Sunday, January 20, 2013

Strategies to Help Unique Students Learn!




 Hello to all who have come to visit Plugged into Education, it is week two of my EDUC 6115 Learning Theories class.  I will be sharing two reviews of brain based learning and their respective web sites. 

Have you ever thought about the dynamics of students who come to the classroom setting and are very articulate and can answer any question posed to them but they cannot put their thoughts on paper?  These students may have learning disabilities but they are above average in intelligence, they are twice exceptional learners.  They struggle in one area of learning but extremely sharp in other areas of education. 
The article I selected to highlight is from Orion School in Atlanta, Georgia.  This school teaches students who have a learning disability in one area but are gifted in other areas.  The article expounds upon how they teach their students using different modalities and explains the need for teachers to realize that a student with dysgraphia may have to be tested in another way because writing is hard for the student.  The use of graphic organizers and other aids like calculators, and books on CD’s are just a few other ideas that are shared here as a way to teach students with weaknesses in one area but strengths in other areas.

I have selected a lesson plan that will provide a way to categorize different learners by brain quadrants.  This article explains the four quadrants of the brain according to research done by Ned Herrmann.  Each quadrant does a different set of task.  The one common thread in the readings on how we learn i.e. cognitivism, behaviorism, constructivism, kinesthetic, visual, and other theories is that people do not use only one way to learn but that they learn in multiple ways.  This lesson plan is to help the teacher identify how they learn and then begin to use those ideas to begin to structure lessons that meet the needs of their learners.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

All About E Learning and Choices



Hi to all who want to become plugged into education!!!  I am currently a student at Walden University online working on a degree in Instructional Design and Technology.  As part of my voyage to IDT I will be sharing three web sites on education and technology.



I selected Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, http://www.educatorstechnology.com/



This site had a lot of useful information on how to use technology in the classroom through gaming and other methodologies.  The site shared with teachers useful ipad apps that teachers could get in order to enhance teaching. There are videos and YouTube suggestions.  Bloom’s Taxonomy is on here but not just the pyramid but the author includes different learning domains; cognitive domain, affective domain, and psycho-motor domain.  This site is a treasure trove of information, ideas and useful technology ideas that can be incorporated into teaching or taken into a school district as an in-service of ideas for other teachers who are not using technology.



I thought this web site was useful because I have a sixteen year old son who has informed me that when the teacher is teaching some of his classmates are sending text messages to one another and using Facebook.  I then began to think I would be really mad if I were up teaching and my students were enthralled in their technology devices, so my next thought became why not as a teacher tell the students to take out their smart phones and goggle a topic currently being taught and share that information.  First share it in groups of two or three and then do a class presentation on what they have learned.



The second blog I selected was one that was totally out of my range of experience but as I work on this degree I want to know what else is out there in the field if IDT, as in what skills will I need to take my teaching out of the traditional K-12 setting into other areas?  So I found this think outside of the box management blog.  I did some reading within the blog and found useful tips about how to do a presentation and what things will kill a presentation.  There were YouTube videos as well as ones that the reader could click on and then read the slides for themselves.  http://www.elsua.net/



The third blog that I found was most definitely a find.  It contained a lot of information on story boards in eLearning learning.  This site featured information about what an informational designer does, it suggested books to be read by beginning designers and basically contained more information than I could really explain.  http://www.elearninglearning.com/instructional-design/storyboards/



Well happy Blogging to all and to all a blogging good night!