Final Reflections

As this current course, Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction and Technology, comes to a close, I find myself looking back on how I describe my personal learning theory.  In the first assignment for this course, I described myself as a blending of Cognitive and Social Learning theories.  To an extent, that is still true.  I do believe that U.S. History is best taught through a Social learning style.  By students engaging in conversations and collaboration on historical topics they begin to understand the human aspect of history, which allows them to empathize with the history makers that they study which helps them to understand why events happened the way they did.  I still lean toward the Cognitive learning theory in that I do think the any teaching has a basis of information processing and learning experiences, because, as teachers we impart knowledge to our students and plan learning experiences for them to turn their learning into knowledge that they take with them throughout their lives.  How I have changed a little is that I need to add to my description Constructionism because I think that learning must be built up over a period of time and that students get more out of their learning when they are taking a more active role in how they learn.

With the reflections on my personal learning theory, I began to look at how I actively teach my class.  Being a 13 year veteran teacher, I've gotten very complacent in how I teach and after watching Dr. Orey's video, "Instructional Tool vs. Learning Tool" (Laureate, 2010) I came to realize that I've been using the technology in my class as a fancy form of Teacher centered learning.  This is an immediate change I am going to make this coming school year.  The video was a milestone in making me realize how I've moved away from how I taught in the past and may help to explain why my students are not achieving the learning goals put forth by my school and district.  I've been trying to figure out how to improve my standardized test scores for the last few years, and now I think I know what the problem is, I need to get out of the way.  I need to make my classroom more learner centered and be more an instructional facilitator.  The best way to do this is to use my Promethean Board in a more learner centered fashion.  Instead of just reading Power Point slides to them, I need to use the presentation in a way to get the students talking about the topics and have them come up and use the board instead of it just being me.  I've already started going in to my Power Points and pulling out a lot of the wording and using images to facilitate discussion as well as moving them to Active Inspire Flip Charts and adding interactive quizzes for the students to come up and show their learning.

Long term changes that I would like to make would be to use more virtual field trips.  In the past, we had a Distance Learning Lab where we would take students to in order to do Virtual Field Trips or Distance Learning Events.  Due to hardware and scheduling issues, it was not utilized to its full potential in my classroom.  We now have a DLL (Distance Learning Lab) cart that can be brought to the individual classroom and with my school going off block scheduling (90 minute classes with students being seen every other day) making scheduling easier, I can see how I can more effectively bring in Virtual Field Trips (VFT) and Distance Learning events (DLE)  to my students, and if my Campus Technology Manager and I can figure out how to do them with my Promethean Board and a web cam I may be able to do VFTs and DLE events without the cart, which would further allow me to bring the world to my students.

Another long term change that I want to make to my classes is the use of Voice Thread.  I can see how it would be a benefit to my classes.  I could use it to record lectures, discussions or lessons and post them on my school web site so that students can use them to keep up when they are absent or if they missed something during class that they need to complete their homework.  It would also be of value to my Limited English Proficient (LEP) students who have language barriers that impede their learning.  One of the goals set by my Principal for next year are to improve the standardized testing scores for the LEP students in Social Studies.  By using Voice Thread, they can listen to class discussions over and over again to help them pick up English which would help make them more successful in not just my classroom, but in others.  The only barrier that I can see to this is privacy issues.  I will have to check out how I can use Voice Thread and not not violate the student's privacy.

All in all, in this course I've gotten some wonderful ideas to integrate technology in to my lessons to help my students become more responsible in their learning. 

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2010).   Program #14:Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and                   Technology [DVD]  Instructional Tool vs. Learning Tool.  Baltimore, MD: Author.

Social Learning in Practice - 2

Please check out my voice stream interpretation of the results for 6th grade TAKS Reading and my comments on how this will effect my school next year.

http://voicethread.com/share/2095532/

Social Learning in Practice

This week was an exploration in social learning.  Which to most people would just simply be using collaborative learning techniques.  Most teachers think that just putting students into groups and giving them an assignment to do together is what collaborative learning is all about.  Yet, after reading the article on Cooperative Learning by Palmer, Peters, and Streetman (Palmer, 2003) I can see how it is very different.  I got a real sense of what I've been doing wrong when I tried it after following the Scenario that the authors presented to drive home the lesson.  The section about the benefits of Cooperative Learning really helped convince me to try it again, next school year. 
 
 Another technique presented in our readings came from Chapter 7 of text "Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works" was that of the simulation game.  I often have difficulty with getting students engaged in studying U.S. History, unless I find something that "edutains" them.  One game that my students are showing interest in is a game on the IPod Touch called "Oregon Trail".  It was interesting watching how fascinated they were with the game, and when they finished, they could describe hardships that early pioneers faced when traveling west.  It is something that I will definitely use in the future when I am covering Manifest Destiny and has encouraged me to check out the "Revolution" web simulation that was mentioned in the book (Pitler, 2007) as well as searching for other web based simulations to help my students learn.

The techniques presented in the readings all had social learning frameworks in that the students were all working together to create a new body of understanding and knowledge.  The learning was not just one person having an epiphany and "spreading the word", it was each student contributing to the whole and building a whole new level of learning or creating a new understanding that has influenced by their common experiences (Davis, 2008) as well as their individual differences (Kim, 2001).