video clips and having group assignments also helps to keep student’s attention and can provide information that might not have been available to the student before. Technology would be integrated through the video clips, power points, and also having discussions online or a Twitter or Facebook account to post changes in assignments and other updates.
The third and final video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Using Us”, was about how today’s internet is user friendly. It also talked about the internet being so easy to use, and that we need new legislation to regulate certain online activities. When planning instruction, teachers can certainly utilize the different technologies of free blogs, You Tube, Facebook, free website hosting, and many more ways of posting information on the web for learning purposes. The addition of these different websites and methods of learning make classes more interactive and interesting, especially online classes.
Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide?
This video is of author Amy Tan discussing her perspective on creativity. My favorite point she brings up is that uncertainty allows for new ideas and creativity to emerge forward as there is no definite answer as to what might come. It’s a great one to watch to get different ideas on where creativity might come from.
The three videos, “Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?”, “A Vision of Students Today”, and “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Using Us”, all had one thing in common: they talked about students. The first video was my favourite. Sir Ken Robinson was an amazing speaker, one that kept your attention and had lots of examples to back up his claims, for example, the story he told about Gillian Lynne, the choreographer from the musical “CATS”. When she was younger, she had trouble in school, and a doctor, instead of telling her mother she had a learning disability or to put her on medication, told her to enroll her in dance lessons. She might have never had the career she had if her talent for dancing had not been indulged.
In schools today, instruction is not designed for learners like Gillian. Many, not all, classrooms consist of a teacher lecturing at the front of the room, not allowing for kinesthetic, musical, or any other types of learning besides auditory and sometimes visual to occur. There are so many students who need to have hands-on learning, or learning through music and art. Teachers can incorporate many of these into their lessons and reach all types of learners when planning their instruction. For example, they could take a science lesson and include group work to be completed at stations.
This would give the students a chance to interact orally, move around, and the activities can be things like, creating a song to teach the scientific process, a game where they have to race to see who can order the steps of the scientific process first, and an activity where the students choose which sentence belongs with which step of the scientific process. Technology can also be incorporated into the lesson to allow for differentiation, such as making an interactive power point game that deals with matching the steps of the scientific process to their definition. It can include graphics and have the questions can be read aloud.
The second video, “A Vision of Students Today,” dealt with the issues students of today deal with. A teacher had his students take a survey about their habits in class and outside of class. They came up with different figures that were sobering. Only 49% of students read their textbooks and many students had spent over $100 dollars on textbooks that they had never opened. It also talked about the large class sizes and how the chalkboard where the information is written is so far away.
This video alludes to making instruction more accessible in college classes.
When planning their instruction, professors should choose books that would be helpful in the student’s actual career and helpful in learning the objectives of the specific course. Also, making power points available online helps so the student has the information in front of them as well as on the blackboard. Using video clips and having group assignments also helps to keep student’s attention and can provide information that might not have been available to the student before. Technology would be integrated through the video clips, power points, and also having discussions online or a Twitter or Facebook account to post changes in assignments and other updates.
The third and final video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Using Us”, was about how today’s internet is user friendly. It also talked about the internet being so easy to use, and that we need new legislation to regulate certain online activities. When planning instruction, teachers can certainly utilize the different technologies of free blogs, You Tube, Facebook, free website hosting, and many more ways of posting information on the web for learning purposes. The addition of these different websites and methods of learning make classes more interactive and interesting, especially online classes.
Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide?
This video is of author Amy Tan discussing her perspective on creativity. My favorite point she brings up is that uncertainty allows for new ideas and creativity to emerge forward as there is no definite answer as to what might come. It’s a great one to watch to get different ideas on where creativity might come from.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Mind Mapping
Above are the 3 mind maps I created. The first is with paper and pencil and is the topic map. The second is with Mindomo, a web tool and is the lesson map that I based off of my topic map.Here are 5 potential benefits of using this visual technique in instructional design:
1) It can help ESL learners:
a. When you use a visual to help illustrate how information is connected and pictures to help the student understand vocabulary, it helps them learn. Students that are labeled as ESL often need the visual connection along with written and spoken word. For example, if I went to France and was looking for a bathroom, I would find one much quicker if the universal men’s room sign was posted, the man standing with his arms at his sides. I might also see the French word for restroom next to the picture, which can help me learn the how to say bathroom in French, just in case the next place does not have a sign with a picture.
2) It can help visual learners:
a. Students that are visual learners will be able to not only hear you talk about the topic at hand, but also see the topic and visually connect it to other subtopics.
3) It can help activate background knowledge:
a. When beginning any lesson it is always beneficial to activate student’s background knowledge. That way it gets them on the right train of thought, where they can mix their old and new ideas. Mind maps allow the teacher to begin with a central topic, and include subtopics as the students share their previous knowledge of the topic. It feeds discussion and also allows the teacher to go back in the closing of a lesson to add newly learned information.
4) It can help plan an essay
a. Creating a mind map in the form of a tree map can help students organize their thoughts into main topics, subtopics, and details for their paragraphs, or even sentences if the students are young enough. This will help them keep their writing straight and to the point and hopefully cut down on the amount of revisions they will need to do.
5) It can help a student get as many thoughts out on a topic as possible before writing an essay, poem, or story.
a. When a teacher gives an assignment for a piece of writing, sometimes students are able to choose their own subtopic. By having students create a circle map, another type of mind map, they are able to write all of the ideas they have before using them in their writing.. They might use one keyword they wrote down, or many. Either way it is a useful tool for brainstorming.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
copyright
Grade school teachers have many issues to consider aside from the kids. Like little johny comming home from school saying "My 7th grade class just finished Old Yeller but we don't get to watch the movie
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)