Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Constructionism in Practice

Using Constructionism in the classroom allows for students become introduced to the process in building artifacts while learning the process. A good example of a constructionist strategy would be a Wiki. Wiki's allow students to create pages and are allowed to add on pictures and audio to enhance the cognitive learning experience. Wiki's are also published documents, when students here those words they feel the need to produce something great. They find that building Wiki's can be challenging but neccesary for students to grow and develop how to produce problem solving answers.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Cognitive Learning Theories and Strategies

As teachers, it is our duty to find the best way possible for students to understand, retain and recall the information given. Technology has become a powerful tool in creating these visual and auditory information pertaining to a certain topic.

After reading chapter 4 in, "Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works," I have been enlightened by using explicit cues when allowing students to research or preview a project that they are ready to approach. In this chapter it explains how using software and online graphic organizers to reach a point as to why we are learning about a topic. In this case Ms. Douglas was talking about bridges and the properties to the structure and design of certain bridges. She would give websites and vocabulary terms to allow students to get a deeper concept of how and why bridges are built the way they are.

Cognitive learning through procedural application gives students a picture memory of how things work. The graphic organizer allows for students to gather the information learned and to create connections for the brain to store the information longer in the mind. This strategy gives students to understand and retain the information needed to visualize in their mind of how a bridge holds so many lives everyday.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Behaviorist Learning and Strategies using Technology

As I started reading chapter 8 of " Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works," I like the idea of keeping track of effort. Many teachers including myself do not have students keep track of their own effort. This will give students a chance to place a visual in relation to their effort of the course and the grade they receive. Hopefully this will set an alarm to some student's brains thinking, "wait you mean if I try I could also get good grades too!"

I also read chapter 10, in which incorporated a lot of strategies for homework and practice using technology to deepen the understanding of student content. I found no only was the reinforcement in these strategies positive, but allowed for students to relate information to something they enjoy. For example, in this specific strategy a coach was using a spreadsheet to keep track of the football teams lifting workouts and how much they could lift in a certain time period. Well a math teacher thought it would be interesting to take those numbers and convert them to parabolic functions using Microsoft Excel. I found this very interesting how this math teacher could not only take a real world application, but also to put the information in using software where her students could then practice adjusting the numbers and time in order to create different parabolic graphs.

The amount of instructional strategies using software that has been on the market for decades is unbelievable. Incorporating this into a behaviorist learning style would allow for students to broaden their minds to readdress the problems using other techniques.