As a teacher, it is important that we are teaching students to be successful in life. I hope students not only retain these lessons that I teach in their long-term memory, but that they can easily retrieve them when needed.
As educators we really should do more than just hope. We should teach the material in such a manner that students have a better chance of recalling this info. Cognitive Learning Theory says images are powerful tools, but more importantly elaboration, or making as many connections as possible to the material enhances long term memory retrieval.
The instructional strategies cues, questions, and advanced organizers do just that. Spreadsheet software can be used as a tool for my math students to organize and easily calculate values in a way they do not get lost in the arithmetic and loose the big picture. This data can then be modeled visually making another connection. Organization and Brainstorming software can be used when I am pre-planning out lessons. I have considered having students maintain a wikki site that they entered their own notes. This software could definitely help them and other readers organize it better. To truly understand teach it. Multimedia tools are just an expansion of the above software.
They all offer more connections to the material than a traditional lesson with no technology would. This can only help our students.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Chip,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that we are not only here to teach our students the content, but also to teach them to be successful in life. By teaching them how to take notes and read their textbooks, we can help them to become successful in school (not just our own classes). Also, by using strategies in our lessons to help students make connections, we can help students to truly learn the content that we are teaching them rather than just memeorizing it for the test.
Sally Moore
Have you used spreadsheet software with your students? One idea I had next year was to start my school year out with a homework challenge. I was going to have my students keep track of their classes progress of keeping data on homework completion. I was going to base the challenge on the percent of homework that was done daily. I figured this was one way to get all students involved in completing homework and make it an interesting challenge by using a spreadsheet.
ReplyDeleteCaryn Letts
I like your idea of using spreadsheets to organize their math and calculate values. I think that many students struggle with math because they do not always understand the flow of it, especially when it starts to get more complex.
ReplyDeleteIn my accounting classes, we end up doing rather complex equations. Although the math is always simple (add, subtract, multiply, or divide), the equations can get pretty long. An example would be calculating the final interest on a note payable. If I had the students divide this out into columns in Excel, they would probably see it a little better than trying to figure out how to calculate it. I really wish now I would've seen this idea sooner, since we are done with that chapter already.
I've also tried the wiki idea of note taking. To be honest, I really need to work that. If you come up with a way that works, I'd love to hear it. My idea was to have a selected reporter for the day do the notes on the wiki. We had it all organized by chapter and the idea seemed great on paper. The application of this idea pretty much failed however. Different not taking styles in combination with someone not doing their job caused it to collapse. It's something I will certainly try again in the future however.
Brett
Sorry i did not reply earlier. I worked hard this week to get done by the weekend because a lot was going on. Rachel and I just got our daughter to bed and were looking at patio furniture online (I know, crazy life we live here in Montana). I shot up realizing that I had not finished this weeks application.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate all the ideas. I think our worst enemy is time. I know all these things we thing about and do help our students. In a perfect world we could put this much thought and prep into every lesson.