Reflection: Final Blog Posting for ED6711 :(

Reflect on the “Personal Theory of Learning” you developed in Week 1. Summarize any modifications to your personal theory of learning you have made as a result of your learning in this course.

Modifications I would make…

- Focus more lessons to adapts to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
- Good Intrinsic Motivation for ALL Students
- Alter teaching methods to reach all students
- Change up redundant lessons frequently
- HAVE LOTS OF FUN and continue to make learning meaningful each and every day!

Personal Theory of Learning
All students learn in different ways. It is my job as a teacher to know my students, asses their learning strategies, and encourage them to always do their best work when it comes to learning and understanding the content. As a teacher it is top priority to build on what students already know and continue to educate them to the best of my ability. I need to have strategy when teaching lessons, I teach in one way that meets all of my students learning needs.
Learning is a long process that continues to build confidence in students; teachers can show students the most meaningful way in which they learn, to make them motivated to want to learn. If a teacher shows confidence in learning process, students will begin to gain intrinsic motivation when it comes to school and learning. As a teacher I find that my personal theory on student learning continues to change as I gain more knowledge in education.
A perspective I felt that complemented my theory was the behaviorist perspective. As Lever-Duffy and McDonald (2008) state “learning is essentially a passive process, that is, one learns as a response to the environment, not necessarily because of any specific mental activity” (pg. 15). As a teacher I need to understand that students need to be surrounded by positive influences to help them learn. Students who come into the classroom after they have had problems at home are usually unwilling to learn or take any knowledge in because there are more concerned about problems outside of school.
As a teacher I am also influenced by Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. According to Lever-Duffy and McDonald (2008) on multiple intelligences it is stated that “every individual possesses some degree of each of the intelligences Gardner details but one or more of the intelligences dominates” (pg. 24). With Gardner’s multiple intelligences a teacher is able to touch on most intelligences while teaching a new lesson so students will begin to learn through a new process. Lever-Duffy and McDonald (2008) also state that “if one adopts the multiple-intelligences approach, then learning will be affected by the dominance of one or more of the intelligences in each individual student” (pg. 25).




Describe any immediate adjustments you will make to your instructional practice regarding technology integration as a result of your learning in this course. Identify two technology tools you would like to use with your students and how the tools will support or enhance your students’ learning.

- I am using VOICETHREAD (www.voicethread.com) to establish some social learning and allow students to be free to use opinions on certain subjects
- Weekly Blogs in my classroom through my class website
- Virtual Fieldtrips that correlate with our lessons in Social Studies to deepen my students understanding of certain topics. I plan to use a virtual field trip as an introduction or recap of each unit.
- I also plan to incorporate concept mapping with each unit for students to have a visual aid.

List two long-term goal changes you would like to make to your instructional practice regarding technology integration and outline a strategy for achieving them.

- I plan to use technology everyday in my classroom. I want to present students with new topics and have interactive activities on the computer. I will present all information through PowerPoint so students see it visually and I can apply pictures, sounds or definitions with each topic.
- I plan to have technology goals for my students in the computer lab each week and have them printed out for them to see. So many times we go into the computer lab and just play around and have no goals, I want my students to accomplish something each day in the computer lab 

Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

Social Learning comes in so many forms. The ideas of social learning are simple: Students and people learn with and from others. What kind of education would it be if we were unable to learn from others and not help guide each other through the education experience? I think about classrooms where students remain in there desk all day and struggle in uncontrolled situations because they are unable to understand how to work in collaborative groups due to the fact that they are not presented with social learning experiences. I struggle not to have social learning practices in my class because I understand that working together as a class will only benefit my students in the long run and help them to more thoroughly understand the information being presented to me. As a teacher I enjoy siting back during social learning experiences and watching my students achieve that "aha" moment when they achieve something from a peer.

Collaborative learning can be used to guide social learning theory by assisting students in constructing their own meanings of the World around them. By watching other human activity and listening to other peers students are able to construct there own meanings about a topic if they choose to be open minded.

Not one person can tell a teacher what the best learning practice is for students. I believe it depends on the student themselves. It is a teachers job to provide many different learning strategies for students to develop new and meaningful information. What may be meaningful to one student may not be meaningful to another. Using the strategies that are presented this week will allow our students to become part of the 21st century. They will be equip with tools that will make them successful in the years to come. As stated by Marzano "Cooperative learning is not so much learning to cooperate as it is cooperating to learn."

I struggle with technology day in and day out in my classroom. As I have stated before so many parents are afraid of the unknown (technology) and in turn veer away from the subject when it comes to there students and school technology. I struggle because in the small town in which I teach about 1/3 of my students have high speed Internet at there home and about 1/2 have working computers. For cooperative social learning to take place I would have my students great GMail accounts so they would be able to use the beneficial tools Google has to offer. I would have them upload assignments to google docs, I could scan in activities and have them complete them at home or online, I could use the calendar feature for assignments, plan book and tests (this would also help when students are absent) and so many more features. Our school district is so tight on our paper budget this would cut it down more than half. I look forward to the social learning experiences I have through my masters class and I look forward to helping my students appreciate social learning experiences and meaningful technology practices.