The
work in this course has helped me deepen and expand my understanding of how
students learning, and in particular, how they express their learning. My “Personal Learning Theory” from week 1 was
that students learn primarily through the means of Jean Piaget’s constructivist
theory. I still believe that learning is
a very personal experience for students, and that students will need to have
some background knowledge available (either already there or provided by the
teacher) in order to be able to effectively absorb new knowledge. I have revised my learning theory after
studying some of the materials in this course.
After watching Dr. Pat Wolfe’s lecture about how the brain learns
(Laureate Education Inc., 2011), I learned the difference between procedural
memory, which is the memory of how to do a specific task such as driving or
decoding text, and declarative memory, which is the information that you can
explain and teach. While we do want our
students to develop procedural memory for decoding and other skills such as
math facts, for the most part we want our students to have declarative memory
so that they can explain the skills they have learned. Dr. Wolfe shared that in order to develop
declarative memory, elaborate rehearsal is necessary—students need to practice
saying the information, acting it out, singing about it, etc. (Laureate
Education Inc., 2011). This made me
realize that I need to work on my delivery of information and give students
more opportunity to rehearse the information I want them to know.
Another
revision to my learning theory is that behaviorism is another strong tool that
I need to be using as a teacher.
Behaviorists say that student learning is the response to positive and
negative reinforcements (Lever-Duffy & McDonald, 2008). While I do not think that learning is best created in this way, I
do think that motivation is strongly controlled by rewards and punishments. I have revised my learning theory to include
the ideas of providing recognition, reward, and praise to help motivate my
students to greater learning and excitement about their learning.
There are new tools
that I am planning to use now as a result of my learning in this course. One tool that I was introduced to was “VoiceThread”. This website allows learners to make a short
voiceover to go along with a picture, which can be left independent or put
together into a kind of slide show. The
website also allows other users to view the voice/photo combination and make
comments on what they see. What I love
about this website is that it provides immediate feedback for learners on what
they have done, and it can also spark a lively debate about the ideas
presented. I am planning on using this
website to help my students learn how to debate ideas respectfully and only
using evidence presented in the text.
The VoiceThread website will allow us to track each comment and learn
from each other very effectively.
Another tool that I
would like to begin using in my classroom is the classroom blog. I have been hesitant to start one for the
last two years because I have not been sure how to moderate blog comments or
provide exciting, interesting prompts. I
now see after taking this class that the blog does not just need to host
writing prompts, which was my only idea before.
Now I am excited to post student work, student videos, and student writing
on the blog. This will give students and
parents the opportunity to see other students’ work and be able to comment on
it. At the beginning of the year we are
going to have a discussion about the types of blog comments that would
appropriate, and develop a student-created list of “do’s and don’ts” to put on
the blog. I am excited to see the kind
of learning that will develop out of this environment, because most of it will
be unstructured and will reflect true student thinking and innovation.
Before taking this
course, I viewed technology in the classroom as a way for students to more
effectively generate a product to demonstrate their learning. While I still believe this is one use of
technology, I now see the field of instructional technology as far
broader. What I understand now is that
technology is a means for students to collaborate and a place for them to create their learning. In my classroom, I have two goals about how
to change my instructional practice with technology in order to increase student
learning.
One goal for changing
my instructional practice is to use technology to create and provide structures
for note-taking in my classroom.
Note-taking is a very important skill for students to develop, but it is
not something that most teachers (myself included) ever take much time to teach
in the classroom (Pitler, Hubbell, & Kuhn, 2012).
My goal for myself is to find a way to use technology to make note-taking an
easier task for my students, and also to help them organize their ideas more
effectively. In the beginning, my plan
is to develop the notes on the teacher end, using Inspiration, Microsoft Word,
or PowerPoint, and then provide these notes for students to fill in. This will give students a general idea of
what notes are supposed to look like, and will help them begin to understand
the structure. After some time of
working with these types of notes, I will help introduce students to iPad
programs, PowerPoint, and Inspiration, and invite them to organize and take
their own notes. This will help my
students learn how to evaluate and synthesize information more effectively,
which will create deeper learning.
My
second goal for changing my instructional practice using technology is to help
students generate and test hypotheses.
Students who are asked to problem-solve and test their own hypotheses do
not run the same risk of developing misconceptions about their learning as
those who simply listen to lectures (Pitler, Hubbell, & Kuhn, 2012).
I know that my students will need to have this experience in order to develop
rich thinking skills, and technology is an easy way to provide this
opportunity. One way I hope to achieve
this goal is through our science curriculum.
In our physical science unit, students are asked to complete a variety
of experiments involving dropping objects, racing cars/balls down ramps of
various angles, and measuring distances.
In the past, I have just asked students to record this information in
the science notebooks, but most of the information and time was wasted because
we did not analyze or examine the data.
My goal for the coming school year is to help students look at their
information more carefully by putting the data into a Microsoft Excel document
and building a chart or graph. This will
help students to see the trends in their data and give them a better
opportunity to understand the law of physics being tested.
All
of the learning from this course has expanded my instructional and learning
theories, and has given me a broader vision of the kinds of learning that
technology can help with. In the future,
I am going to use technology as a part of student-centered instruction, instead
of simply as a way for students to create a fancy, polished-looking final
product. This is going to expand and
enrich the learning that my students will have, and will allow me to understand
their learning and fix misconceptions more quickly.
References
Lever-Duffy, J., & McDonald, J. (2008). Theoretical
foundations (Laureate Education, Inc., custom ed.). Boston, MA:
Pearson Education, Inc.
Pitler,
H., Hubbell, E. R., & Kuhn, M. (2012). Using technology with
classroom instruction that works (2nd ed.). Alexandria,
VA: ASCD
