Chapter 1
Question 3: 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 21stcentury 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? While it is true that there are almost innumerable tools available to teachers, I believe the teachers should focus less on "Silver Bullet" applications for the classroom and focus more on applications that allow students to create, communicate, and collaborate. These applications should be the foundation for teachers to use in the classroom and will be applicable to any curriculum. Applications that allow for presentations, videos, podcasts, etc. allow students to communicate the knowledge of whatever subject matter is being taught in the classroom. It is important to remember that unless the teacher is teaching a technology class the technology needs to be transparent to the end-user and the focus should be on the content itself. There are exceptions to this of course and instructors should be encouraged to find applications to help students gain a better understanding of specific topics. The vast majority of the time however students and teachers will use the core set of application to collaborate, create, and communicate. There are many resources that teachers can use to help find these core sets of apps. Podcasts, Facebook Groups, list-servs, and other places where educators meet are all great sources to find tools for use in the classroom. Here are a few that might be of use to teachers: https://www.apple.com/education/everyone-can-create/ https://medium.com/gosynth/communication-and-collaboration-podcasts-for-empowering-student-voice-e5e565712643 Christopher Columbus 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? The first thing that I would discuss with the students is Christopher's need to persuade someone to help pay for the trip across the ocean. Once the students understood that need, then I would let them begin brainstorming on how much to ask for. They would be allowed to work in groups, but each group member would have a role. This discovery process would be allowed for one day.On the next day each group will be allowed to present their plea to be funded and would have to justify the expenses. Each virtual ship would be equipped with the supplies that the group asked for if they were successful in their persuasion and received backing. Each day for the next 10 weeks, the weather app would be used to discuss how their trip would be impacted if they had departed from Spain and were headed to the New World. Supplies would be subtracted from the inventories of each ship on each day and each group member would be responsible for writing in their journal as if they were the Christopher Columbus. These are just a few ideas that I have about how I would teach this. I may be way off base, but I think that I would find this method interesting. "DID I do that?" 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. Step 1 of the DID model is to know your learner. This step really resonated with me as a teacher and education major. We were always taught to do this before class began. What I found rather ironic however is that step is rarely if ever given much attention outside of core education classes. I can't remember the last time I had a teacher gather information about me, my cognitive level, my interests, or even my education goals in a way that I felt impacted the class delivery method. I have filled out plenty of information about myself through introductions in discussion boards and in blogs. I don't know if that information has had any impact on the class as the syllabus, assignments, assessments, etc are already set and do not change. Maybe the real world simply doesn't work in a way that information about the learner is important. Step 2 of the DID model deals with stating the objective. Most of my classes have done this in the past, and I always felt as a teacher if you could state the objective up front it helped students stay focused on the task at hand. I typically follow the ABCD format for objectives. Objectives themselves can be either enabling objectives or terminal objectives. Enabling objectives are typically objectives that students master on their way to terminal objectives which are usually measure through summative assessments. Step 3 of the DID model deals with Identifying teaching and learning strategies. The teacher will use information from step 1 to help identify the correct strategies for teaching the objectives. This could change from year to year as each group of students could be drastically different and have different learning styles, experiences, or cultural backgrounds. Step 4 of the DID model deals with Identifying and Selecting Technologies. I feel like many of the courses that I have taken have not revisited this step often enough. Many times I am taking classes using applications or software that is no longer relevant in the real world. This is a daunting task for the teacher of technology classes however. They are often the only teacher to teach certain classes and have full work loads which leads little time to review and update technologies. Perhaps some of this work could be crowd-sourced by students to help keep the classes updated and modernized. Step 5 of the DID model covers assessing and revising. This can take place through both formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments have the ability to shape classes/units in midstream. Summative assessments typically take place at the end of classes and are able to shape future courses, but rarely have an impact on an ongoing course.
3 Comments
Merita Swan
6/17/2019 05:53:41 am
Hi Shane, I was checking out the links you posted and I think they are going to be very helpful with understanding some of the new applications at are available today! But I totally agree, teachers need to be aware of any type of application that will help a student learn to communicate, understand and apply the technology skills in today's world.
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Gina Pepperman
6/27/2019 01:29:51 pm
Shane are you sure you are not a Code.org expert too. Code.org is all about allowing students the ability to create, collaborate and communicate. They are trying to bring these skills back into the classroom because students are graduating and can not freely think. These skills are becoming lost to those graduating into the work force of today. So I am totally on board with any and all applications that can allow students to use these skills.
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Brandon Warden
6/27/2019 02:00:49 pm
Shane,
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AuthorShane Seal
Systems Engineer Apple, Inc. Blogroll |