Week 14

Week 14

Cool

To be honest the reason I was struck by the idea of advanced performance tracking was for two reasons. One my love of sports and weight lifting because having a suit that is able to help students/athletes accomplish the correct form is very important. Especially in weight lifting because all too often, when you walk into a high school weight room many are using the wrong form that could cause injury. The second reason that this hit me as cool is the fact that it reminds me of shooting Golem from the Lord of the Rings movies, where the suit the actor wore mapped and recorded his every movement and converted that movement to the screen.

On a traditional classroom educational level, the advanced performance tracking could help keep track of a students’ progress through a unit. Meaning that the program would not let the student move on to the next step of scaffolding until it was deemed necessary that they have learned all the information from the previous step. All too often the work tracking is thought of as evil in the educational world. (Even though that is exactly what standardized testing is accomplishing and the inclusion of every learning level in one classroom.) Advanced performance tracking could be used to make sure that students are not leaving the classroom with giant gaps in their knowledge of a particular subject. This would not be tracking to discriminate or label, but tracking that would help the teacher know exactly what each individual student needs to learn. With this information a teacher could divide the class and let the students who have a concrete concept of the information onto a more elaborate project, while spending their time filling the gaps of those who are not there yet. Both groups would be learning and working with the same information, but on different levels, allowing for the classroom to become more efficient.

Favorite hands on activity

To be perfectly honest, this is one of the few courses throughout my college career that have kept me both interested and learning. Most of the activities that we had to complete in the course were tools that I have used in the past or have seen used, but never knew they were this free. The greatest realization I will take away from this class is the endless possibilities that many of these free tools open up to be used by everyone in the classroom. Teaching in an economic struggling community and school system makes this information valuable to both me and my students. These tools will allow them to keep up with technological progress without putting pressure on the wallets of their guardians.

The greatest tool that I will take away from this class is the free websites that anyone can make under their Google account. The ability to load up my projects to a website that the students can navigate and access from anywhere there is an internet connection will make their lives, and mine, a great deal easier. No longer will they have to depend on a sheet of paper to tell them the requirements or will they have to ask me questions to find a starting point for their research. The website will allow me to communicate and be a guide of information, leaving the students to initiate their own learning and become their own teacher. One of the greatest items I try to teach my juniors is the act of self initiation and the technology I have been given in this class will allow me to cut free the ones that know how to learn on their own and focus on the ones that are not there yet. Ultimately letting me teach the students that need it and allowing me to be the guide for the students that can learn on their own.

Chapter 30

Chapter 30 Reflection

First Idea

The first idea that I can apply to my classroom from reading this chapter is working using more visuals with audio narration.  The catch for me on how this could actually be useful in my classroom stars with the Modality Principle. This principle states, “Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on screen text.” (Reiser and Dempsey pg. 317) From experience over the years I have learned to modify my PowerPoint’s to be limited on verbal information on screen, but also to have that information be a trigger for me to expand upon to help the class learn the information.  This year in fact, I have let the students write the information down on paper first and then only after they have finished (I have a timer, so they do not have all day) I will start talking.  While I am talking and explaining the information, I also try to use maps, pictures, and graphs that will help the students understand.

The second part of this idea of using visual with audio narration is that I picked up that’ “working memory has at least two separate subsystems for storage of data.” (Reiser and Dempsey pg. 318) As a teacher you can also, “overload the visual/pictorial channel” if the graphic that is put in place to explain the information is to complex. (Reiser and Dempsey pg. 318)  Over the past three years I have been working to take complex information and convey that information to the students into the simplest form possible, but still allow them to learn the overall picture.  This means that the 30.2 table on page 318 makes total a complete sense to me.  The six steps that are laid out are exactly what I want to do for a learner in a social studies class room.  In every other core subject matter the facts are pretty much set in stone and social studies is the only real place for a student to learn to take a stand or opinion on real life issues such as economics and politics.  Therefore if I can incorporate graphics and narration that are simple and straight to the point, there is a better chance that more students will find it easier to take a stance and stand up for their opinions and thoughts.

Second Idea

The second idea from the reading that I would like to incorporate more into my classroom and every, social studies classroom around the country, is the idea of minimizing unnecessary visuals and text. This idea plays off of the first idea and to me this section was summed up perfectly in the following: 

“Seductive details consisted of textual information inserted into instructional materials that were intended to arouse interest.  Seductive details in lessons are typically related to the general topic but are irrelevant to the main instructional goal.”(Reiser and Dempsey pg. 319)

What I am attacking in a social studies classroom though is not the seductive details of history or politics, but that of what the state and federal government tell us to teach our students.  Take the Civil War in 8^th grade history in Michigan for example.  The five benchmarks are so vague, that it is left up to the teacher to decide on what information is important to teach. An example of this is benchmark 5.2.2, where it states to make an argument to explain the reasons why the north won the Civil War by considering the critical events and battles in the war.   So, most teachers go by the textbook and focus a great deal on the Civil War in the east because it is the seductive version.  Problem is that the Civil War for the North was really won out in the West because it helps solve the blunders of the war out east.  Overall, at least in a social studies classroom, my teaching ability would greatly improve if both the state and I stopped with the vague seductive details.  Then as a teacher I could teach straight to the point and allow the students to make up their minds on the situation.

Document/Photo Editing Review

Google Documents Review

The greatest part of Google documents for me is the fact that you can access any of your documents from anywhere in the world, as long as you can log into your Google account.  That means that you do not have to carry around a flash drive that has everything for the classroom on it. It frees you to think about other items that may be useful in the classroom.  If you’re anything like me, my life is on my flash drive and at least once a month I find a way to stress myself out by misplacing it.  I have all my documents saved on the work computer, my personal computer, and the flash drive, so it is not a problem of backing up.  It is just a problem of losing convince.

I also liked the thinkfreeonline tool because it was basically an online flash drive for your documents.  I also like the fact that you could work in the Microsoft program itself.  The reason I would choose the Google documents over the thinkfreeonline is because of Microsoft.  I know and use Open Office all the time with my students because most do not have the Office program at home, so it is a necessity sometimes.  The main reason is that being a district with money problems, an Office program for the computer is way at the bottom of concerns. Google Documents allows the students to have access to the abilities of a Microsoft Office, but at none of the price.  There is another advantage to the Google Documents in that, as I said in the above paragraph, the students can access the information from anywhere on the web.  Meaning that there is no more excuses of leaving the document at home because they forgot their flash drive.

Foto Flexer

I will be honest that this was my second image editing program that I went to.  The first one that I went to was Sumo Paint and that was based squarely of the name itself.  To me Sumo seemed to be an online version of paint on my computer that I could access everywhere.  That did not seem like something I would really use in the classroom as much.  So I went to Foto Flexer and discovered all the cool imaging editing I could do to a great deal of my pictures.  The other reason that I liked the program is because it is already connected to photo bucket, which I found existed because of this class, and I could load in my pictures from Philadelphia and make them have an old school photo appeal.  Being a social studies teacher, this program would be helpful in the case of civil war reenactment photos.  I would tell the students that they are not real, but some of the reenactments take their hobby so seriously that with a tweak of editing online I could turn their battle in to an “old time” visual for my class.  To be honest this could probably be done in Sumo Paint, but once I saw how close it was to regular paint, I left the website and went to Foto Flexer.  It just seems to be more beneficial to a Social Studies secondary classroom.

One other upside to this editing program is that I can have students dress like the time periods we are talking about in class.  Then have pictures taken and converted to black and white.  This would allow the students to have a little fun with the era, but also gain a personal connection to the material that is being covered in the classroom.