Reflection

Reflecting back on my personal learning theory, that I developed in week 1, based on the knowledge that I gained from this course, I would not modified my learning theory. My personal theory about how students learn is: that students must be able to access the information being present to them, feel comfortable in the learning environment, receive positive reinforcement, and make meaningful connections to the information being presented. I believe that technology can be very easily integrated into my personal learning theory and there is no need to spell it out in the learning theory.

Any immediate adjustments that I will make to my instructional practice regarding technology integration will be to have at least one integrated lesson per day. I need to have my students on the computers more and take advantage of all of the resources out there that would let my students express their knowledge in a way that best fits them. Two technology tools that I would like to use with my students would web cams and VoiceThread. The reason that I picked web cameras is because my students are deaf and communicate through sign language. I think that web cameras would be a great to track progress of each student’s language development and reading fluency. It would be a great tool as well to record books so that the students can have a watching center instead of a listening center, which is what their hearing peers have. The reason that I want to use VoiceThread is because it allows the students to interact with each other in a different way and to have conversations about educational topics, so that they are getting that language practice and vocabulary development. It is also a good tool, because it allows the students to practice their writing skills, in a new and exciting way. I can also then grading and or track their progress with concrete evidence through these assessments as well.

My first long-term goal that I would like to make in my instructional practice regarding technology integration is to be able to think of ways that technology would support the standard curriculum without much effort. Right now, I have to work hard at making technology integrate into my curriculum. I want to be a person that people could give me a topic and could list five different ways that technology could be integrated into the lessons. The first to achieving this goal is to finish my degree in Integrating Technology in the Classroom. The second would be to follow blogs or professional journals and get ideas from the current experts in the field. The third would be to try as often as possible to have integrated lessons, and then make notes on each lesson about what work and what did not work so that in the future the lesson could be improved. The final step would be keep working at it because practice makes perfect and to attend workshops and classes to keep update on all of the new technologies that are available and support education.

My second long-term goal that I would like to make in my instructional practice regarding technology integration is to have every lesson for every subject to have some technology integration built into it. The first step would be to pick one subject and try to have one lesson a week, and then to slowly build to having it in every lesson. The second step would be to add another subject after, feeling comfortable with the previous subject or subjects. The third thing would be then to work towards having all subjects. I think that it could be a huge undertaking, but I think the key will be to take it slow and not try and hurry. I think that this goal may take a couple years to full master, but I think the pay out at the end is well worth the effort. I know that I cannot do it alone, so I will need to tap into every resource available to me whether it be blog sites, professional journals, workshops, classes, and or people around me.

Voicethread Project

Please scroll down to view my voicethread project.

Social Learning Theory

The instructional strategies described in the resources I explored this week correlate with the principles of social learning theories, because they focused on social networking and using others to gain information and skills. The resources talk about using different software and programs the enable many people to work on the same project at the same time, and where the participants are located does not affect their ability to work on the project. Social learning theorists believe that the primary way that people learn is by interacting with people and their environment. They believe that children should be involved in cooperative learning groups and should connect new knowledge and skills to old knowledge while they work in their groups to complete a common task. These cooperative learning groups are a great place to integrated technology using social networking. Group members can not only work on the same project, but they each other feedback and answer each other’s questions

The Constructivist Perspective

Lever-Duffy and McDonald (2007) stated, for constructivists, knowledge is a constructed element resulting from the learning process. Further, knowledge is unique to the individual who construct it" (pp 16). I believe the key to that statement is that knowledge is unique to the individual. There are so many things that we learn how to do in our life, but if we were asked to explained how we learned them we each would have an unique answer. How one person learns a new skill or a piece of information may not work for another person who is trying to learn that same skill. An example of that is when someone ask another person how to teach them to do a certain task. The person teaching gets frustrated at the person who is trying to learn the task because they are not getting it and the learner is frustrated at the teacher because they do not understand. It is because knowledge is unique to the individual who constructs it.

That is why project based learning and or problem based learning is so essential for our students. It gives them the opportunity to show off what they know in an unique way. A student may not be able to explain how they know something but given a chance to show you, may blow you as the teacher away. I do think that students need guidance during this process to ensure that they stay focused on the skill that you are assessing them on. I think that rubrics are the perfect match for these project based learning assignments. They provided both the structure and the freedom that is required for both parties to get what they require. I know that I loved problem based learning, especially when I can to work on the computer for the entire thing. Our kids are getting burned out of learning at an early age it seems like now a days, one way to get students excited about learning again is to use the resources provided to us and the technology that we have access to, to provide students with these problem/project based learning opportunities.

Social Learning Theory

The instructional strategies described in the resources I explored this week correlate with the principles of social learning theories, because they focused on social networking and using others to gain information and skills. The resources talk about using different software and programs the enable many people to work on the same project at the same time, and where the participants are located does not affect their ability to work on the project. Social learning theorists believe that the primary way that people learn is by interacting with people and their environment. They believe that children should be involved in cooperative learning groups and should connect new knowledge and skills to old knowledge while they work in their groups to complete a common task. These cooperative learning groups are a great place to integrated technology using social networking. Group members can not only work on the same project, but they each other feedback and answer each other’s questions.

How to get students to focus on details

Cognitive Thinking Theory

My thoughts on how the instructional strategies described in the resources I explored this week correlate with the principles of cognitive learning theory are that thinking maps are the perfect partner for cognitive learning theory. According to Levrt-Duffy & McDonald (2008), cognitive theorists focus on learning as a mental operation that takes places when information enters trough the senses, undergoes mental manipulation, is stored, and the finally used (pp 16). Thinking maps provide the brain with a way to organize the information and a way to link old information to new information. Cognitive theorists would love that students would be linking the old information to the new information because it would make retrieval of that information quick and more efficient. The learner would remember more because they would be learning information that was always represented in a mental process, which is what cognitive theorists, live for. Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, and Malenoski had this to say about thinking maps, “to aid the learning process, look for opportunities to activate students’ background knowledge, thereby providing a direction for exploration. The technology, in turn, provides you with editable visual aids and multimedia resources that appeal to a number of learning styles” (pp. 79).