Emerging Technologies Project

Annie Kroll

November 15, 2007

T & L 466, section 2

Emerging technologies project

The first emerging technology that I’d like to discuss is that of the 1 to 1 Learning concept that Apple is currently promoting on their website (http://www.apple.com/education/k12 /onetoone/). According to Apple, “A 1 to 1 learning program is defined as an environment where students and teachers have 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week access to a notebook computer as well as digital content, educational software, and digital authoring tools” (Apple, 2007). Of course, Apple is promoting this idea specifically with their laptops, and the idea is that they will provide students with resources that they would otherwise not have access to, and that this type of teaching will equip students with the knowledge and skill sets to be effective and capable employees later on in life.

I think that, while this is a good idea, it might be difficult to implement for the first time. I suppose that could be said for many of the emerging technologies that will soon be appearing in the classrooms of America, but nonetheless, it might end up being a tedious process teaching computer skills all day long in a class that should be learning Spanish. That said, if given the opportunity to participate in a program such as this, I would not hesitate to accept. It would be a fabulous way to explore using technology in which everyone would be able to participate. There would be a lot of student learning going on, not only because they’d be learning from the teacher, but also because they’d be asking each other for help if they missed something that the teacher said, or if they just didn’t quite catch on to how to do something the first time around. Of course, a Spanish unit would have to be based on technology vocabulary, so as to make the rest of the term/year practice of that useful vocabulary. It would have an effect on my teaching also in the fact that I would need to become much more knowledgeable about operating a Mac, but that would be information that I would be more than happy to read through for the sake of this project.

The second emerging technology that I’d like to discuss is Google’s Experimental Labs (http://www.google.com/experimental/). In this search, a person can look up timelines on a variety of subjects. The site offers a few possible search subjects, such as Thomas Jefferson, but I wanted to see for myself, and instead picked ‘Mexico’, which was not on their list. There was a timeline that came up, but there were many gaps in it, and would certainly not be enough for any of my students wanting to know about the chronological history of Mexico. However, I think that if Google continues to improve on their timelines, this could be a very useful tool for students in the classroom (Google Experimental, 2007).

This would impact my teaching preparation by making me allot time to show students how to correctly type in a search for a timeline, and I would definitely have to think up some sort of activity in which the students would be looking at the bigger picture of some subject instead of specific events and isolated ideas. Using this technology would, however, give them a knowledge of how to access timelines if needed for other classes in the future, along with, as stated earlier, giving them a glimpse at the big picture of subjects we’d be studying.

My third and final emerging technology that I’d like to discuss is that of Google SketchUp (http://sketchup.google.com/), which is a computer drawing tool that can be used to design 3D models. I personally was attracted to this particular piece of emerging technology because it said that it was a very good tool for people with autism (Google Sketchup, 2007). It also allows people to use the models they’ve made and put them onto Google Earth, making it a fun activity that they can later go home and show their family members (assuming they have internet access at home).

This would have an impact on my teaching preparation in that I would be replacing one activity with a very similar one. My teacher would always have us do drawings in our Spanish class of our houses, and this would be a great twist on that by providing students with a way to teach themselves about technology while learning Spanish words for things in their places of residence (couch, closet, carpet, etc.). Professor Gruenwald continually uses the statistic that 40-60% of students are chronically disengaged, and I think this would impact them by making sure that they stay engaged!

Works Cited

Apple, Inc. (2007). 1 to 1 Learning. Retrieved November 15, 2007, from Apple Web site: http://www.apple.com/education/k12/onetoone/

Google Sketchup (2007). Google. Retrieved November 15, 2007, from Google Web site: http://sketchup.google.com/

Google Experimental Labs (2007). Google. Retrieved November 15, 2007, from Google Web site: http://www.google.com/experimental/

Distance Education

After reviewing a few of the sites listed at the bottom of the first page, as well as some listed on the second page of the assignment sheet, I have come up with a list of pros and cons to having virtual schools. I have not yet made up my mind whether the pros outweigh the cons, or vice versa, as I’ve not had enough time to really mull over it that much, but I can see why there are advocates and opposition for both.

The pros of the virtual schools that stood out the most to me were as follows: Students had many options to take classes that were interesting and relevant to them; students would probably have to develop a lot of personal responsibility to keep themselves on track, which is something they would find very helpful the farther they go in life; students work at their own pace, so if they need to spend a little more time on a certain topic/subject, they can; students are still kept accountable by having a minimum pace to maintain in order to stay in courses; using the computer so much gives students experience using technology; students could experience less test anxiety from taking exams online through these schools by using the tools offered them in preparation for them; and, students that are home schooling would be able to have access to teachers that are certified in their content areas and that might be able to offer better feedback on assignments than a parent would.

Some of the cons that I noticed were that, although some of the schools offer opportunities for social interaction, students would still not get as much interaction as they would in a regular classroom; these schools are only available to those that have internet access; the minimum pace could allow students to be lazy and put off homework/projects until they’ve all piled up at the end of the term; students won’t necessarily form as close of bonds with their teachers and classmates as those that are enrolled in an in-person high school; courses such as physical education are based, from what I can tell, almost entirely on the students’ word that they did an assignment and/or are working on becoming more healthy; and, in some cases, classes online can be rather pricey.

On one of the sites, there is a checklist of sorts for the prospective student to go through to see if he/she is ready to participate in online delivery. Some of the questions that it asks are: “Can I set a personal schedule and complete assigned work by the required dates?”, and, “Can I solve problems and work through difficulties independently?” The site also advises that if the student has problems or questions to ask someone, most likely one of the staff persons. In general, though, I would say that you would determine that a student is ready to do this type of learning by making sure that they have at least a basic knowledge of how to run the computer that he/she will be using, observing that the student has the attention span to sit at the computer for as long as is necessary to complete assignments of any kind, and provide the necessary tools for the student to stay organized so that he/she does not fall behind/forget assignments.

In order to teach in a virtual school, you would, of course, need to have a fair amount of knowledge about the technology that you will be using, teacher certification, a knowledge of how best to engage distance learning students, be able to pass a criminal background check, and knowledge in the content area of the course. The person would have to be willing to check and respond to emails and, most likely, phone calls on a fairly regular basis, and grade many assignments submitted online.

Technology Integration Article Review Project

Technology Integration Article Review Project

In APA Style

Annie Kroll

Teaching and Learning 466

For this project, I read through Nicholas J. Turro’s article “Constructivism and Information Technology at Columbia: A Journey from the Wilderness to the Promised Land”. In it, the author goes through how he and other faculty members at Columbia were able to use technology to help their students succeed in their classes. Here at WSU, I hear that many of the teachers are more concerned with their research than with actually teaching their students. While research is an important and necessary part of growth and change, I found it refreshing to read an article about a teacher than went the extra mile to help his students comprehend the material from his classes, and wondered what he did that I could apply to my teaching methods when I actually start teaching. His class was an undergraduate chemistry class, and mine will be a high school (or possibly middle school/junior high) class, but due to the success that he had, I think there are a lot of ideas that I can take away from this and use myself. Five topics that the author presents in this article that I found to be especially interesting and relevant were how students learn from each other versus how students learn from teachers lecturing; how technology was used to promote learning by his students; why constructivism was such an integral part of the success of this experiment; whether or not students were capable of constructing the learning tools themselves; and, the effectiveness of a mentor-apprentice approach in projects.

Turro starts off the article by recounting how he was worried about the number of students in his class that were headed toward a failing grade, and the steps he took to see what more could be done for them. In an experiment that he loosely conducted, he held a study session to which approximately 20 of the 40 students having serious trouble in his class attended. In this study session, the teachers contributed little more than the occasional answer to a group question. Most of the teaching was done by the students themselves as they went over problems as a group. The students’ grades dramatically improved by the end of the term, indicating that the students learning much better when they had someone else in a similar position (as a student) to explain the concepts to them (Turro, 2005: p. 1292). This story is very advocative of group problem solving as a way to teach the more difficult concepts, or concepts that students, for the most part, simply are missing the point of. The students doing the explaining get to review the material and know it extra-well since they’re repeating it to their classmates, and the students listening to them get the information explained to them in a way that is more easily comprehensible to them. For Spanish, this would be a great way to arrange the class when teaching something as complex as the subjunctive, the difference between situations requiring the preterit tense and those requiring the imperfect tense, and even something like discussion of the differences between the two ‘to be’ verbs, ser and estar. The teacher can’t be at each group at one time to assess student learning, but the idea is that other students will be helping each other along in constructing knowledge based on previous learning, just as a teacher would do. Unfortunately, I think that this would be a method that I as a teacher couldn’t use as frequently as I would like to; the students would get too comfortable, and would be more prone to get off task or not talk in Spanish.

In the course of explaining this journey from lecture to reliance on IT, Turro explains their first real IT tool: the Infrared Tutor, which helped students to learn about infrared spectroscopy. According to Turro, “The main feature that provides an active engagement is the ability to connect the IR signal with thevibrational motion of a set of atoms by simply clicking on the IR signal which causes an animation of the vibration to appear…By running through the set of functional groups and comparing the overlap of their IR spectrum with that of a saturated hydrocarbon, the program allows the student to create new and robust knowledge of how to interpret infrared spectra” (Turro, 2005: p. 1293). While I don’t understand all of what he said in that quote, I can imagine that it must be a lot easier to comprehend when there’s a visual, interactive model to demonstrate concepts such as this. By using technology in this way, the instructor is able to reach different types of learners. The auditory learners are engaged by listening to what their instructor/classmates say, the visual learners learn from the material presented on a computer, and the kinesthetic learners learn by being able to participate and actually click on different of things in the program to make things happen. In a Spanish class, it might be difficult to do this often, since most classes don’t have that many computers in it, and there are only so many days that you can make use of the computer lab for your own class. This minor detail aside, instruction in this method would, I believe, be a little bit easier on the teacher because it frees them up to circulate around the room, paying more attention to each individual student, and answering questions with greater ease. Teaching with interactive programs such as the IR spectroscopy one that Turro and his companions created might be a good idea some of the time, but I think that for a Spanish classroom, interaction with other students is more important. There are always students that understand some concepts better than others, and I think it would be killing two birds with one stone if I as a teacher relied more on that than on a computer to explain something. In addition to this, most of the more complex things in Spanish that need detailed explanations probably wouldn’t need interactive programs such as this. I think that the group work was a much better idea when dealing with a Spanish class.

This particular article did not give an actual definition of constructivism, so I looked elsewhere for it. The one I found (Huitt, 2003) is as follows:

The basic premise is that an individual learner must actively "build" knowledge and skills (e.g., Bruner, 1990) and that information exists within these built constructs rather than in the external environment. [See Ullman (1980) versus Gibson (1979) for an overview of this controversy within the cognitive perspective.] However, all advocates of constructivism agree that it is the individual's processing of stimuli from the environment and the resulting cognitive structures, that produce adaptive behavior, rather than the stimuli themselves.

Turro gives much of the credit of their success to their constructivist approach, saying that his experiments “validate the principles of constructivism” (Turro, 2005: p. 1293), and the rest of his article is more or less devoted to showing how student interaction helped them build on previous knowledge, and what they were able to create with a constructivist approach and access to technology and funds to pay for it. This is, I think, an excellent way to approach teaching Spanish. The instructor was motivated to change his methods from traditional lecturing to actually involving the students, and providing the stimuli necessary to make them construct their own learning and knowledge on top of that which they already had. For a Spanish teacher in a high school class, student-created technology projects would be a time consuming, but ultimately very rewarding endeavor. The students would not only learn from working on their own projects; they would learn from the projects that others create as well. The teacher, meanwhile, would learn more and more about how to assign such a project, the parameters they should specify the next time they attempt something similar, and information that they probably didn’t know with regards to the subject.

Turro explains that he hypothesized that “Students, if provided with faculty mentors and support in learning how to use the powerful new software, could construct comparable modules on content of interest to chemical education” (Turro, 2005: p. 1294). I think it’s really important to leave a lot of the responsibility to the student. Obviously they’ll need some help with the technology, but students have the maturity, even as teenagers, to be in charge of their own learning if they’re given the chance and provided with the structure. In a Spanish class, this wouldn’t be different than Turro’s class.

Turro later on said that the results of the experiments in producing these modules showed that, “constructivist principles of collaborative and interactive learning can be effectively applied by having the undergraduates trained as a group under the mentorship of a postdoctoral associate” (Turro, 2005: p. 1294). While I don’t think it would be very plausible to get a bunch of postdoctoral folks to come in and teach students, I do think that this idea could be applicable, with a little tweaking, to a Spanish classroom. Students from different levels of Spanish that have already learned a concept and how to use the information technology would be able to give a tutorial lesson to students at a lower level. This would make students in charge of other students’ learning, and would help them to reinforce their own knowledge of the concepts and the technology being used. I doubt that it would be that difficult to do a collaborative lesson with some other class in this way, and it would be fun for the students to interact with students from other classes and grade levels.

References

Huitt, W. (2003). Constructivism. Retrieved October 18, 2007, from Educational

Psychology Interactive Web site: http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/cogsys/construct.html

Turro, N. J. (2005).Constructivism and Information Technology at Columbia: A Journey

from the Wilderness to the Promised Land. Journal of Chemical Education. 82. 9., 1292-1299.

Evaluating TeacherWebs of classmates

For this assignment, the first TeacherWeb that I went to was that of Melissa. The URL is http://www.teacherweb.com/WA/WashingtonStateUniversity/MsSpencer/ . Her 'about me' page was nice, and let me feel like I actually knew a little bit about her and her interests :) She didn't modify the name of her links page to say 'Web Resources', but she does have fifteen links in there, and they seem to be both relevant to her subject, as well as varied in what they provide to students. Each one has the description asked for on the assignment sheet. I was unable to find her link to her wiki page. Her class handouts seemed to be helpful to students struggling with capitalization and spelling, which I thought was a nice resource to provide :) Overall, though I was unable to locate a few things on her page, I like it. It seems like it would be useful both for a student in her class, as well as a parent wanting to know a little bit of information about their student's teacher.

The second TeacherWeb that I visited was that of Mike Divelbiss, at http://teacherweb.com/WA/WashingtonStateUniversity/MrDivelbiss/. I'll say right off the bat that this TeacherWeb caught my attention with all of its interesting icons/animations. Some of them are even comics! I love it! Most of the pictures in his 'about me' portion are of his daughter, but they are very endearing, and the captions show his sense of humor. In his Web Resources page, not all of the links have at least two sentences in their description, but I don't think they're really necessary, as the descriptions are, in my opinion, still adequate. The links are relevant to his content area, and some of them make me want to click on them and read them a little more in depth, such as one about math and music. I dislike that there are actually more like three links about math and music, but I suppose that if he were working with a math teacher on a collaborative project, it would be useful to have those links on his page. I didn't see any Project Reflection things on his page, though he did have some questions that required long responses in the Review Quiz portion. Overall, I enjoyed this page very much as well. It's much more interesting-looking than most of the rest of the TeacherWebs that I've seen, and I like that it captures my attention!

Engaging Students with Concept Mapping Activities

Questions:

1. The use of concept mapping can be very helpful for engaging your students in their learning. A few specific examples would be to use concept mapping for showing how Frida Kahlo's life was connected to so many other peoples' lives (as well as the interconnections between those people), teaching a cultural lesson about Cinco de Mayo and the repercussions of the battle that happened on that day, and maybe as an assignment for students to map out the process of the manner in which children in Latin America go from being in school to workers helping to support their family. The third example might sound a little too simplistic, but it's a lot more complicated than a person might at first assume.
   
2. My students would be able to demonstrate that they understand a concept or topic that I'd be teaching by using concept mapping fairly easily. The maps would not be just about lines and bubbles with words in them; they'd have explanations/reasons on the lines going from one concept bubble to the next. It would force them to think a lot more about the relationships between the details of whatever concept you're helping them to master, and to critically think about the topic and the consequences of the beginning action, or the end result of something that happens (depending on what it is that they're mapping). Chances are that it will also draw on previous knowledge, which will help your class be a place of constructive learning for your students.
   

Annie Kroll

October 2, 2007

T&L 466 section 2

Concept mapping summary

Concept mapping is a much more clean way to come up with ideas that the traditional pencil and notebook paper. They’re sort of like an advance organizer on the computer, and are easily adjusted if ideas change or information needs to be added to already existing information. Concept mapping, from what I observe, gets rid of the need for continual scratching out, the worry about running out of room for all the ideas, and eliminates the frustration of trying to read barely legible handwriting later on.

A lot of the sites that I tried to access were not working or gave me an error message. However, there were a few that worked very well, and in my future classroom, I think it would be fun to copy a few of the ideas that I have seen from reviewing these pages. For example, the Mind Maps page pointed out that this would be a great way for students or teachers to present information and how things are connected. In my classroom specifically, this would be a great way to map out the way that the governments of the United States and Mexico interact and how they’re connected to each other. Other fabulous ways to use concept mapping would be for study guides, coming up with ideas of what to write about in a mock letter to the president (which I actually did do during my practicum), and to help students to recognize and remember key ideas in a reading or a video that we go over in class (or even that they review for an assignment). The websites that I visited were mostly not available, so The versatility of concept mapping makes it easily adaptable to a large number of situations in or out of the classroom, and it’s a nice way to make over a tried and true tool for students to use!

Works Cited

“Mind Maps: A Powerful Approach to Note Taking.” MindTools. 2007. Buzan Organization. 2 October.

2007. < http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_01.htm>.

“Graphic Organizers”. T/TAC. Spring 1997. The College of Whitman and Mary. 2 October.

2007. < http://www.wm.edu/ttac/articles/learning/graphic.html >.

Blogs in Education

The Five Issues:
1) The results are somewhat similar. The first site listed by all three search engines was the same. However, when I chose a different site on yahoo and msn than that one that I left on Google, they were different. The site on Google, titled “EdBlogger Praxis” (Delgado, 2007) is one that is basically a gateway to other educational blogs. It's full of links to blogs that the author finds interesting, podcasters, and blogs that might be helpful or informative for educators. The site brought up by yahoo was actually an article titled “Educational Blogging” (Downes, 2004) instead of an actual blog, but it was very informative and talked about the use of blogging in schools, specifically in one particular elementary school. The site brought up by msn is a list of educational technology blogs (Schrock, 2004). I clicked on one, and it belongs to a teacher that uses it to talk about what her students are doing these days (Blake, 2004). They were similar in that they were all talking about educational blogs, but dissimilar in that only one of them was an actual educational blog by a teacher about her students.
2) Blogs are currently being used in a variety of really interesting and creative ways in the K-12 classrooms. The first that I clicked on, edublogs, is a blog hosting service, and has a few blogs of interest, such as the foreign language resources blog that lists assignments for students enrolled in a certain class, as well as a PE blog with articles that students from its school can read and respond to if they need to make up points for a day in which they were not there or could not participate in PE. Still another site has lots of links to different videos that the teacher obviously thinks the students should watch. I would watch one, but I have a dial-up connection, so perhaps I’ll keep that experience for some other time. Next, I went to the Meriwether Lewis Elementary School Classroom Notes page, where different teachers have the opportunity to post blogs on the school’s site. It’s probably pretty nice for the teachers to be able to blog without having to worry about constantly maintaining a website. Parents (or students, though I think the blog is largely directed at informing parents about their students’ education) can click on a teacher’s name to view just their posts, so as not to waste their time reading all about classes in which their student is not enrolled.
3) According to one website, “RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading” (Bricklin, 2005). The site goes on to say, “a Web browser for RSS content”, and it basically does a lot of the work for the person online by keeping track of and sorting through different websites for the person. I believe that we were shown an example of one in class a week or two ago. It presents the possibly relevant material to the user without forcing them to read through everything themselves. As a teacher, I think that using RSS readers and aggregators would really simplify my life. I would need to keep up on current events, especially those involving Spanish-speaking countries, and to be honest, I don’t know how much time I’ll have to spend pouring through the newspapers in search of relevant news, so this will help me to know what I want and need to without bogging me down with useless professional sports information or things like that.
4) I think that blogging will have a positive and negative aspect. On the one hand, it helps to get students engaged, to gain useful skills using technology that will be helpful to them later on in life, and encourages them to take more control over their own learning in many cases (this is all assuming students are the ones doing the blogging). On the other hand, students could very well lose the ability to write well on the spot simply because they get so used to blogging on the computer. As far as teachers blogging, I think it is a fabulous idea! It helps to keep parents in the loop about what you and your students are doing with your time and their taxpayer dollars, and it can help students keep on track because often times, teachers post the assignments online. That way, if a student forgets or loses an assignment, there’s no need to worry. We’ve all slipped up at one point and lost a paper, so this helps that predicament to not be a stressing point.
5) Two pros of using blogs and RSS readers is that they save paper and they allow teachers and students more freedom. With all of the assignment sheet printing that you’re not doing with a blog, it makes it easy to save paper. Additionally, having a blog gives a lot of control to the student because it puts them a little more in charge of their own learning. If the teacher is doing the blogging, the student would be in charge of checking the site, accessing links and material provided, and doing the assignments listed there. If the student is doing the blogging, they’re in charge of how the site looks, they have the option to receive feedback through comments that people leave, and they have something to show off. They have a blog. They made it themselves. Two cons of using blogs and RSS readers is that it takes away the practice that the student would get actually writing longhand, and, as far as RSS readers go, they take away the research skills that students should be required to develop. Students should be able to research without having the computer do all of the work. It helps them to know how to sort through things and choose what is a good option for them rather than just useless knowledge/trivia. Promoting the conservation of paper (and, thereby the conservation of forests/trees) is something that is good for both your students and your fellow teachers to see. Schools use a lot of paper, so I think it’d be really nice to focus on not using quite so much unnecessarily.


References


Blake, J (2004). The Junk EduBlog. Retrieved September 25, 2007, Web site:
http://theedublog.blogspot.com/
Bricklin, Daniel S. (2005, November 9). What is RSS?. Retrieved September 25, 2007, from Whatis?com Web site:http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci1088619,00.html

Delgado, Albert (2007, 2, 19). Retrieved September 25, 2007, from EdBlogger Praxis Web site: http://educational.blogs.com/

Downes, Stephen (2004, September/October). Educational Blogging. Retrieved September 25, 2007, from EDUCAUSE Review Web site: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp?bhcp=1

Schrock, Kathy (2004). Kathy Schrock's Educational Technology Blog Listing. Retrieved September 25, 2007, Web site: http://kathyschrock.net/edtechblogs.htm

Learning Styles Project

For this project for focusing on learning styles, I took the ‘Learning Styles Test 1’ test. I went to the site listed at the bottom of the assignment page (http://teachnology.com/currenttrends/learning_styles/), clicking on the ‘Abiator's Online Learning Styles Inventory’ link, and clicking on the ‘» Learning Styles Test 1’ link in the left-hand portion of the page. This particular test asks questions about how I as a learner best take in information. It asks things to determine whether I learn better by listening, by reading, by discussion, what my study habits look like, and what I do to understand new or difficult concepts.
According to the results of the test, I am primarily an Auditory Visual learner. I wasn’t sure what exactly that meant, so I clicked on the links provided for visual learners and for auditory learners. Both links gave lists of suggestions for learners of that type. One thing that both lists suggested was to look through a piece of reading before really reading it, just to skim over the pictures and the headlines and get a feel for what it’s going to be about. I think that that’s actually a really good suggestion for me that I’ve never thought about before now.
The problem with being an Auditory Visual learner is that some of the suggestions listed for those two groups of people conflict. The Auditory learners’ list says that I should “study with a friend so you can talk about the information and hear it, too”, whereas the Visual learners’ page tells me that “Most visual learners learn best alone” and that I should “Try to work in a quiet place”. It sounds like, no matter what I do, I’m distracting one part of me so that I won’t really be able to be in a good position for learning. Personally, I find that I work better alone, so perhaps I’m more of a visual learner than an auditory learner.
From taking this online test and reading the information provided about the results, I have definitely learned that people, like me, can have more than one learning styles, and that they don’t necessarily fit perfectly into one group. Not everyone who is a visual learner will be good at reading, and not all auditory learners will pick up playing music well or connecting with everything they hear. It is for this reason that I hope to offer a variety of different teaching methods in my classroom. It’s true that most likely not all of my students will be reached through their particular learning style all of the time, but at least I can take steps to make sure that everyone receives their specific instruction style some of the time. Examples of this diversity in teaching approaches could be starting out with an entry task in which each student writes in a journal, later moving on to working on groups to read children’s books in groups, and, if we’re working in a block period where there’s a lot of time, I’d have them work on coming up with a way to act it out for the rest of the class to watch. Perhaps we’d do it in a theme, such as melodramatic soap opera style, or country western or something where they can make it funny and not worry so much about peoples’ reactions.
With a plan like this, a teacher would be able to reach most, if not all, of the students at some point, and to make sure that their learning has meaning and will stay with them. The visual learners would be able to work alone during the entry task, could preview the children’s book with a quick flip through, and take notes on it as a summary, which could probably be used as some sort of rough draft for their skit later on, and all of which are suggestions for visual learners.
The Auditory learners would also be stimulated to learn because they’d be working in groups and most likely reading the book aloud because of that. They’d be giving an oral presentation, of sorts, and memorizing lines, which is the same as repeating important information several times to help them remember it. The kinesthetic & tactile learners would not miss out on the learning because a lesson like this caters to their style as well. According to the Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic & Tactile link on the assignment’s website, kinesthetic & tactile learners tend to be those that “gesture and use expressive movements” when talking, which they would do while acting out the scene. It would give them a hands-on experience, and hopefully help them to remember the material being covered.
Learning styles make making learning meaningful for students sometimes difficult, but providing a variety of teaching methods and student activities can, I believe, help to provide students with a well-formed idea of concepts and vocabulary that they learn about in Spanish language and culture classes. As a prospective future teacher, I think I’m finding more and more that I have a greater chance of getting my students to learn when I keep the schedule varied and include a wider spectrum of methods in my planning.

The beginning of the end

This is my first post for my technology in teaching class. They tell me that I need a post, so here it is. Yay for me :) I'm posting!