Activity: Small Group Discussion Board
In your small group discussion boards, discuss your current
understandings of constructivism and how it applies to your
work in the classroom. Use the following questions to initiate
discussions and to formulate new questions for your group.
- What does it mean to learn something?
- What criteria are necessary for learning?
- How do we know when someone has learned something?
- Is memorizing information meaningful learning?
- How do we as teachers support meaningful learning?
Collaboratively, come up with 4-5 guidelines that you consider
essential for learning to occur and explain why you believe
those attributes contribute to meaningful learning. The
final posting to your group discussion board should list
those elements and their importance to meaningful learning.
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Activity: KITE case studies
First, read "Technology as Facilitator of
Quality Education: A Model" at http://www.intime.uni.edu/model/modelarticle.html
As noted in the article, "The seven dimensions of the model
provide a way for educators to view the integration of technology-related
tools into a robust educational environment and thus answer
the hard questions regarding support for the shift in our
educational activities toward technology. The model sets
up a framework for this robust educational environment and
identifies key points at which technology should be implemented
and evaluated to determine its impact." Second, explore
the Knowledge Innovation for Technology in Education (KITE)
digital library at http://kite.missouri.edu/.
When you go to the KITE site, click on the banner across
the top that says Technology Integration Case Library. After
entering the site, you can search for stories that fit your
interests.
KITE is a repository of "stories" that describe technology
use. It is being developed by eight universities headed
by the University of Missouri-Columbia with the purpose
of diffusing technology integration knowledge. The intent
is to provide a support system for teachers, teacher education
faculty, technology coordinators, and administrators in
technology integration. Over time, the project hopes to
build a K-16 community of practice through a knowledge repository
that enables learning through sharing, communal understanding
through storytelling, continuous exchange and creation of
new knowledge, and collective problem solving among K-12
schools and teacher education programs. The site contains
a collection of stories that are described and indexed for
use in case-based reasoning by technology users in education.
Explore stories within your discipline area, paying attention
to the quality of the stories that represent current practice
in utilizing technology in your discipline area. Evaluate
the two KITE cases you feel are the best in your discipline
area by using two assessment tools: (1) the guidelines your
team developed in your group discussion to evaluate the
meaningfulness of learning from a constructivist learning
paradigm, and (2) the TFQE model discussed in the article.
Since not all cases in the digital library have the same
quality, pick the two you feel are the best in terms of
quality. You will share your findings and describe how you
might build on these applications in your own classroom
or technology use.
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