Choose one question to answer. Responses due by 12 noon on November 3.
Question 1: Given Mayer's explanation of different kinds of active learning, give an example of a "hands-on" activity that likely would not lead to meaningful learning. Then, explain how your example activity could be transformed to support meaningful learning.
Question 2: After watching the video clip (from the Roblyer textbook DVD): "Technology Across the Curriculum: Smartboards for Students Who are Hearing Impaired," explain whether you think this video clip shows a good example of active learning that could lead to meaningful understanding. Use information from prior readings to support your argument.
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16 comments:
Question 1:
An example of a "hands-on" activity that would not lead to meaningful learning would be by giving the children playdough, and letting them do whatever they want with it. This activity does help foster creativity in a child, but it is not leading them to meaningful learning. They are only learning how to make balls or little worms out of playdough. One way in which you could enhance the activity so it fosters meaningful learning, would ba having them make letters of the alphabet. If the children in my class were in kindergarten, this would be helping them with their letters. It would also make them think about each letter and how it looks. They would have to retrive information from the back of their brain, and remember how the letter is shaped.
Question 1:
The process not the product. Often we worry about the product but in fact the real learning comes with the process. If a child has been given an informational video where the student sits and watches while the video plays and then is asked to answer a bunch of questions at the end this does not give the learner any opportunity to think for him or herself. Therefore foregoing the learning process. Where as if the teacher were to stop the movie and ask questions such as: what do you think will happen next? Or how does this scenario make this character feel? And what would you do in the same situation? This gives the students opportunities to use problem solving skills.
Question #1:
I think alot of times teachers use word searches to just fill time. The kids are interacting and actively searching for words but often there is no meaningful learning going on. One way to make this activity more meaninful is by using specific vocabulary words or spelling words. This will actually help the students learn their words. When they are searching for words that they are learning, they think about how to spell it and to recognize words that they know the meaning of. This is one way to make word searches lead to more meaningful learning.
Question 2*
The classroom activities in this clip are all examples of active learning, but they are not very effective for leading to meaningful understanding. For example, one teacher had her students read one line of a poem and then find the picture of what was talked about in that line. All this does is tell the teacher whether or not the student can find a picture. The activity was not developmentally or age appropriate and does not show student learning. Reading a five-word sentence is something that students learn in first grade, even when the students are hearing impaired. This activity did not help the students generate new knowledge, does not transfer to other situations, and is not retained for long periods of time.
Another teacher was having one student write his full name, but it seemed like she had not given her class enough instruction prior to the activity because the student did not know that his first name goes at the beginning of his name. She also did not allow him to fix it so that he could see what it should look like. Both of these problems will make it much more difficult for the students to learn, which make meaningful understanding nearly impossible.
* I will admit that a good portion of my argument is based on my knowledge and experience working with students with disabilities, not just the information from this class.
Question #2
I think that this video was a great example of active meaningful learning. I enjoyed watching this movie to see the use of smart boards in classes for children who are hearing impaired. I think that the smart boards were a great way to use technology, because as a teacher you can involve your whole class at the same time. I think that it is a great way to involve the whole class by having them come up to the board, and explore learning through action. I think this helps support meaningful learning by having the children explore subjects, and do activities as a class to practice subjects. I also thought that Ms. Cook supported meaningful learning because what she was teaching was authentic, and was something the children could relate to in their daily lives. Being able to identify the emotions that people make is very important in the lives of hearing impaired students. She had them match emotions to the correct face on the screen, and then as a class they created a face with an emotion the class chose. This promotes deep learning because they use their creativity to make a face by not only recognizing a face but actually being able to recognize the features it makes to create an emotion on a face. I think this activity is good because they can see as a class what the correct information is, and the teacher can involve all the students.
There were some instances on the video, that were only for recognition and recall, and did not present a new way to look at information or deep learning. Also one of the teachers did not correct a student when he did something wrong. Overall I still felt like using smart boards would be a fun, new way of teaching that offers variety to accommodate for the different learning styles in a classroom by having visual, auditory, and tactile styles all in one lesson.
Question 1:
I remember one assignment in elementary school where we created our own alien from a planet of our choice. I remember liking the assignment, but it did not teach me anything. Instead of having our students create their own things, like aliens even though we know there are none in this solar system, we could have our students design a model of how to visit the planet of their choice, or create an environment where the microbes that might live on those planets would be. We could use the science we know, and have them create models of how that would work. This would still have the students use creative processes, as well as learn more about what is in the core. Changing the assignment like this will help solidify information and help fit what we are learning into the child's schema.
keQuestion 1:
One example of a hands on activity that wouldn't lead to meaningful learning, would be the children just playing the playdough, and no purpose behind it. Children need direction, creativity is wonderful, but they need to be directed as to how they should use it. The children should be assigned to create certain things, for example if you were talking about different eco systems, you could name one of them, and have the children mold an animal from that system. Hands on is a great thing, but use it in a way that supports what they are learning. Have them create something dealing with a subject they are presently learning about.
QUESTION 2:
Smart boards are a great resource to have within classrooms, regardless of level or student ability. Although I did not necessarily see a way for smart boards to directly impact learning for students with hearing disabilities in the video examples (as far as aiding their disability), I feel that smart boards are beneficial for all students. Smart boards allow the students and teachers to actively participate in collaborative learning activities while using computer programs together in one central location (the board) rather than requiring a separate computer for each student, and allowing everyone to focus together on the lesson.
The first example of a lesson using a smart board did not represent a developmentally appropriate activity. Although the students had a disability, their disability was the inability to hear, not mental problems (as far as was described). These students were discussing emotions, which is a subject often discussed and learned during preschool ages and should be known thoroughly by middle school, which was the age of the students in this example. The second example was much more developmentally appropriate for the elementary age group. The teacher was challenging and communicating with all of her students, as well as allowing them to come to the board and correct grammatical errors and sentence structure on the board using Microsoft word with the smart board. After being presented with the process and application over the smart board, I would be confident that these children would then be able to open the application on a computer by themselves and recreate the learning that had just occurred during the lesson.
Question 1:
Math worksheets are often used in classrooms, just like cbrizle states about word searches, to fill time. More often than not a teacher can take one of the problems that are more challenging and have the studentss get into groups and figure out how to solve the problem and why it works. I did this in one of my math classes and I learned so much about the process of math. I began to understand how math works my thinking about it and why it works. This would get rid of the need for worksheet and would encourage teamwork.
An example of an activity that would not lead to meaningful learning is having kids color pre-made pictures that relates to a subject that they just learned about. One way to make this into meaningful learning would be instead of them coloring pre-made pictures. Have the kids draw their own pictures from what they learned about the subject and then colored those in. For example if the students learned about different ecosystems. They could make a picture of their ecosystem and include what plants, animals and anything else that would be in their ecosystem.
Question #1:
I find that as I watch teachers and what they give to subs to teach during their absences is a whole lot of basically busy work. The children don't have to remember anything from them they just have to read a paragraph and reguritate the answers to a few questions. The way that I would make this a more meningful learning experience is by maybe only using that during a lesson on the culture. I could use it as a sub page when my students are learning about that culture and maybe add a few questions that would require them to take what they already know or predict to answer them.
Question1: An example of a "hands-on" activity would be filling in questions on a video presentation, if there were no further need for the information, this would result in no meaningful learning. If the same questions were asked, and then the teacher asked the student to reconstruct what they learned, this would be a more meaningful learning experience. If the teacher said to the class, remember the steps in this video presentation, because you will do this exact thing for your job and get paid according to what you do, this type of learning would be very meaningful.
One example might be letting the students play Yahtzee rolling dice, after teaching them about probability with numbers. Perhaps it would be more meaningful if they did experiments by logging the results of some dice rolls three different times, doing more results each time. And then they can average and compare to see if the experiments reflect the probability outcomes more accurately when they rolled more times.
Question #1
An example of a "hands- on" activity that likely would not lead to meaningful learning is having students do a hands on activity by themselves of playing a game that can be played by more than one person. My example activity could be transformed to support meaningful learning by haveing student play the game together.
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