Global Learning's Effect on Education

World Education Rankings

Dr. Z went to Jordan for a conference and held a class session while he was in his hotel room. This was absolutely fascinating. Without doing anything we got to meet a man from Jordan and one from Australia and talk to them for a little bit. We shared with them what we had been working on in class and they shared a little bit about themselves with us.

It just goes to show how easy it could be for teachers to collaborate with teachers from around the world. We all have different specialties and I can only imagine if we could find people that specialized in different topic from around the world and had those people present those topics to our classroom how well they would be received.

I think Global Learning has the ability to bring the United States on top of the achievement board. If our teachers would get in touch with the teachers from, for example, North Korea and Finland and observe how it is what they do and how they do it and maybe discover ideas that we are missing here. It is no secret that we are falling further behind and our students are struggling so any help we can get from other countries we should take.

Using Problem-Based Learning

PBL occurs when the teacher’s role is that of a facilitator. S/he models what should happen, scaffolds, and monitors the students’ learning. The students work in groups to learn about real-life problems. The goals of PBL are to help the students develop flexible knowledge, effective problem solving skills, self-directed learning, effective collaboration skills and intrinsic motivation. *

Flickr- Josie Fraser

I think that this is a great way to encourage collaboration and interest by having students learn about topics that most likely affect them or someone that they know. We don’t always want to learn about topics that we will never have to deal with in life and knowing that what you’re doing affects someone is a great motivator.

Here is an example of a list of PBLs.

* Hmelo-Silver, C.E. (2004). Problem-based learning: What and How Do Students Learn?. Educational Psychology Review, 16(3)

Using Interactive Whiteboards

mrjorgen

Anything that a teacher does on a computer can be transferred over to the whiteboard. Instructions can be recorded so that teachers can go back to them when it comes time for reflection or just to go over it with a student who was absent the day of a particular lesson. Some other benefits of interactive whiteboards are: built-in maps, digital storytelling, brainstorming, notes taken directly into PowerPoint presentations, project calendars, helps in the writing process, use it with Kidspiration or Inspiration, illustrate and write books, diagramming activities, electronic word wall, and sharing projects during conferences.

In the field experiences I’ve had I saw one teacher use the interactive whiteboard with her first graders and they seemed to greatly enjoy it. They had an opportunity to participate and go to the front of the class to ‘teach’ their classmates. A kindergarten room that I was in had an interactive whiteboard that had never been used. The teacher didn’t know how to use it, so she just simply didn’t. Another classroom that I have visited had the whiteboard, but I only saw the teacher using it. The students sat and watched just as if the teacher had been using a projector.

The interactive whiteboards can be very helpful to the teacher and beneficial to the students if they are used correctly. Students have to be able to have hands-on experience with them and teachers have to know how to use them.

Creating/Using Podcasts in Education



Wikimedia Commons

Since my group was called the Reading Brigade everything we did had to do with literacy in some way. So, when it came to creating a Podcast I, initially, thought that we could read a book and discuss it on the Podcast. That obviously wouldn’t have been all that interesting so my group members and I decided that we would try to get in touch with authors and see if anyone would be willing to Skype with us so that we could transfer it over to a Podcast and share it with our classmates. I emailed Nathaniel P. Jensen and he emailed be back the next day saying that he would be happy to Skype with me and my group. We were thrilled! Also, Jenna’s aunt is an author so she agreed to help us as well. The world that we are in is so fascinating! With a few clicks we were talking to people that I never thought that I’d have the opportunity to speak to.

It was such a simple task to create the Podcast and be able to share it with our classmates. This is something that any teacher can do to make lessons more interesting.

Scholastic has many Podcasts of books and also tips on how to use them in the classroom.

Creating your Group PBL Lesson

It was hard in the beginning to think of something that we could do for PBL. We researched many websites to look at other people’s ideas. After some discussion we realized that we all thought that most classrooms and playgrounds weren’t very accessible to the handicapped students. It was disappointing to me because these students already have many problems to deal with on a daily basis and then they go to school and they can’t do the activities that other students are doing and when they have problems getting around to where they need to be how can they focus on their learning?

Take a look at our ideas that we started off with as we were brainstorming what it is that we could do for our PBL lesson.

This was my version of a boundless playground.

At the end we ended up teaching a lesson to our classmates about how they could create a boundless playground using Google Sketchup.

The other groups all had creative ideas as well. I used Glogster and PicMonkey which were both extremly fun and a lot easier to do then Sketchup! There are many tools that can be used with PBLs. I don't know if I would have ever come across all of the tools that my classmates introduced me to on my own so I'm very grateful to have had such a creative bunch of people in my classroom. They have taught me so much that will help me tremendously.  

Using Collaborative Tools

“Complete a project without physically speaking to each other… what!?” Those were my initial thoughts when Dr. Z told us that we had to do a project without speaking to each other at all physically and being in different places as we worked on it. We got onto Google Docs and started typing away. We agreed that we wanted to know what the most used and favored technology was in our class. Since we are all educational technology minors we thought it would be interesting to see what technology our class was the most comfortable with. Here is a link of our survey that we used. I also discovered tinyurl.com which is an absolutely fascinating tool! It shortens the webpage into just a few words that the user can actually select.

After we got our results back we were once again back on Google Docs trying to figure out what to do with them. Google Spreadsheet was a great tool to use because it provided us with graphs and charts based on the responses. We used those to create our power pointpresentation and then a video of the results. To create the video we used Jing. Since we were all unfamiliar with it we ended up getting together and creating the video.

Once we were finished with everything, I realized how simple it all was. It actually is so easy to use collaborative tools and not have to worry about where to meet with your group and what time best works for everyone. We only used Google Docs, but we could have Skyped, texted each other, tweeted, and used many other tools.

Introductory Preso Experience

To introduce ourselves to our classmates we had the opportunity to use whatever media we wanted to use. At the time I was still fascinated by iMovie so I created a short little movie about myself. We also had to critique our presentations and I did a PowerPoint to review mine. I wish that I would have done the review on YouTube instead. My partner and I were confused as to how it is that we were supposed to work together, so we just approved each other’s messages at the end of our presentations. It was hard in the beginning to have to work with someone who you just met for the first time. We also had different experiences with technology and interests which is why our introductions differed a little bit from the others.

Some of my classmates also did movies, some did PowerPoints, and some even used poster board. My favorite presentation was from Jenna and Nicole. They shot themselves on campus and used short clips of popular songs to tell about themselves.

It would have been great if we could have redone our presentations at the end of the semester to see how much everyone’s presentations would have advanced after everything we learned.