I found several strategies this week in the reading that would support cognitive learning in the classroom. As I read through the resources, I found that many of these strategies would be effective in my classroom. I've always liked this approach to teaching because I myself get bored with teaching in one particular way. To me, cognitivism is all about delivering information and obtaining information in a variety of ways. Some of the organizational techniques, such as concept mapping, or the organizational software, such as Inspiration, would be good to share with students who struggle to understand the big picture. I always found when I was a student that having visuals helped me learn and retain new information.
I find that multimedia breaks the monotony of a school day for students and most at least claim to remember more when I show them films or clips. I've made use of many of websites found in Chapter 4 of the textbook. Using images or film clips helps plant an image in a student's mind rather than attempting to deal with a concept abstractly.
I was pleased to see that blogs were mentioned in Chapter 6 as a method of reciprocal teaching. I think blogs are a great cognitive tool because they can allow the student to wear many different "hats" as a learner, especially if they have access to each other's blogs and take advantage of the commenting sections.
Moodle Presentation
13 years ago
I like your observation about stagnant teaching being difficult if you teach using a cognitivist approach. I hadn’t put it into that perspective before. I am always trying new strategies and methods in my classroom. These strategies presented in this weeks learning resources should not only inspire students but teachers to continue to learn.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that a stagnant lesson can be broken up with multimedia. My problem is because I am a health and p.e. teacher there aren't a lot of videos out there for the breaking it up. Do you guys know of any good websites to visit to pull short videos up?
ReplyDeleteunitedstreaming.com is a good one but you have to pay a fee and I don't think there are very many P.E. clips available (there might be more for health). This year, we were lucky enough to have youtube opened up for us to use in the classroom. It has been an excellent tool so far, and I would encourage anyone whose district does not use it to lobby for it.
ReplyDeleteAdam beat me to the punch with United Streaming. I love that, and am so disappointed that my new school does not subscribe to it. It really helped give that visual that students want/need for remembering things, and usually gave more information than the general text book information to make for a much more interesting lesson. Some of the videos and clips even have quizzes at the end of them. Very cool. I agree that sometimes you need to change things around so to not be so boring, and we are very blessed to have so much technology to help us with that in this day and time.
ReplyDelete-MB