Question 1: (60 marks)
(b) In order to get this project to work, there were a number of issues that I had to deal with. i. Collaborative work: I had to make sure the students were going to be able to work together and the work was to be shared equally among the group. Therefore I chose a task that could be divided equally among the group and each would be ensured adequate effort and parents could semi-assess their work for constructive feedback and motivation.
ii. Parental involvement: getting the parents involved in their children’s work was a task because I needed to make sure students could not make it up and pretend it was their parents. Also, constructive feedback in parental comments was needed rather than just a quick checkup of their work in general.
iii. Application of web 2.0 technologies: this project was designed to motivate the students to work on an otherwise ordinary project with the use of brand new web 2.0 technologies. However, I needed to make sure the children would actually know how to use these technologies and different applications so that they were not baffled by the experience and completely blank out on what to do. Therefore; I implemented different pages on my Wiki that could direct the students and guide their minds on how and what to do exactly. Also, the project was simple but long so I created a myriad of pages that provided thorough examples and brief comments on how to go about researching for the task.
iv. Higher order thinking: another issue that I had to deal with involved the execution of higher order thinking in the project itself and the technologies used for it. For many educators, Bloom’s Taxonomy serves as the basis for what are now called higher order thinking skills. Generally, the concept is that higher order skills are complex combinations of lower skills. Higher-order thinking requires students to manipulate information and ideas in ways that transform their meanings and implications. This transformation occurs when students combine facts and ideas in order to synthesise, generalise, explain, hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation. Manipulating information and ideas through these processes allows students to solve problems and discover new (for them) meanings and understandings. In this project students were asked to research, comment, synthesize, collaborate and evaluate the information.
v. Motivation: During the project I needed to make sure that what I was doing kept the students motivated enough to complete the task and remember what they did for future. In applying motivation factors I followed Maslow’s theories and took risks, made predictions, modified predictions, established realistic goals, and assumed personal responsibility. I divided the task between the students and allowed the students to take responsibility of the choice of task they would prefer. I invited criticism, introduced new technologies, established relationship between student-teacher, parent-teacher, student-parent and student-teacher-parent.
Question 2: (40 marks)
(a) the way in which the teacher conveys new information:
Behaviourism argues that learning takes place through a mechanism of stimulus and response – a convenient approach since both the stimulus and response are obvious and therefore measurable, and offer a practical legitimacy to the psychology of education. The operant conditioning of Skinner, with its focus on unpleasant and pleasant consequences (reinforcement) as a means of shaping behaviour is perhaps the best known educational application of behaviourism, and has lead to the development of tangible guidelines for learning strategies such as a focus on incremental learning and the need for consequences to be irregular and timely. These views have been rapidly adopted into models for instructional design and can easily be adapted to the Web.
In many respects the Web is an ideal forum for constructivist learning, and despite its limitations, the web does offer some interesting opportunities. Hypertext links as seen above and throughout the text, work by association rather than indexing and it could be argued that this “free association” can be disorientating. Yet, the counter argument that it operates much like the way humans think (Gygi, 1990) suggests intriguing possibilities for the meaningful linking of data required for the information processing within a cognitive framework.
This video highlights the path to the new web 2.0 world. Students no longer share a relationship with books and handwriting. They have dumped the old and established a stronger lasting relationship with the new; that of the internet and the world wide web.
(b) the encouragement of collaboration among students :
To encourage students to work together in equal collaboration, some key issues to look at would be the type of technology that is suited for the group and the age group of the group. For example, students throughout high school (7-12) should be able to successfully use a wiki or a blog. Group work can be identified with establishing one weblog or wiki for each group. In this way, students need to equally distribute the amount of work and effort involved and complete the group task over the web. Some examples of this include: JMJAG, thehed, and BeastsfromEast.
Students need to be encouraged to work together and another key issue is the actual use of blogs. Blogs are not hard to use and if succinct research was made, the web would be the best tool to use in order to answer your weblog questions. For example, this video I found on TeacherTube, outlines how to use a blog and the little features involved with it.
Download Video: Posted by mrmayo at TeacherTube.com.
(c) classroom management methods: Classroom management methods can be major issues for a teacher in the web 2.0 environment. The key issues involved in classroom management methods include plagiarism, completion of tasks, motivation, keeping the students on task, etc. Plagiarism in the web 2.0 environment is hard to monitor as the web is vast and varied. One way to counter plagiarism in the web 2.0 environment would be to put into practice the del.icio.us website. The Delicious website is an online book marking service that gathers all your viewed websites into one webpage.
Also, you can gather information through your own personalized Google reader. By creating or registering an account with Google, you are being introduced into a new world of web 2.0 technologies where you can post reports on the internet, search through an unlimited email database with your own Gmail, create documents, gather information through the Google reader and many more applications. A link to my iGoogle page is http://www.google.com/ig and my Google Reader page is http://www.google.com/reader/view/#overview-page .
Another way that classroom management can be tackled is through motivation through relatable applications such as slideshows. These are interesting and can keep a student alert.
(d) ensuring that learning occurs at Bloom’s higher levels:
- Evaluation – Judging the outcome
- Synthesis – Putting together
- Analysis – Taking apart
- Application – Making use of knowledge
- Comprehension – Confirming or understanding
- Knowledge – Gathering Information
In ensuring that learning occurs at Bloom’s higher levels, a teacher must be able to communicate information in an engaging way. Using different types of media, information, and techniques are the basis of a successful learning environment.
Also the use of contemporary and easy to understand tools should be implemented in the classroom so that students are motivated rather than confused and trying to keep up.
This is a short video that is filled with inspirational quotes for the struggling math student. Although it does not help pass grades thus far, it motivates the students to better understand the dificulties involved in mathematics. This video can be shown at the beginning of the lesson or at the end to enforce its motivational characteristics.
