Course Reflection

I feel that since I contemplated becoming a teacher I have always been drawn towards the constructionist way of thinking, even before I knew that was what it was called. As a student I loved building things and figuring out how the academic puzzles went together. As a teacher, I so enjoy the expressions on my students faces when they are creating artifacts and figure something out. I feel that too often in today’s society, teachers have a misguided theory of instruction, and view children as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. In fact, students bring a vast array of previous knowledge, experiences, and worldviews to the classroom setting. I believe that learning activities and experiences should therefore be guided by the constructionist approach, which incorporates and builds upon students’ insights and understandings via inquiry based learning and active exploration. Instruction should be engaging and ought to stimulate a variety of senses, including visual, tactile, and auditory, and is as such in my classroom.

To enhance that engaging instruction, I would love to create more webquests. I want to speak to my grade level about their idea for the exciting technology and work together to create at least one more for our school or grade level. Another short term goal is to become even more student-centered. I know that I have the intention of doing so, and can sometimes “hog” the SmartBoard to demonstrate skills such as notetaking. If I use the track changes feature in Word (Pitler, Hubbel, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007, p.122) I could more clearly show my students exactly what I mean. I have used the track changes features countless times on my own, but have never thought to use it as a modeling tool for my class. If my class can see how I ignore certain sentences, and shorten others I think that visual aide will be beneficial. After I model a paragraph or two I would use Word to type up my notes in “student speak” so that they can see what that end result would look like. I believe I would use this tool first to model, and then put up a new paragraph for my students to work on in pairs, for another type of practice.

As a more long-term goal I would like to focus on reinforcing effort. By using self-evaluative rubrics and an effort achievement spreadsheet (Pitler, Hubbel, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007, p.159)I could physically show my students that effort DOES matter! By having my students assess their effort and then see the correlation between their effort and their grades, they would (hopefully) be more motivated to try harder in school. I would start out the year with simple charts with something as quick as multiplication timed tests. The students who studied would see they did better. As the year went on I would have my students work on charts for unit tests and quizzes to show the large impact studying/practicing can have on success.

My last technological goal would be to integrate concept maps and advanced organizers into my classroom. “Advance organizers help students focus their learning ((Pitler, Hubbel, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007, p.73).” Most students have used graphic organizers such as webs either on paper or digitally before, but to provide some of the information in the “bubbles” beforehand helps to focus the student in knowing what to take notes on. When my class does their annual research report on global warming, a site such as Spinscape would help them to organize their notes and even link to the sites where they found information. There would be no more (or at least less) “I don’t know where I found that info” or “Sure, those are my own words.” By typing up their notes and physically moving around the nodes, students would see how to best organize their materials into a streamlined research report. It would also be easier for teachers to check the sources to ensure facts were being written. This is something else I would like to discuss with my grade level, the computer teacher, and our librarian as we all work together to plan the research projects each year.

Teamwork is essential in many of my goals. I need to teach my colleagues what I have learned and then collaborate with them on how we should best utilize our new knowledge. Just as I want to share my new ideas with my personal classes, I also want to enlighten my peers so that they are able to enhance their teaching styles as well. With all of these goals in place and the skills I learned from this course I believe that we will all be able to more successfully integrate technology in a more meaningful and student-centered way.

References

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom

instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.