Week 8 (Course 5) final Blog posting

My personal learning theory at the start of the course was fairly eclectic mishmash of what ever works must be good. From this course I have been able to synthesis in my own mind why some of my practices are working out and have heightened my curiosity into expanding on these areas. Before I was happy to let things be if it was working out...now I would like to keep on improving through sound research.

I have always been quick to change if things are not working out. This is one reason why I am working on Integrating Technology in the Classroom, masters program.
Two technology tools I will use in the classroom are anything to do with mind mapping. I aways new it was good for some students to be able to visualize how things are organized, because of the research in this course I am definitely going to have the students use programs like spinscape or bubbl.us in my science class. I will have the students create a individual and a class mind web, for each section we are working on which they can add to and share.

In the first week I wrote, According to Lever-Duffy and McDonald (2008) “The world is different. Kids are different…learning is different…and teaching must be different too” (p. 6). I still believe in this but with the exception that people at any time learn best by doing it themselves. I will strive to have my students take more responsibility for creating their own links, artifacts, connections themselves. I will strive to give up more control to the students. A difficut task for me. One small step will be to have the students keep a personal blog to write their own KWL charts.