This weeks resources on the cognitive learning theory stressed the importance of making as many connections as possible to a piece of information so our students can then use these connections to get back at this information (Orey, 2001). This allows students to connect new information to prior knowledge, and these connections help the students retain the information long term. Throughout this weeks resources, they gave us many examples of multimedia advance organizers and how they could be used in the classroom.
In this weeks discussion post we were to look at our course textbook and explore the sections on Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers, and Summarizing and Note Taking. In these sections they gave example of many advance organizers to use in the classroom were our students would use a higher lever of thinking to make as many connections as possible on information being presented to the them. The one that caught my eye that I want to use in my classroom next year was the PowerPoint advance organizer. I teach History so an example of how I would use this in the classroom was where I would have my students try to predict the causes of WWII and how the War started. There my students would brainstorm from prior knowledge the conditions around the world prior to the war, and they would come up with a hypothesis on why they believed the war started. I have pulled up some videos from United Streaming to help with their prior knowledge, and after the activity is done they have a video to watch from United Streaming to see how the war started. We then could see how accurate our predictions were. To end the lesson we could remake our PowerPoint organizer after we realized what the actual causes of the war were, and hopefully this will help my students have long term memory of the condition prior to the war that became actual causes of WWII. I then began to look at concept maps and virtual field trips, and these types of activities are more examples of cognitive learning technologies that will help our students make connections between prior knowledge and new information that they can visually see for themselves. I began to think of how I could use concept maps in my classroom, and then I began to think on how I could use it today. I am a football coach, and we have started our mini camps were we start from scratch to teach everything from stances, to alignment, to schemes. I thought back to yesterday when I worked with the offensive line. In our chalk talk meeting before we went out to the field, I think it would be a great review of what we did yesterday if we had the lineman do a concept map where they could explain the important points of a particular scheme. This activity would be lead by the older, more experienced lineman, and this would help our younger line understand the concept of the scheme. This should help them remember the important coaching points, and hopefully will lead to them remembering this information long term.
Overall, what I got from this weeks resources was ideas of ways to use technology to make our students use a higher level of thinking to take what they already know and make connections to new information, and this should lead to them retaining more of the information. For me in history, instead of just going over the information, I am forcing them to make connections from an action that happened in the past, and how this action lead to other events in history. This has been the most useful class we have taken so far because it has provided us with many examples of activities and technologies that we could use everyday in our classroom that will promote a higher level of thinking from our students and help them retain important information.
References
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Bridging learning theory, instruction, and technology. Baltimore: Author. “Cognitive Learning Theories”
Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Article: Novak, J. D. & Cañas, A. J. (2008). The theory underlying concept maps and how to construct and use them, Technical Report IHMC CmapTools 2006-01 Rev 01-2008. Retrieved from the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition Web site: http://cmap.ihmc.us/Publications/ResearchPapers/TheoryUnderlyingConceptMaps.pdf
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I think that using an advance organizer like powerpoint would also accomplish the purpose of improving note taking and summarizing. I thought that your idea of having the students create a powerpoint with their predictions about how the war started is a great idea. Would this sort of act as a KWL chart? I thought that having the students recreate the powerpoint once they learned the correct information would be a great way to teach good note taking skills. They would be able to grasp the concept of what is and what is not important information. I feel that this is really important to teach our students because often times they will follow teachers or their peers blindly, without any real understanding of what they are doing or learning. By having them distingush what is imporant, and what they can discard is a great life lesson too.
ReplyDeleteI too am a coach, and I never thought about having my players use concept maps until I saw it in your blog. I am curious to see if you used this, and how it turned out. My season starts up soon in early August and that would be a great way to have students learn plays and techniques. I am glad that you suggested it because it only makes sense that a technique to help improve student learning would help them learning in a sport.
Yeah we did use a form of a concept map in our pre practice offensive meeting before our minicamp practice on Thursday. We had our older offensive lineman lead the discussion on the chalkboard. We talked about a blocking scheme we put in on Tuesday. The lineman went over the rules of the scheme, and all the important points of the scheme with our younger lineman. They made good coaching points, like when you teach them to cut down their splits to make the blocks easier. It worked out great. The older lineman got to teach the younger guys the scheme which helped both the younger and the older guys out. And by drawing this information on the board and making these connections, I am hoping that when we call these plays, that they will think of the important points that we discused in the chalk talk, and this should help them remember what we tell them in practice.
ReplyDeleteI too am a football coach. Our staff has put together a PowerPoint presentation that we use for instruction. We have put our whole offensive and defensive package into it. The presentation includes written and play layouts but also video clips of plays, alignments, drills, routes, blocking, tackling, and special teams. It is used from 8th grade on up to varsity. Our kids love them and I feel they have benefited from. It is a lot better than trying to break down old game films.
ReplyDeleteI also have been using PowerPoint in my classroom for several years. It allows me to create and make positive connection with the material. It has been a great learning tool in my classroom and my students seem to benefit from them. In my note taking presentations I have include sound bites, video's, hyper links, and pictures to insure I am reaching as many learners as possible. They do take some time but once they are finished they are reusable and you can always add to them. The avenues are endless.