Digital Blog Post #J

Chapter 11 is about how technology is used to evaluate and assess the learning happening in the classroom.  Reflection is described as a process of self-assessment in which a learner examines past actions to identify what to maintain or change to continue to grow.  I am personally a person who needs to see my strengths, weaknesses, skills, etc on a graph or document, this is where a portfolio can come in.  A digital teaching portfolio is a collection of educational and professional materials stored in an electronic format.  This is a very clever way to use technology to document and graph the growths of a teacher's work.  It can also include pictures, videos, audios, PowerPoints, and other types of multimedia to enhance strengths and experiences.

Photo credit to Jerry Swiatek from Flickr

Democratic schools and classrooms is a very intriguing movement.  Democratic schools and classrooms are places where students and teachers together make substantive decisions about important aspects of educational operations, from the academic curriculum to school climate and rules.  This can be confused to where the students are in control of what happens in the classroom.  On the contrary, teachers and adults are always in control.  This is a good idea to implement in schools.  Just like a business, feedback and opinions from consumers help the business grow.  Students are the ones learning and if they have a chance to come up with an idea or mention a method in which they learn the best, this can be of great help to the effectiveness of the school.  Here is a video on democracy in a classroom.  In my future classroom, I plan to have short discussions quarterly to get the students opinion of how they feel about certain teaching methods I am using or by passing out short surveys to anonymously receive feedback.

So far in my education, I have not had the ability to use a student participation system such as the clicker.  Teachers have mentioned it and how they have PowerPoints ready to be used for such a system but the school does not have the funds to provide it.  It attracted my attention to want to use it to learn so I can only assume my future students would love it.  These "clickers" which are like a smaller sized television remote allow students to be actively involved in the lesson.  Instead of the teacher standing at the front of the classroom, reading off the projector and pointing to the board, students will be answering questions such as true or false within the PowerPoint.  It can also give immediate results so the students and teacher knows how much they are learning during the lesson.  Here is a link to an article about how current research supports the use of clickers to enhance learning in students.


References

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O'Loughlin, Ruth-Ellen, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MS: Pearson Education, Inc.

Martyn, Margaret. Clickers in the Classroom: An Active Learning Approach. 1 January 2007. Retrieved from http://er.educause.edu/articles/2007/1/clickers-in-the-classroom-an-active-learning-approach

Sprouts. Democratic School Education. 23 March 2016. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhUx1pArrO4