At the beginning of our course, I was asked to look back on my history as a student and educator, and create my own personal learning theory. In that, I stated that as a student myself, I felt that reading, lecturing, and practice were methods that worked for me. Fortunately, school came easy to me. Of course there were some group projects that I had to do, but they seemed like a smaller part of what I did. Not enough to make a significant impression on my learning theory. Once I got to college and my education program, the instructors preached constantly that all students learned differently and that we had to augment our teaching to try and reach as many of these students as possible. It was safe to say that the things that were easy for me and that I was comfortable with were not going to comprise a large part of how I taught in my own classroom.
Throughout this course we were presented with plenty of strategies and tools to help us vary our instruction style as well as incorporate technology into the lesson. Overall, I would not say that this course drastically changed my views on how students learn. What it did do was go outside of the multiple intelligence argument and offer another viewpoint, a viewpoint that I find no fault in subscribing to. In every classroom there is a place for behaviorism, mainly in the classroom management strategies. In science, the use of discovery learning has a firm hold in constructionism, where students create the meaning. Also, much of what we do in a science classroom involves the use of partners to work on projects and assignments, which is a connectivist theory. All of the theories we encountered had technological strategies as well. Some of them, I have used in my class already, such as posting work online and allowing other students to read and make comments on the work. Others, where the students work together to create a finished product that exists online, I have not done much with yet, but plan to in the future.
In the future, I would like to try and take advantage of virtual field trips for my students. There seems to be plenty of them out there, and easily accessible. Also, I would like to try and incorporate VoiceThread into more of my lessons. I think the first thing I would like to do with it as a test run would be to have students create their vocabulary lists using it. In the future, I would like to bring technology into my lesson plans at least twice as much as I do currently. Another future goal I have is to try and get myself an interactive white board by writing grants and fundraising. They seem like a wonderful tool to have in the classroom.
