The Times They Are A Changing

The times they are a changing and I am learning so much! I’ve so many new techniques about how my students learn in the classroom. One of the best parts I learned about in this class is how people learn. Experience, hands-on, working in cooperative teams these are ways people learn and more important, how they remember! Incorporating newer technologies like blogs, Smartboards, wikis are tangible, hands-on learning for my students to use today. I think perhaps my favorite new learning technology was VoiceThread. An application that allows one to build a PowerPoint style presentation but then others can also log in and make comments as well…sorta like PowerPoint meets a wiki…a very cool way to get the conversations going.


And so…here it is…another class has come to an end and I come away with more tricks in my teacher bag to help my kids become the best that they can be!

Voice Thread

Hi Everyone!  Hope you are having a great week!  Please check out my VoiceThread link...enjoy! 

http://voicethread.com/share/775920/

Shayne

We Remember What We Teach

Being a reading teacher, I am completely for the idea that social learning is the primary way people construct meaning. However, too few classrooms in my building use this teaching style. The areas in my school that I see this most used is in our social studies classrooms. In the guided reading classroom, each week we learn a new strategy to become better readers. For example this week we are looking at text to text, text to self and text to world connections in reading. By the end of the school year my students have pockets full of strategies and know when to pull them out to use them. Often I will pair up my students, sometimes one lower and one higher reader or sometimes both will be low or high and they read out loud to each other. When one struggles with a word or passage the other student’s job is to suggest a strategy that might be helpful. When they have to ‘teach’ the strategies to each other, they usually understand them and how to use them.


Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski stated “the instructional strategy of cooperative learning focuses on having student interact with each other in groups in ways that enhance their learning” (pp 139). When students interact with each other and teach each other key strategies for success, learning is remembered and students know how to apply what they have learned.