Module 6: Research-Based Theory on Learning and Instruction

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, technology helps me jump from topic to topic, where ever my curiosity leads me. Sometimes this is helpful, but other times I find that I am less focused than I need to be on a particular assignment. In a face-to-face environment, this issue is less pronounced, since the effect of being surrounded by others helps one stay on task. While I think that all real learning is a result of satisfied curiosity, I am very familiar with the ways that clicking on one link, then another, then another, can take me further and further from my initial inquiry. Of course, depending on the links, they can also be connecting me to more and more sources of information on my topic.

I think that the most critical aspect of teaching and learning is the ability to process and reteach what one has learned. In fact, I would say that until one can restate their new knowledge in their own words, explaining it to others, they have not truly acquired that knowledge, or learned it.

Module 5: Affective Learning Theory

Two years ago, I took a technology course which taught me how to create and use a classroom blog. My students absolutely loved our blog, and after a year of benefiting from it, I really wanted to share what I had learned about blogging with other teachers. I offered to lead a workshop and the assistant principals were enthusiastic about it, but the principal couldn’t find time to schedule it because of all the other professional development workshops already planned. I spoke to many individual teachers about creating a blog, but while they all admired my blog- or pretended to- none of them were interested in starting their own. Some of them thought it would be too hard for them, and some of them just didn’t like the idea of having any outside-of-school contact with the kids. They thought it would be too much work, and more than a few of them said they thought I was crazy to take on the extra work.

Keller’s ARCS model could be useful if I can ever get the other teachers to talk to me again after I so thoroughly annoyed them the first time. The first step is in getting their attention, which I could do by showing them examples of really interesting personal blogs that share the kind of information they would be interesting in sharing on a social network, like Facebook. If I show them my personal blog, containing pics from my vacation, pics of my new baby nephew, and so on, this would be probably be of interest to them.

In order to convince teachers of the relevance of blogging, I could show them how my students’ homework performance has improved since they were able to access the homework list on the blog each night, and more importantly, their parents could check the official homework list and not just what their child happened to write down in their agenda. Another contributing factor in homework improvement is that it is easy to add worksheets to the homework posts if they came from an online source, so that students who forget their homework folder can still print out or copy the worksheet questions.

To increase confidence, I could simply show they how easy it is to create a blog post, and offer them friendly, non-judgmental support as they create their own blogs. Since I would be talking to teachers whose classrooms are nearest to mine, it would be easy for me to give them all the help they need, not that they will need much after they get started.

Satisfaction will be easily achieved when teachers see how great their blogs look and how readily kids take to them. When they see the improvement in their own classes, they will be encouraged to further utilize blogs and learn how to do more with them.

References

Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning for instruction (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.