Reflectiong on "Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology"

In my personal theory of learning I stated that I have a cognitive-constructivist perspective. I believe that students need to be emotionally and actively involved in the lesson in order for it to be meaningful to them. After completing this course, I would not change my personal theory of learning - I think it fits with the nine instructional strategies discussed very well.

Some immediate adjustments that I would make is to integrate technology more. During each lesson, I plan some type of a synthesis activity and my plan is to use technology more with these activities. Our school has limited technology so I plan to spend the summer brainstorming creative ways to use what I have at my disposal. One technology that I plan to implement at the beginning of the year is a class blog for each of my classes. This blog will serve as a place for students to discuss questions and to review content learned in class. I plan to post a question each week for students to respond to and to respond to each other. The other technology tool that I would like to use is VoiceThread. With the limited technology that I have, this is something that we would be able to use easily and it would be a great way for students to present information and have other students comment on it.

One long-term goal that I have is to implement and use a blog for each class. I will maintain this throughout the year and have my students continue to use it after they are out of my class as a place to remain in contact and pose questions to other students. This is something that I will implement in September and work out the kinks throughout the year. Then by the following year, it should be seamless. The other long-term goal I have is to use more nonlinguistic representations in my lessons. This will be difficult to do because I teach middle school math, but I hope to visually describe the use of mathematical concepts to make them more understandable. Again, this is something that I plan to start doing next year and continue to implement more nonlinguistic representations every year. These will mostly be in the form of a PowerPoint.

Overall, I found this course very useful. The exposure to different technologies was extremely helpful and I loved seeing everyone else’s ideas. I wish you all the best 