Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Week 13

Being a designer is an essential  act of a teachers profession, you design the curriculum and learn  new experiences to meet specified purposes.Like other design professions, such as architecture, engineering, or graphic arts, designers in education  must be mindful of their audiences. Teachers have to act like designers everyday, because they have to experiment and find new ways to help their students learn. 
iStopMotion is a software that allows students to create their own animated movies and time-lapse recordings. Students can create this through a laptop, digital camera, or a direct-video input device. They are able to capture and then create animations frame by frame. This could be a fun and creative project that students can make during class. Even elementary students are able to create something like this because it has a easy-to-learn application. Students could use this in a group project or individually, and it can be used in any content area. 
Digital Storytelling allows students to show their creative sides by being able to generate ideas and put those ideas into action. Students will research, write, and organize how they plan on structuring their story. Once it is set in motion, then the camera comes into play. This type of program is more of a tool to get students ideas to begin flowing. Incorporating this kind of technology would be very beneficial to the students. Students would be able to work with visual images, text, and sound to develop their critical thinking skills. I am going to be a speech teacher, and I could definitely incorporate this type of technology in my classroom. When preparing for a speech, students have to have critical thinking skills in order know how to prepare and present a speech. The skills that they would acquire through the Digital Storytelling, would benefit them in their writing and presenting skills as well. 
Visualization is an important concept to have when dealing with mathematics. Some other methods that the textbook suggest are programs like Mathematica, MathLab, and Statistical Analysis System. These programs allow students to visualize the mathematical problem and see the effect on   problem manipulation. It is a fun and creative way for students to visualize the problem and how to makes the correct solution. 
I think that it is very possible to learn from watching TV. Most students these days are consumed by the television constantly. Since TV, is something that really reaches out to people then people would definitely learn from watching TV. A good example that can be used is how much YouTube has affected our world. You can type in just about anything and YouTube will have it. I have used YouTube a lot to learn different stuff on cooking, music, or how to operate my cell phone. It is a very beneficial thing for students, if what they are watching can allow their minds to think critically and they learn from that. 
References
Crismond, D., Howland, J., Jonassens, D., Marra, R. M. (2008).  Meaningful
learning with technology. Columbus: Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall.

4 comments:

  1. I agree. The teachers out look on their yearly cirriculum allows for creativity, although they must follow many guidlines before applying creativity it is still a tool that can be used to design work appliciations for the students.

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  2. I also agree. Teachers are designers everyday when they are designing ways to teacht their classroom and help their students to learn different material.I also agree that visualization is very important because it is hard for students to understand something if they cannot see it and get an concept and understanding of the subject. ( :

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  3. Those programs truly are very helpful for students to visualize what they are doing in math. visualization is probably why most students do not understand math.
    EW

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  4. istopmotion sounds fun and like it would work well for these purposes and i think it could work well for many other applications. if only excecuted in a right way for each one of those goals.

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