- The number of technology tool available to teachers is already daunting, and more are emerging every day. Given the value of these tools to enliven and support 21st century learning, what will you do to keep yourself informed about the options available to you? How will you manage your discoveries and work toward integrating them into your classroom?
Response:
On the face of it, this seems like a pretty easy question – however I find that this is the most difficult question for me and the biggest obstacle that I face in integrating technology into my classroom. I tend to get overwhelmed and confused when I have too many choices. I do believe that technology can be a tremendous asset, but I also like things rather simple. When I’m building a course, I tend to do things sort of the ‘old fashioned way’ in terms of making power points, notes off of those, and exams first so I can see where I’m going. I then look at things and see where I can add a technology piece that would make sense, to enhance a student’s understanding of the material. Every semester I challenge myself to learn and add some new technology to my classes. I can’t possibly add 10 new things at once, or I’d get confused. The college that I teach at, has a faculty development committee that puts on workshops frequently to introduce and train on new technology. The textbooks come with a ton of great stuff already done for you – videos, online homework and games, quizzes, etc. Too many instructors don’t use the materials given to them, instead drive themselves crazy trying to recreate stuff. Since I teach medical based classes, my favorite are interactive videos where there is a patient and the student has to do a certain procedure. They have to interact with the patient and based on the questions they ask or things they do to the patient, the responses are different. If they do something wrong, the patient gets irate. It is immediate feedback and correction, which is fantastic. Since more stuff is coming out all the time, I’m going to start a file of ‘great ideas’ that I’d like to try and slowly see which I could integrate into my classes. I tend to change things often (although not in the middle of a semester) so the students, or I, don’t get bored.
Chapter 2
- Imagine that you are going to teach a unit about Christopher Columbus to the grade level of your choice. What strategies immediately come to mind as good possibilities for teaching this unit? What relationship can you discern between how you might want to teach this unit and your learning or cognitive style? Describe how you think your own personal style might affect your teaching styles. What lessons can you draw from this realization when you teach your diverse students?
Response:
When presenting a topic, I try to present it in several different ways. For Christopher Columbus, I would probably: show a video about his story, have the students read excerpts from a diary written by Columbus or one of his crew to give a personal touch to the story, have the students play an online game or fill in a worksheet that gives immediate feedback on the details of Columbus’s voyage, etc. At the end of the unit, ideally the quiz given would be online so the student gets immediate feedback. When giving quizzes, I let the students take them multiple times if they choose to get a better grade. Exams are taken once.
I’ve been reflecting quite a bit over the last couple of years about what kind of learner I am. I have to see and do things, in order to remember them. I also have to write down the steps. I’m convinced that I have an auditory processing problem- if you tell me something, I will forget it very quickly. I think that because of this, I tend to forget the auditory learners in my class. It wouldn’t really occur to me to play a podcast of a recording of something that didn’t have a visual element to it, because for me all it does is jumble in my mind and confuse me. I have to be better about including those auditory learners. I think I do pretty well with other types of learners, but I need to include all of them.
Chapter 3
- To effectively design instruction with technologies, a number of instructional design models are used in education. After reading this chapter, discuss the Dynamic Instructional Design (DID) model with the focus on its five steps.
Response:
The DID is a model for creating lesson plans. It has 5 basic steps.
1. Know your learner- the way you set up your lesson may be different, depending on the makeup of the class that you have. For instance: I teach out of 3 different campuses. Two are in suburban areas and one is in the city. The student population is very different at each campus, so the way I teach the same class may be a bit different at each campus. I can also have students age 18-65 in my classes, so I have to be adaptable to their different needs. The campus in the inner city can be challenging because many of the students don’t have ready access to the internet or computers off campus. Believe it or not, many of the students have never worked on a computer at all, until they come to college. If I have set my class up with a lot of technology components, I may have to rethink that- or at least be prepared to help the students come up with creative solutions to their technology issues.
2. Identify the objectives of the lesson: this may be easier said than done. It requires you to know which objectives you need to live by, and where to find them. If you teach K-12, you probably need to go by state and federal standards. For the program that I teach in, there are institutional objectives (that every class has to accomplish, no matter the subject), and standards that I must meet according to the accrediting body that accredits the program that I teach in. For me, it would be the American Association of Medical Assistants since I teach for the Medical Assisting program. There are 187 standards, or competencies, that we need to meet in the program and these have been divided up between the classes. So, for a particular class I have a list of objectives that I need to ultimately accomplish, therefore when I’m writing a lesson I will state the ones I’m doing that day. We also want to make sure to cover the various levels of Bloom’s taxonomy while we are deciding on the lesson.
3. Identify teaching and learning strategies: this is the meat of the lesson, where you will list the activities that the students will be doing. You first want to decide what you will be doing for teaching- making sure it is done in an organized manner and based in sound teaching principles. Then list what the students will be doing to master that learning- keeping in mind to include all learning styles. For instance: worksheets, interactive games online, etc.
4. Identify what technologies are needed: you want to identify what technologies you need to enhance the lesson and help the students learn and remember the concepts. Most people think that technology has to mean computers, but it doesn’t. It can mean flashcards, white boards, etc, along with computerized things. Over the whole unit you want to mix things up for the students so that they can find what ultimately works for them and their learning.
5. Assess and Revise: throughout the lesson, you should do formative assessments to see if the students are grasping what you are teaching. This can be as low stakes as them answering questions for understanding, to higher stakes such as a quiz for a grade. If a student isn’t grasping the concepts of the lesson, you may need to revise and take a different approach- sometimes several times until you find a way to present the material to the student in a way he understands. You also want to assess how the overall lesson went and revise anything that didn’t go well. My lessons are always a work in progress. Sometimes I try something that I think will be great, and it crashes and burns. Other times I try something that works with one class but not another- so I need to adjust. Sometimes the adjustment is in the middle of the lesson, others it’s a retrospect learning opportunity. There has never been a semester where I thought, “I nailed it every day this class! It was perfect!” I’m always trying to improve.