Technology Reflection

In the beginning of this course I felt that to learn you had to physically experience an action or have a personal connection through an experience. Now I feel that there are many other ways to gain knowledge that are secondary to first hand experiences. There are so many ways that one can experience something, for example, cooperative learning groups and social learning theory, where students can take in stories and experience from others and make connections for themselves. For this reason I feel that experiences are still key in constructing knowledge, however my definition of experiences has been expanded.

Now that I see how guilty I am in using technology for mainly teaching strategies and not as often integrating the technology as a learning strategy for students, I plan on turning the table and having the students construct artifacts with all the new technology applications such voice threads, concept mapping tools, and even tools like excel which has been primarily used as an instructional tool rather than a learning tool. As a high school science and math teachers I feel that these applications are very useful to show step-by-step process in both subject areas.

The first of my long-term goals is to use technology to make learning more meaningful and hands-on. I think that when technology is used to construct knowledge by constructing an artifact, possibly a flow chart on how to solve a problem or a map to show relationships, the knowledge becomes more meaningful because it is not just information that needs to be remembered it has an experience that goes along with it. When I start a unit I list the top five concepts for the students and have them copy them down as a checklist when we go over them. Now I would like to have the students construct something for each concept. I want the concepts to be experienced rather than just memorized.

The second long-term goal I would like to achieve is to not use technology just because it makes it easier on me. It is so easy to type out notes for my physics students and hand them over as a document to read and remember, or to use PowerPoint to get notes across quickly and easily. I feel that when I do the above I am learning the information really well and the students are not, because they are not engaged in the process, all they are doing is copying it down for reference. I want to use technology to make an impact and not a copout because it is more difficult for me to help the students construct meaningful knowledge and experience math and science first hand than just to tell them about it.