Blog #5

The use of Powerpoint in the average classroom has become extremely prevelant. This multi-media tool I feel has increased the learning capacity of students and the affectiveness of teachers to get information across to different learners. As a High School Special Education teacher I can see multi-media tools such as Powerpoint coming in extremely helpful with my students. I want to teach in a Mild-Moderate classroom so my students won't be as much physically handicapped as they will be mentally. My students will have to overcome such obstacles as ADD, ADHD and Autism. How PowerPoint can assist me in the classroom will be to keep these students focused on small condensed slides for a short amount of time and then onto a next one that may contain some sort of video link or sound clip. The constant change of slides and use of videos and graphs I feel will be able to keep the students short attention spans at grasp better than an average lecture or plan overhead.

After reviewing the Bloom article it refreshed my mind as to what I studied during my Under-Grad. I myself was a student that was able to get by pretty well when it came to the spelling tests as a young child when only memory was tested but my brother did not do as well. Later in school and life he became a much better student grade wise due to the other levels of the pyramid, application, analysis, etc. Bloom makes some great points in the article especially to keep students interested and maintain their attention.

Blog #4

I found this article to be easy to connect with from the students perspective. As I read it reminded me of a field trip to DeLuz Canyon from my elementary school years. Field trips are a great tool and break for both the students and the teacher to get out to the classroom and energize the class. We did the same kind of test but instead of water we focused mostly on soils. Anyway I am a more visual learner and teacher, so the mapping of how the water quality is affected would have helped me more than just bulleted notes. This mapping reminds me of the Inspiration program we are working on now and I feel that this is something I will be using as a teacher.

Blog #2

The tools of technology that I learned this week have already proven to be extremely useful. I am using my Yahoo! Briefcase a lot and would have loved to know of this while working on my undergrad. I often found myself on campus with approximately 2 hours with a cancelled class and wishing i could be working on an assignment due some time there after. The Yahoo! Briefcase would have enabled me to have access to these files anywhere. The Groups on Yahoo! also will prove to be extremely affective during my formative years as a teacher along with my credentialing process. To be able to tap into resources of willing teachers and grow with other young teachers as we help each other on the group message boards.

I agree with the article and feel that there are different ways that students learn but at the same time there are structured similarities between all. Although all students do not share the same preconceptions it is true that the ones they have shape they way they learn. With technology students can challenge these preconceptions and help them learn factual information. The art of thinking about thinking, metacogniton, is how psychologists have found students to be the most effective and efficient learners. It is a difficult and challenging task to get rid of preconceptions and also to develop the art of metacognition, but these are two steps that will help students to become well equiped learners.