Voice Thread

Where in the USA is NY?
In the book Firegirl one of the settings was New York.
We take a look at a map of the USA to find TN and NY. We also take an up close look at each state, a real life photo, and the state flag.

https://voicethread.com/share/14299921/

Keep in mind if you are using the telephone call feature you only have five time to record for every 24 hours! I had to record some twice, because of my loud children. So, I did not get to finish my recording before this assignment was due.

Constructivist Learning Theory, Teaching, and Learning

    Orey (Laureate Education (Producer), 2015) describes constructivism as being a theory of knowledge stating that each individual actively constructs their own meaning and Constructionism is a theory of learning that states people learn best when they build an external artifact or something they can share with others. In both constructivism and constructionism, knowledge is built by the learner (Parmaxi, A & Zaphiris, P, 2014). The instructional strategies are the many ways that teachers use to help the students to learn or get a better understanding of something. Teachers choose and use instructional strategies to help the students construct their own meanings and create artifacts. By doing both of those things you keep the students active and engaged and they will possibly remember it better. A few technology tools that can be used to help students to create their own meaning and build artifacts include the following. Power Point Presentations can be created and built by the students. They can include images, videos, and voice clips that they find and record. Word Processing programs allow students to type and build many projects on their own. All of these strategies and tools work together to support student learning in the way that they students are creating something from their own thoughts to better understand and learn. With the assistance of digital media and computer based technologies, learning through making and the emphasis on individual learners’ interactions with their artifacts are the basis of Papert’s idea of constructionism (Parmaxi, A & Zaphiris, P, 2014).

    I personally use Power Point all the time. I will encourage the use of it by my students to create one of their own for classroom projects or activities. I currently use lots of graphic organizers for my students for them to fill out and create on their own. The ISTE standard for students (ISTE, 2016) is 3c Students curate information from digital resources using a variety of tools and methods to create collections of artifacts that demonstrate meaningful connections or conclusions. The students will use what they have learned to make artifacts. The ISTE standard for Educators (ISTE, 2008) is 6c Create learning opportunities that challenge students to use a design process and computational thinking to innovate and solve problems. I will create opportunities for the students to design artifacts for critical thinking and solving problems.

    For the Genius Hour projects I will have the students use a word processing document to record their thinking and to help them organize their thoughts. I will also want a hard copy printed out.  They will use this information to fill in their Power Point. The students will use Power Point presentations as their artifact to present their GH projects to the class on the topic of their choosing.

References

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for educators. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards/standards-for-teachers

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2016). Standards for students. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards/for-students-2016

Laureate Education (Producer). (2015e). Constructionist and constructivist learning theories [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author.

Parmaxi, A & Zaphiris, P. (2014).The evolvement of constructionism:

an overview of the literature. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-07482-5_43