Education, Technology, and More

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Podcast

Podcast

I subscribed to Learning Matters through RSS reader. John Merrow, president and founder of this podcast, which discuss current events in education. Podcasts are short — generally 5 to 10 minutes each — and topics include Race to the Top, education in New Orleans, ways to evaluate teachers, ESL and more. It is non-profit media production company focused on education. Their mission is to encourage and enrich public dialogue about education, youth and families. Click here to check it out.

I love the idea of podcasting because you can listen to and/or watch the information instead of just reading it which gives more options to your students. I think we could use podcasting for making tutorials, which is something I definitely would like to do in my classes. We could use them for teaching, especially the one with video podcast because the learner is watching and listening to the information. Also podcast can be used to update on what’s new on any field that interest to you.

Audio Podcast

LISTEN: Education Thinker/Consultant Angela Maiers

In this edition of the Learning Matters podcast, Angela speaks to Rachael Wettenstein about evolving notions of education, how technology has changed the game, and what exactly a ’21st-century classroom’ should look like. Angela Maiers could probably best be defined as an education consultant, but she can speak to so much more.

Click here to listen to it.

Human Performance Improvement

Human Performance Improvement (HPI) is to achieve, through people, increasingly successful accomplishments that are valued by all organizational stakeholders, including those who perform their managers, their peers, the organization as a whole, shareholders, customers, regulatory agencies and even society itself (pag. 135). HPI stresses a rigorous analysis of requirements at the societal, organizational process and individual levels as appropriate to identify the causes for performance gaps, provide appropriate interventions to improve and sustain performance, and finally to evaluate the results against the requirements.

I think that the principals laid out by Gilbert on page 137 can be well applied to the educational system. These principals emphasize the need to account for the many environmental factors that affect how people (teachers, students) perform their work, achieve their valued results (learning), apply their work process (understanding) and exhibit their behaviors. What I like from these principals is that he states that even if you provide some factors and lack others, there will not be success in the workplace (in our classroom). It means that we need a combination of different factors (motivation, knowledge, understanding, hard work, rewards, accomplishments, performance) for success in classroom.

I also see that the ideas on Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model can help me as a teacher and my students at school, especially cell 1: environment information and cell 2: environment resources. These cells describe clearly most of what we teachers are supposed to do in order to accomplish our job.

Reference

Reiser, R. & Dempsey, J. (2012) Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology. Third edition. Pearson Education. Boston, MA

Friday, February 15, 2013

Embedding Media Activity

I will try to teach learners how to calculate and compare the units costs of various sizes and/or brands of a product using three theories of learning. I will use the behavioral learning theory, the constructivism, and the situated learning theory.

Behavioral Theory

According to Reiser and Dempsey the behavior is observed both before and after and intervention such as instruction has been implemented and the observed changes in performance are related to what occurred during the intervention (pag. 36). To teach learners how to calculate and compare the unit costs of sizes and manufacturer brands of a particular product, I would first ask students what they know about it in order to have that information before the intervention and compare it with what they know after the intervention. Then I would use their own example to further explain calculation and comparison. I would divide the class in small groups for they search on the web about the product. Groups can use Microsoft Excel or other application. After they are done with their research, they will share and explain their findings with the class.

Constructivism

In the constructivist approach, learning is more a matter of going from the inside out. The learner actively imposes organization and meaning on the surrounding environment and constructs knowledge in the process (Reiser and Dempsey, p.40). The learning environment should engage learners, provide collaboration and opportunity, setting learners’ own goals, and encourage reflection (pag 41). The leaner constructs new knowledge from what s/he knows. I would allow students to work with any product depending on their likes. It could be from a supermarket product to technology product because the more they know about it, the easier it will be for them to understand the mathematical processes (calculate and compare).

Situated Learning Theory

Reiser and Dempsey say that learning from a situated perspective occurs through the learner’s participation in the practices of a community, practices that are mutually constituted by the members of the community (pag.38). Since this approach is a social and cultural, I would ask students to identify any stores or salespersons in the community and compare the prices of a particular product. Then they will share their findings with the class using, prezi, power point, or a chart. The idea is that can understand calculation and comparison with what they see every day in the community.