Thanksgiving Assignment

When it comes to teaching, teachers act as designers because they use creativity and planning to create lesson plans. The creativity of a teacher can be seen when teachers have to create fun lessons that engage the class quickly and efficiently. Teachers are also like designers because they are able to be unique and come up with things specific to their students and their classrooms to help their students succeed the best like decorating the classroom and creating assignments.

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, art, and share your creations on the web. As people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Scratch can be used in the classroom during PowerPoint or video presentations.

Digital Storytelling is a program that puts primary focus on integrating technology in activities with more infuses on the activity. During digital storytelling, students tell a story digitally while working with other classmates. A digital story is a 2-to-4 minute digital video clip, most often told in first person narrative, recorded with your own voice, illustrated mostly with still images, and with an optional music track to add emotional tone. In my classroom I would use digital storytelling for many purposes, but primarily for teaching technology and teaching team work within the classroom.

Methods suggested in the textbook that can help students visualize mathematical concepts include the use of graphing calculators. Graphing calculators help students simply problems because of its capability to plot graphs, solve simultaneous equations, and perform numerous other tasks with variables. The graphing calculators can help students understand math while making it easy to focus on tougher concepts.

I think that it is very possible to learn from the television alone. The majority of shows on the television nowadays have how to viewings and channels like the cooking channel and do it yourself channel. I think that, of course, without trying the techniques on the shows you may not be successful, but part of learning is making mistakes. Not all things should be learned through television, but some things can be learned, even with little to no written instruction.

Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. M., & Crismond, D. (2008). Meaningful Learning With Technology. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Week 11

Gee’s principles of probing state that learning is a cycle of probing the world and reflecting in and on this action is what you do to form a hypothesis. The top three principles I feel would be most important for education would be the Semiotic Principle, Intertextual Principle, and the Discovery Principle. The Semiotic Principle states that learning is about coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems like images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts. The Semiotic Principle is a complex system and it is the core to the learning experience. Intertextual Principle states that the learner understands texts as a family, or genre, of related texts and understands the text in relation to others in the family, but only after sompletely understand the text. Understanding is what helps the learner make sense of such texts. Discovery Principle states that the learner is allowed ample opportunity to experiment and make discoveries.

If I was creating a simulation for my classroom I would support the activity of discovery, because I do feel like discovery is the most important when it comes to education. Students would be able to manipulate and plan which ever way they learn best to truly find out if the student is grasping the concept being taught. I could present an open ended question and allow the students to invidually come up with an answer. This would affect the classroom is many ways from expressing individuality to creativity.

In conclusion there are various ways that state that learning is a cycle. Knowing these principles and being able to reproduce them in the classroom is vital to the students knowledge. Overall the use of simulations in the classroom makes the learning cycle and experience interesting and unique not only to the students, but to the teacher as well.

References:

Jonassen, D. Howland, J. Marra, R. M. Crismond, D. (2008). Meaningful Learning With Technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Merrill Prentice Hill.