I have been a student and an instructor in both online and face-to-face learning environments. I believe both types of learning have the place and their value in the educational community. As how we learn evolves, the new technology will become increasingly important. When calculators and word processors took to schools, schools accepted the convenience they provided their students. As the technology provided more, for the most part, the education community accepted it. Now we learn at a whole different level because of technology. Sometimes I look at my struggling math students and I am not sure some of changes are good.
Change is inevitable. Learners memorize less and are able to dig deeper into the concepts or idea. This allows students to discover what is important in that concept or idea. Allowing a student to discover their learning is, at times, very difficult for students to do. My high school students think the teachers should spoon-feed them the information they need for their next test. True learning has no applications. When a teacher stands back and says why or explain, the student is often times lost. They only learned what was given to them and didn’t make the connection to anything else. However, my online students are required to read the text and work the examples. They need to figure out a lot of the information on their own. I am there to facilitate the learning and answer their questions. I guide the discussion to make sure the students cover the concepts required. The students make the connections to prior knowledge and to their lives. Making the student do the work to learn has a great deal of advantages.
Aimee
ReplyDelete1. Change is going to happen no matter if the student or educator is ready for it. Do you consider yourself forward thinking and seek out new technology for the classroom environment or wait to someone brings you the idea?
2. The days of spoon feeding should be over but with formal testing, educators are scared to try something new because they do not want to get off task as they are preparing for 15, 30, and 90 day assessments.
How right you are that the student should take charge of his or her learning. The teacher can be a wonderful facilitator and offer guidance to the student as they find their way. As Sandra said in her comment, the days of spoon feeding should be over. Instead educators are struggling to fulfill the facilitator role given the rigid schedule of state assessment. What a quandary we find ourselves in when the legislators and running the classrooms instead of the educators.
ReplyDeleteSandra,
ReplyDeleteI do feel I am an forward thinker seeking new technology. I am always seeking new ideas to use in my classroom.
Aimee
I posted on Kristen's blog
ReplyDeletehttp://ktemplesedu7105.blogspot.com/2011/08/module-6-blog-post.html
and Debbie
http://moduleresponses.blogspot.com/
Hi Aimee,
ReplyDeleteI like your thoguhts concerning change. I went to Honduras to teach fora couple of years in 2006 and they only had a chalkboard. I could barely remember how to teach that way. It really brought home to me how much things had changed for me. Now I do not think I could teach without technology.
Debbie Stripling
Hey Aimee, I can relate to your post. As a fellow math teacher, it is so very important to get the students to see how or why something works. I sometimes feel that they have been conditioned for years to be given their information rather than asked to search for it. I hope, like you, to encourage them to be more responsible for their own quest of knowledge. Thanks for your post!
ReplyDelete