This week to continue our research into sensemaking we read Clark chapters 3-6 and Baggio chapters 7-9. The information that Baggio shared was very straight forward and clear and made a lot of sense to me. In essence as an educator it is important to be familiar with your learner & to know their goals – when we are teaching often I think that this is half the battle. In some ways it is important to know what is going on in a student’s life, where they are headed so you can tailor lessons to meet their needs. When teaching a lesson, objectives should be clear and visuals should be there to support content. Visuals are extremely important, but what is key is that they should attract attention to the content rather than distract from it. I thought it was interesting that they said that visuals should be moved to the opposite side of the page every 3-5 slides just to make students’ brains wake up. Students take in a whole slide as one image so it is important to not put too much information onto it. Levity, brevity and repetition are key in all presentations – repetition will make things stick in the short term memory.
The second reading was Clark which was all together much more complex. The chapters included how to teach procedures, concepts, facts and processes. I found it hard to define the differences between all of these. Essentially when teaching procedures, it is important that students actually practice carrying out these procedures while they are being demonstrated to them. Clark points out that it is pointless for the students to learn just the steps, or be tested on the steps, the action of doing the procedure is the most important. His next chapter was about teaching concepts which he defines as both concrete and abstract. Concrete concepts and things that you can draw, whereas abstract concepts are much less tangible. He suggests that the real reason for teaching concepts in workforce learning is to help employees identify the tools or technical terms they will be using in their everyday jobs. He discusses the importance of giving common and less common examples when teaching concepts. Facts he suggests need different instructional techniques as they can only be processed at the remember level and are stored individually as they are unique. He says that educators should incorporate factual knowledge needed into the overall lesson task objective and that using games can make rote learning more interesting. His final chapter discusses teaching processes, which are descriptive and tell people how something works. For employees who work as part of an organizational system, understanding how things work can certainly help them can more insight into their own job tasks and empower them. How can I use this wealth of knowledge to help me to build a resource for fellow educators for my capstone project? I am still working on defining my exact driving question. Last semester I researched Quizlet and its effects on student learning, but I feel that I would really like to broaden my horizons a little and see how music or other language applications such as Quizziz or Kahoot can help students acquire language more readily. When I have completed my research I will probably be using Adobe Spark to make some kind of a screencast with visuals to present this project. From reading Baggio, it is most clear that visuals should support the content, but not distract from it, and that there should be very little text on the slides presented, as people find it difficult to take in too much information written onto slides. Information should also be presented in a variety of ways to incorporate Dervin's philosophy of each person's unique ability to interpret things differently from each other. Each slide on the presentation could include a separate language application and how it can be used to help with language acquisition. What would be most important I feel would be a link to a demonstration of each one so that my colleagues could see how it actually worked. They could then log onto a separate device and join the application/game that I made so they could be an active participant. In that way, they would become much more familiar with the process of how it could be used with students and be in a better position to use this application themselves in the classroom. In the same way, another idea would be to introduce my colleagues to using music in the foreign language classroom to aid language mastery. I could have a link to an actual song with activities to accompany it, so that they could essentially try out these activities as they were presented to them. I might incorporate a song with a video link and they would have to listen to and fill in the missing words. They may then have to find the meanings of the English words I gave them in the song. At the end I could ask them how or if it had helped them learn any new vocabulary words. ( I would get the French teachers to listen to the Spanish music and vice versa). It would be interesting to see what they had to say!
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AuthorI am a French & Spanish teacher at Justin-Siena High School wanting to get new ideas to motivate my students. Archives
May 2019
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