Chapter 1: Technology, Teaching, and You
I found this question to be the most intriguing one for me because during my first year of teaching I was bombarded with more tools than I could fit into my toolbox. Everything was technology, technology, technology, and I remember thinking to myself: how will I ever find the time to implement any of these while I'm learning how to teach?
The way my district generally rolled out their various technology initiatives was by having a professional development. These were an hour and a half sessions where the presenter basically went over the info and expected us to take it out on the road immediately. Needless to say, this method rarely proved to be a fruitful one for me.
So heading into this next school year, I've been thinking of this particular question and I've come up with some ideas. firstly, I'm going to pick one type of technology to focus on. I'd rather be very good at one of them than be terrible at all of them. I want to be able to give my students the very best I can offer. In order to make sure that I'm informed about the options that I have available for me, I plan on devoting 2 hours to discovery a week; hopefully, this will give me the time to begin to familiarize myself with the technology I will be looking towards implementing in the month to come.
C2.Q1:
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 own learning or cognitive style? Describe how you think your own personal style might affect your teaching style. What lessons can you draw from this realization when you teach your diverse students?
In thinking about teaching this unit I'm going to take the easy route and focus on the grade level that I currently teach: 9th grade. In my one year of experience I've gathered that most of my students enjoy the both the behaviorist approach and the constructivist one. They were really into the idea of being called on and stimulated externally and the thrived on structured learning activities to support their learning. So I would immediately think of using movie clips to allow them to visually take in the story of not only Christoper Columbus, but other explorers as well. I would provide them with digital graphic organizers to take notes and formulate their opinions for later writing tasks, etc.
My personal style of learning is one of the cognitive perspective and I thrive on introverted ideas. This made it difficult for me to learn how to explain what I was hoping my students learned because I thrived on the inner world of concepts and ideas, while they were only used to the external. What I had to learn to do was create strategies for my students that allowed them to see how their external views related to the inner ones I was interested in pulling out of them. I used the behaviorist approach to assess their learning ability, which allowed me to show how learning should be more complex and more focused towards bigger ideas.
C3.Q2:
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.
The Dynamic Instructional Design model is defined as an instructional design model that includes these six phases: know the learners, articulate your objectives, establish the learning environment, identify teaching and learning strategies, identify and select support technologies, and evaluate and revise the design. It is used to simplify the Design Plan Act approach.
step one: Know your learner: To effectively teach, the learner's characteristics that impact learning must be identified. For example, if a student has an auditory learning style, continuously giving the student only literature to read will eventually, if not immediately, prove ineffective.
Step two: Describe the performance objective: one needs to clearly articulate what is expected of the students. The teacher needs to state clearly what is to be learned, the time limit for completion, how it will be completed and what will serve as evidence of that completion. Bloom's taxonomy provides the six levels of cognition toward which these performance objectives should be targeted.
Step three: Identify teaching and learning strategies: This is where you will identify the strategies that will be utilized by you to ensure that the students achieve the performance objectives. The teaching strategies should address specifically what you as the teacher are going to do. The Learning Strategies should show what the students will need to do.
Step four: Select support technologies: Often absorbed into the strategies section, it can be helpful to think of this as located the technology that will be used to assist in the strategies. Instruction should drive this selection, and this is achieved by doing step three first in order to ensure that it (the technology) is necessary.
Step Five: Assess and Revise: This centers around the thought that all instruction can be improved, and in order to achieve that one must assess and revise. The assessment of the objectives must be in direct response to the lesson in order to be an accurate assessment of it. Summative feedback will be most useful in the revision process because it is the a product of the complete culmination of the unit. It is here that you will find the data needed to create remediation strategies, etc.