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5 takeaways from the semester

1. Using the internet to teach your class can be time consuming but very effective

2. You have to use eye-popping visuals in order to grab students’ attentions.

3. It is especially important to make sure the site is appealing to both students and teachers when creating your online educational resources.

4. It’s important to give yourself room to make any changes if necessary in order for your work to be the very best.

5. Teaching students through the use of online resources is very easy, effective, and fun.

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Powerpoint Renovation

I renovated the PowerPoint for “Happy Grove College”, by using some consistency in the design, font, and overall layout of the document.  There were slanted text boxes, effects where there didn’t need to be any, too many photos, too few photos, it was an absolute mess.  Everything about this powerpoint gave me a headache.  Luckily, I changed all the fonts to comic sans and papyrus.  I also set the background to a consistent red.  Another thing I changed were the transitions.  They were often too flashy and inconsistent, those had to go.  Instead, I chose a single slide transition that was very satisfying to the eyes.  Speaking of which, I also got rid of many of the irrelevant and distracting photos, and replaced them with more meaningful and relevant photos for each slide.  

I believe the most important too in design is to be well organized and consistent.  Consistency and organization make a perfect balance for success.  The powerpoint as it was, was not consistent or organized, and no one wants to read it because it is so bad.  Now that it has been changed, it feels fresh and more readable.  When your work is consistent and organized, people’s attention will be more easily grabbed, and more people will listen to you or read your work.  You will be the talk of the town after cleaning up your act and making a better product.

It was a difficult task to undertake, but it was all worth it in the end.  The powerpoint now looks beautiful and organized.  In conclusion, an inconsistent and poorly organized powerpoint will not help anyone, and is unreadable.  A consistent and organized powerpoint makes for a good powerpoint which people will want to read.

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Another Blog:

I watched two videos, Differentiating Instruction Through Interactive Games, and Learning STEM Skills by Designing Video Games.  I saw a common theme through both of them: the use of interactive games to enhance learning and education.  

“Differentiating Instruction” starts with a teacher named Mr. Pronovost commenting, “Really trying to address giving every student what they need, and giving them that differentiated instruction is where the technology really comes in handy. Not only are they getting immediate feedback and they're able to move at their own pace, but then I'm also able to support the students who really need my support.”  Technology has really helped us foster an environment which makes learning easier and more accessible not just for the students, but for the teachers as well.  The video shows children playing a game called “Planet Turtle” to help reinforce math equations they had practiced prior.  Afterwards, they would move on to a program called “Dream Box” which is designed to help the students at their own pace, that is centered on individual students.  This kind of approach is what we need more of in schools across the nation.

In “Learning STEM” we follow a young boy named Rhys who designs games using a tool called “Gamestar Mechanic.” Which allows him to create platforming games.  He compares designing games, with playing baseball also, in that the feedback given is similar.

Both of these videos have a common theme, and that is using games as tools for learning.  In “Differentiating Instruction”, students played the games to help them reinforce maths skills.  In “Learning STEM”, the children learn new skills by designing their own games.  In both cases, children are learning new skills every day through technology.

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Reflective Blog No. 3

In the future, I imagine teaching a classroom filled with students whose generation now finds things like 4K Ultra HD obsolete.  Now it might be 8K or 16K or whatever.  Just imagine: I was probably the last of my generation to use VHS and music cassettes.  The interesting thing to ask ourselves is: what kinds of technology will they use now?  Virtual Reality is now becoming more and more popular, and more affordable, imagine if a student was sick, and instead of going to school, they just put on their headset and learned from watching the class right in the comfort of their bed.  These are the things we should be thinking about.  I imagine that perhaps they’ll soon be making those scouter things from Dragon Ball Z or something like that. 

Anyways, how to grab learner’s attention?  A good way would be to talk on their level, not beneath or above them, while still maintaining an authoritative teaching style.  There are easy ways to pay attention, focusing on things that interest you in whatever you’re doing can help you pay attention, for instance.  The hard part is shoveling through all the other tidbits that may not interest you, but something in your head tells you to push onward, while another thing in your head indulges in all the...other decisions.

As pointed out in the reading, there is a rider and an elephant.  The rider is your logical thoughts, the elephant is your subjective and emotional thoughts.  The best way to grab readers attention is to control both their rider and elephant by making them feel at home.  Use language that’s more familiar to them, connect their course material with the things they enjoy.  For example, say they are learning about the Vietnam War, and hypothetically, the favorite film this year is Forrest Gump.  You connect the scenes with Forrest in Vietnam with the curriculum, and you point out key lines from the film which will help students better understand the Vietnam War.  You must make sure that their rider is in control, and to do that, you have to tame the elephant, and indulge with it, without spoiling it.

I had excellent teachers who tamed the elephant in my mind, I had a government teacher in senior year who made the classroom so interesting, he told jokes, he explained the material to us in ways we understood, and overall helped us better understand US government and Civics without it being very uninteresting.  I had a mythology literature teacher in High School as well, who was a huge fan of Batman among other comic books.  He even showed us the entire Dark Knight trilogy in High School, because it was related to mythological tropes.  These two teachers are the ones who inspired me to become a teacher, so I could be like them, and make the classroom more interesting, like they do/did.

Paying attention in the classroom is a big deal for students, keeping student attention is another for teachers.  As aspiring teachers, we need to find good ways to keep people’s attention, so keep tugging that elephant’s trunk.

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Reflective Blog No. 2

Sorry this is so late, I know this has been a rough start, but I’ll be better about this.  Unfortunately, I have a lot of trouble with memory.  I used to have a very good memory, but something happened between my teenage years and my adult years.  No idea what that’s all about.  

Anyways, the things I do to help myself remember things is by “chunking” the information, as described in page 91 in the book. I also tend to retain the information that I find useful or fascinating, but if I’m paying attention to one thing, and I tend to forget other things I need to do for that day.

As for what I can do to help students in the classroom remember the vital information I present to them?  Well, I want to be a history teacher, so remembering important dates and events is a must.  The way I would go about this is repetition, but not so much that they get bored.  If there is a date assigned to an important event, it will help them put the information in their shelves of thought, and keep it tidy.  If I tell the students “This is an important date that you need to remember for the test/quiz/final etc.,” they will say to themselves, “Well, if the teacher tells me that this is important, than I should probably remember this, or write this stuff down.”  That is where chunking comes into play

It is very important to be mindful of our cognition when considering lesson plans, because you need to give information in a way for students to remember the information you are presenting to them.  Chunking the information bit by bit really helps students.  For example, say you are teaching students about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  How you should do this is emphasize the most important parts so that students can chunk the information.  Something like, “While in DALLAS, on 11/21/1963, JOHN F. KENNEDY was assassinated by LEE HARVEY OSWALD.  The capitalized words are the words that should be emphasized to help students understand the time, place, and people involved.

I find the role of technology in helping our memories is both a blessing and a curse.  A blessing in that, say, a mobile phone will help you remember what you need to buy when out shopping, or offer reminders on a digital calendar for important dates to remember.  A curse in that, we will rely on it so much that eventually we are dependent on our technology to remember important things.  We are seeing this pattern more and more lately.  Unfortunately, this may have affected me in that way, as I described in paragraph two.

These are my conclusions based on what I read in Chapter four.

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Reflective Blog Post #1

Chapter 2 of the book helped me understand the different types of learners that are out there, and how to motivate students in healthy, positive ways.  The book’s guidelines and overall outlook on the process of learning have helped me understand ideas better, and helped me explore new ideas I haven’t thought about.  This being my first blog post for this class, it’s a little nerve-wracking and perhaps I may have some difficulty at first, but I can ease into it.  My experience as a learner, I feel intrinsically motivated by the prospects of honing my abilities to be an effective teacher.  The book’s ideas of learning and learners are not at all hard to grasp for me, and I feel I will get a lot out of the book and be able to comprehend the ideas presented in this chapter.  I should take this time to imagine what my future learners will probably be like.

My learners will most likely be students who may not understand history (my subject), and probably have to take this class for a required course.  With this in mind, history may not be their forte.  Because of this, I have to find ways to motivate learners in ways that will help them achieve and become successful.  There was a show I watched on the Discovery Channel called “Mythbusters” and one of the quotes from the show is that “Failure is always an option.”  This outlook can be applied to learners, by helping them understand that it can be ok to not get everything right, and it can be ok to not do well on a quiz, as long as you learn the mistakes you made and apply yourself again, you can be a very successful learner.  This is the outlook I have on my own learning.

I found that there are different types of learners from the book.  I assume 80 percent of the people I will teach will be “This is a required course” learners, as laid out on page 29 of Design For How People Learn, by Julie Dirksen, the other 20 percent are all the other categories.  I also feel that most of my learners would be 70 percent extrinsically motivated learners, being mostly motivated by the fact that the courses I teach would be required by the school.  The other 30 percent fall into the intrinsically motivated category.

This chapter made me view the learning process with a much different attitude (a positive attitude for sure).  Helping learners by starting with basics and easing them into the more challenging parts of the lessons is a very good idea, as outlined in page 36.  This chapter also helped reinforce ideas I’ve had already about learning, and how to make it interesting for unmotivated learners.  One example is the part focusing on what learners like.  Knowing the newer generations of learners, most of them enjoy games such as Kahoot, which can prove useful to motivate extrinsic learners to learn intrinsically.

I have a feeling I’m really going to enjoy this class c: