Journal Post 2

Chapter Two                                                                                                                                                 Transforming Learning with Unique, Powerful Technology

How does technology create student engagement and collaboration?

                Engagement and collaboration refer to teaching and learning situations where students work together on academic activities thoughtfully and willingly. Now a days, students outside of school are more involved with technology than ever before. They watch television, surf the net, and send emails, texts, instant messaging, just about anything! These are all forms of communication and collaboration. Teachers have it made when it comes to use students’ technology-centered behaviors to promote learning in school. Some ways to promote active engagement and collaboration include: student conducted online polls and surveys, digital storytelling, digital games for learning, online publishing, discussion boards, and Wikipedia. Engaging students is at the heart of teaching. John Dewey, a philosopher, observed teachers and found out something very interesting. Most of the educators neglected the inner attention and focused more on the outer attention. However, the inner attention is where learning happens. This is when you get students involved to think deeply and actually consume information about the topic being discussed.

Photo Credit to Scott McLeod

                In addition to promoting attentive engagement, technology creates settings where students can work productively together. One way we can make students collaborate together is by groupwork. Group work lets students work together in pairs or even in quarters. In my opinion is has been quite effective as a student. Since we are put into groups, not one student feels left out. Everyone brings their strengths to the table and we all collaborate as a team. Cooperative learning is another highly effective way to promote active learning in classrooms.  Each student has a role while working together. Some examples are like having a note taker, an artist, researcher, and even a presenter. When students work together, they acquire skills and knowledge in ways that create and sustain lasting learning.

Web Scrapbook

                Web scrapbook is one of the website resources for engagement and collaboration I explored. It allows individual students or classroom groups to place electronic information in an online folder. Think of it as a clipping file for the Internet. Into that file you can place images, excerpts, and whole web pages that you find while you surf the web or that reside on your computer. In addition, the Web Scrapbook is a collaborative environment. A class working on a project together could place all of the items they wish to discuss or annotate into one shared folder. Groups with a common interest could collaboratively build, sort, and annotate a list of relevant web pages, images, and passages. This reminds me of the discussion board I have in my Introduction to Technology class. It helps us engage with one another and include information and insights we have.

Summary

                In this chapter it talks about how technology makes unique, powerful, and transformative learning through visual learning. It also mentions ways on how to create collaborative activities for students, rapid feedback, and imaginative and creative self-expression.  It focuses on metacognitive thinking to build what has been called a student-centered or knowledge approach to teaching. It emphasizes how computers can redefine and change how teaching is conducted in schools. It offers many examples of multimedia software that can be used to teach and access much information. Using technology, teachers create opportunities for students to generate new ideas, original work, and use models to explore systems and issues.