4. How do we teach? Coherent concept in the mind of the instructor Concept broken down into parts Concept re-constructed in the mind of the student (Not always correct)
5. How do students learn? Sensory Inputs - Acoustic - Visual Perception Filter Working Memory (Limit 7-9 chunks) Storing Retrieving Long term memory Feedback loop for perception filter: previous knowledge preferences bias misconceptions
Insert sound of video killed the radio star. Do you feel like we are competing with technology to teach students through entertainment? With all the forms of educational entertainment, our kids are reaching a point where if we aren’t entertaining them, we lose them. In this era of No Child Left Behind, we can’t afford to lose them, so that means to some degree, we must entertain them.
But we don’t want to give up our long tradition of lecture. After all, it has worked for centuries… Do these students look familiar? To me they look like my better students, trying to pay attention or at least look like they are paying attention, but not very successful. Is it just me, or is that student reaching for his cell phone?
The constructivist model maintains that individuals create or construct their own new understandings or knowledge through the interaction of what they already know and believe and the ideas, events, and activities with which they come in contact (Cannella & Reiff, 1994; Richardson, 1997). Knowledge is acquired through involvement with content instead of imitation or repetition (Kroll & LaBoskey, 1996). But we try to teach students by telling them what they need to know, and hoping they put it together correctly.
Information Processing Model: So what do we do about it? For one, we need to find out what the students know, and we need to figure out what they are understanding, and what they are misunderstanding.
Good example of how to lose students attention, but I want to show the data of a study of middle school teacher’s use of technology. The study was done in 2006 by Berhane Teclehaimanot, Ph.D. at the University of Toledo.
One of the reasons teacher’s aren’t using technology and are showing movies or using overheads is that although they have internet access, only 65% have video projectors. That is changing. Surprisingly, teachers are being provided the training, but I don’t think that always means they are prepared to use it. We need to know how to do something quickly, easily, and effectively! Can someone tell me what is wrong with this PowerPoint Slide?
Problems: Often used as boring lecture notes, the templates can be either to loud or boring. Many students stop listening and just write down the words on the screen. Under these conditions, we may as well sit down and save our voice, because they don’t hear anything we say, and if they don’t ever go back and read their notes, they learn nothing!!! Solution: LET'S BAN LECTURE NOTES! Despite what you have seen, PowerPoint was not invented to take lecture notes and project them onto a screen.
PROBLEMS IN LEARNING: Attention could be focused on the psychological and physiological symptoms stemming from misunderstood words, lack of mental images, and fast pace learning. The symptoms include: irritability, headaches, weighed-down feeling, feeling of incompetence, and confusion, to name a few. INAPPROPRIATE EMOTIONS: You may need to alleviate apathy, fear, boredom, or anger. INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIORS: The way students do things (e.g., lab techniques) or the way they act (e.g. tardiness) may need modified. Use PowerPoint to bring about an emotional feeling with your images!!!
When you use PowerPoint, is it a Sleeping Pill or a Stimulant?
We don’t have the time to spend learning new technology and entertaining the kids we have too much content to cover, and we need to sleep sometime!
Go to Google and search for a PowerPoint, show how to modify it. Use slideshare! (two ways) Find presentations to show students, or upload your presentations for absent students. Lets all get a computer and try to find a PowerPoint about a topic we will be teaching during the first few weeks of school.
Go to preferences to put on filtering if you want to avoid bad images and languages. If you are letting students search you definitely need to make sure this filter is turned on. When you find the image you like, click on it, then click on “see full-size image”. Right click and “save image/picture as” and put it in an image file. If you just copy and paste, you may need it some time again in the future and will have to look for it. You never know when you will want to use something later.
Place images into Work Art text for added impact. And you can find GIF animated files to add as well.
Insert Word Art: right click, choose “Format Word Art” Choose fill effects , under color, Select the “picture” tab, and Select a picture. If you don’t already have a good background picture, you will need to go back to google images to find one before doing this.
Select your picture from a set of pictures, and click on Insert. I selected “rotate fill effect with shape, but you don’t have to… Then you click ok. And….
You have word art with a beautiful background! – of couse, I enlarged it so you could see the detail. I hope you get the idea.
And you can find GIF animated files to add as well. Add sound to make it even more interesting.
This time you just go to Google… and search like you did for powerpoints, with ppt, only you are searching for a gif (or animated) file, so you put in the word and add “gif”
Find a sound that you want…look for “free sound clips” and then download the sound…Insert…from file…find the sound file you just saved. What if you want to link to a webpage like I have been doing? Copy URL, Select image or words, Insert hyperlink, add URL at “Address”
How about getting fancy and trying to insert a video: you go to YouTube, when you aren’t at school and you search for something you want to watch. Here is a good example.
Let us pause and try to do this right now, if all went well….
The video at the beginning can be found on youtube. The problem is that we can’t see access youtube at school, so again you have to do some research
If you want to post your PowerPoint online so other teachers can use it, or so that absent students can use it…just sent up an account at slideshare.net You don’t need to set up an account to download, just for uploading.
If you have a website with Ava Schools, you can post a link to your slideshow so that others can view it. I am going to do that with today’s slideshow!