Class reflection 3

Class reflection

October 9, 2011

As a member of an educational environment I can see tremendous potential for the use of the visual learning tools we learned about this week. In the classroom students would benefit nicely from visual learning opportunities as many students are visual learners and engaging them in activities that play to their learning strengths will only increase their participation and interest in the content. Asking students to demonstrate what they have learned via visual technology would be a fantastic way to assess their learning and gives them real life experiences to apply the skills they are learning in other technology classes.  Utilizing this week’s technology would also provide students with untold opportunities to work together in a virtual sense, again another skill will need to have as they continue to move forward with their education.

For staff I see visual tools strengthening the instructional package they can bring to the table. For example if there are students in the class who are struggling to access the textbook due to the complexity of vocabulary or some other reason, putting things in a visual format may very well be exactly what those students need to connect more deeply to the learning. How cool to have the teacher explaining how to do a lab on UTube and if a student needs to replay it several times to get it right, great they can and the teacher won’t have to explain the process over and over.  Using visual learning can also free up some time when it comes to having to create tests and such to assess students’ learning of the standards/curriculum. As I mentioned earlier students eat up the chances they get to show what they have learned. Why not take advantage of that energy and let the kids do the work within the parameters that have been set.

As a building the use of visual learning tools will be a fabulous way to support our implementation of the PBIS structure. Specifically I can see asking our Cool Tool committee to work students in the building to record demonstrations of our school expectations and post them on our website and or on UTUbe. Additional use could be me recording personal message for families regarding the importance of coming to Parent Teacher Conference, creating a homework completion plan at home or posting presentations regarding social issues and how parents can address them with their children.

Most of us understand our students grew up with technology and for the most part are more tech savvy than most of their teachers or principals for that matter. I continue to be impressed with the confidence our kids demonstrate when it comes to navigating visual learning tools and technology in general. When I ask kids where they learned about these programs the response is almost the same – heard it from a friend and just kept working with it until I figured it out. I envy this near reckless abandonment with which they attack technology when they want to learn how it works. The lack of fear for making a few mistakes along the way is a mindset we adults need to adopt as it will increase our use of technology and integrating it into our teaching and classrooms.