Reflection

As the course comes to a close, my personal learning theory has not changed. I still want students to learn how to adapt to society. This class has helped my to create better instructional and learning tools through constructivist strategies.

The immediate adjustments that I have made to my classes is to create instructional strategies that help the students learn using technology. I loved the different way to use tools such as VoiceThread and Webinspiration. These tools allow for students to become more motivated to learn.

Some long-term goal changes that I would make is to increase more technology in my curriculum and to create more project based learning using constructivist strategies. A more project based curriculum would allow for students to be able to work together and allow them to use their critical thinking techniques.

Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

This is my Voice Thread link:

http://voicethread.com/#q.b1192126.i0.k0

This week's reading was about cooperative learning in the classroom. I have found that with 9th grade that learning in groups is very effective if done with certain structure. When students work in cooperative groups, they make sense of, or construct meaning for, new knowledge by interacting with others (Johnson, Johnson, & Stanne, 2000.)

It is important for students to use all resources, including their peers to retain information. Collaboration of ideas are the best strategy for the long term knowledge of a certain topic. Social learning allows for students to see the big picture of the project or topic. It is best retained when students do not need to learn all the pieces and have to put them back together to understand the world around you.

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.

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.

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.

Reflection

As I reflect back on my recent course at Walden University I see myself more advanced in the field of communication online and how to use web based tools in my Technology courses here in Dansville, N.Y. I have the skills now to develop curriculum in my classroom that incorporates the use of a Blog, a wiki, or a podcast. I am in the process of designing my final project around a Blog. This course has given me that insight to help me share these tools with students that are desperate for the use of technology in my classroom.

This course has allowed me to expand my knowledge on web 2.0 tools and also given me a way to collaborate with other teachers through the use of blogging. I will be increasing my research for new technology that I can incorporate into my classroom and reviewing blogs that are about different techniques that teacher’s have used to incorporate technology in the classroom.

One goal that I have set to benefit the students in my classroom is to create a blog for research and reflection purposes on the project that they do in class. I like that students would be able to add their own character into their assignments using blog, podcast, or wiki’s. This would also give a good knowledge of how to use web based tools for their future. The second goal that I set for myself is to start an online portfolio for student’s work that they have done over the years. I would hold a workshop for the Technology Department and show them how to use a Wiki to add students work to a folder online. I also believe this would give a good impression on college interviews for students to bring with them to physically show what they have been doing the past 4 years of high school.

21st Century Skills: Yeh or Neh

As I started reading the article "Learning for the 21st Century," I found some good insight of how the educational system wants to start directing students of the future. Mainly what this article was about, was how students have gathered the core information, like your Math, Science, English Literacy, and History and then need to ask how can we use those skills to think at problems critically with self-direction and be able to communicate their ideas and answers to other groups. This article does a great job structuring what 21st Century Skills really are.

In the information world that we live in today it is hard not to even walk down the street and see a half a dozen people with cell phones in their ears. People want their information now and they want the fastest applications, the newest gizmo's and a way to be connected to them 24/7. It has already come and the new generation of students need to be able to adapt to the new digital world. There is no bout in my mind that these skills need to be implemented into our school systems, but this could take a very long time to implement into schools that are in poor communities that cannot afford new technologies for everyone. It seems that this article is very realistic and actually 21st Century Skills are installed in my District, but students will not learn these skills without teachers that have prior knowledge to the technologies used today.

I believe that we need to implement these skills not only for grades K-12, but at the collegiate level of learners also. It should be required for college students that are majoring in education to take a class on 21st Century Skills and how to implement them into the classroom. If students were to integrate these skills they would have a better chance of adapting to the real world when that time comes. "Today's education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how student's live and how they learn."