As I look back at my "Personal Theory of Learning" paper that I wrote at the start of September for this course I can see that some of my views have changed. I still agree that students learn by doing and that all people no matter what age will learn better by doing. Experience is still the best piece in learning and no matter what is being taught, one will retain more information if actively engaged in their learning. After almost completing this course I have learned of many resources and techniques to use with my students. My students are those students that need to learn by doing and having hands on activities and lecturing should be the least of my teachings. I have learned that using images in my lessons will trigger more knowledge to all of my students and start learning conversations. I have learned that technology is great, but only if the students are trained to use it and learn with it in the classroom.
Some immediate things that I have already started with my classroom is first with using more images for discussions. We spoke about decimals last week and I started class with four images: a jar full of coins, gas station prices, mile marker and a radio. I presented the images to my class and asked them to talk with their groups about what all these images had in common. We then talked as a whole class and saw how we use decimals every day even if we say them incorrectly like a radio station says, "point" for their station numbers and we talked about why they might do this. Another thing I would like to start doing in my class is to present my students with more interactive PowerPoints. I think that this would be perfect for my learners and that they will be fully engaged even if they are the not the one to go to the board every time, but they know they will get a chance to play with the board eventually.
Two long-term goals I am setting is like mentioned already, I want to create more interactive PowerPoints for my board. This will help students stay engaged and these are tools that I can save so I do not have to recreate new slides for the next year to come and will just have to tweak it when needed. This will make my life less stressful as I continue to grow personally with a family. I know that using interactive boards with my students and having them in control will make them be the better learner.
The second goal I have for my classroom is to create a VoiceThread with my students for each unit we do. For my lesson that I created for this course my students all created an illustration about what they thought was the most important section to know and based on neatness and correctness their illustration was selected to appear in our class VoiceThread, that was then shown right before they took their Unit 2 test as a quick mini review video. All of my students enjoyed creating their illustrations and look forward to creating one for Unit 3 and possibly getting picked for our next VoiceThread.
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