Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Terry Gallivan
EDU 637
February 9, 2014
Introduction
One must be open to the constructivists way of thinking for technology to be a viable consideration for learning. Theorists considered constructivists include Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, Lave, and Wenger.
Cognitive Developmental
Constructivist
Vygotsky believed to achieve cognitive developmental areas of critical thinking, reasoning and remembering the student must be challenged to look beyond the obvious. Vygotsky emphasizes learning is obtained when there is social interaction; otherwise, the lesson is not meaningful and thereby will not be retained to memory.
Social Interaction
2. Students must be challenged in unprecedented ways, and digital gaming may be the solution for some student success.
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3. The first objective is to use programs promoting the cognitive abilities. These abilities focus on the memory, attention, and self-control. As with any educational game, the objective is to encourage learning in a challenging and engaging approach.
4. Educational gaming if presented in the same captivating content as World of Warcraft and SimCity can produce a student population of eager learners. It would, essentially, be the same as giving a worksheet. 5. Lastly, the trend of social media sparks the social games for more than 98 million players in the United States in 20011 (Epper, Derryberry & Jackson, 2012).
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2. Most district networks cannot install and run applications related with the educational serious (learning) games.
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3. Another problem is the games usually do not map out the anticipated learning outcomes. Teachers would have to sieve through games to see if the game could leeway in the classroom. It could take hours of exploration on the teachers part to find a game to meet the desired learning outcomes of the lesson. This approach can be limited and not very proficient.
2. Games can be highly addictive, keep children from going outside to play, and have been accused of increasing violent tendencies in behavior.
2. Virtual worlds with Avatars give students the ability to carry out tasks that would otherwise be boring to them.
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3. The use of avatars levels the arena, no longer does the student who spends the most on materials or is more artistic, or whose parents help with their project have any advantage.
4. According to Antonacci & Modaress (2005), Avatars provide opportunities for collaboration, the social interaction and understanding, meaning making, reflection.
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5. The anonymity of the Avatar in the Virtual world enables students to communicate and express themselves on a critical thinking level.
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2. A well-developed and implemented blog design will result in a student population of critical thinkers. Objectives would include students who prefer the exploration, brainstorming, discussion and reflections found in the non-threatening atmosphere of the online learning design as opposed to the everyone sees me in the traditional classroom setting.
3. Discussion boards are a valuable resource for motivation if the topic is interesting and the incentive for participation is substantial. Discussion forums can encourage higher order thinking and reflection, but may be underutilized. (Repman et al., 2005).
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4. Blogging supports collaboration among students to reinforce memory retention and encourage interaction between students to foster the social aspects of learning.
2. Discussion forums can encourage higher order thinking and reflection, but may be underutilized. (Repman et al., 2005).
3. The implementation of BYOD saves schools from purchasing additional workstations or laptops. The crusade reflects the trends in society for ownership and use of personal mobile devices.
4. In Downes & Bishop (2012), students were engaged in assignments with technology integration which included a one to one laptop program. Students were able to access the lessons from home and school by using Google Docs, websites, and a variety of resources. Students felt more organized and were more effective in completing their assignments.
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5. Students become connected and involved during collective projects in a student-directed setting with BYOD.
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2. Teachers must be willing to learn the new technology by attending relevant professional development.
2. Advantages include, but are not limited to: cost effectiveness, ease of access to and storage of documents, timely collaboration with others, and communication among students, parents, peers and administration (Dekeyser & Watson, 2006).
3. Collaborating and sharing information with peers has never been easier or more efficient. Through Dropbox or Google Drive, sharing and collaborating with peers is literally a mouse click away.
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4. Students no longer require the hard copy printed material to access knowledge just the keystrokes to relay requests for information to the computer to the internet. 5. Communication is the key to a successful educational environment. The challenge is incorporating useful and user-friendly technology. Google Drive is similar in fashion to Dropbox in that it is capable of storing a large amount of data for individual users, which can be shared between multiple users (Google.com).
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2. It is increasingly important for teachers to design and implement lessons requiring students to engage in the mindful use of technology to find useful information, to learn new skills, and to create documents, designs, and other products. Mindful use of technology implies using critical reading skills to decide what is likely to be true. (Slavin, pg. 277).