Supporting All Learners

Week 2 Redesign: Supporting All Learners

All learners have strengths, weaknesses, and preferred areas of interest within the context of the learning environment.  The importance of designing to support the needs of all learners is so that all learners can succeed.  Promoting interactivity, individualization, and consistency can help meet the needs of various types of learners.  Using technology in the classroom helps students become more motivated, simulated, and can also bring out individual skills and learning styles. 

Recognizing all types of learning styles, visual, auditory, tactile, linguistic, kinesthetic, logical, social, and solitary will make sure all individuals get everything out of their learning and education.  Since there are several different ways to learn not everyone learns the same.  Understanding and knowing multiple intelligences will allow individuals and students to explore and learn in many ways and enable the students to identify strengths and weaknesses (Lever-Duffy & McDonald, 2011).  Since technology is able to bring out and concentrate on individual needs, it is a great way for students with disabilities to learn. 

Original Lesson EDU648 Teaching & Learning with Technology

The activity that has been chosen to be redesigned was to Plan, Implement, and Evaluate (PIE) can help students and the teacher make the most out of the lesson; the impact of commercial fishing on the seal population in Alaska’s Maritime National Wildlife Refuge during the last thirty years.  In this lesson, the students will demonstrate an understanding of the impact that commercial fishing has on the seal population in the Alaskan Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. 

The top questions that should be asked are: what is the goal of this task, what obstacles could hinder learning, how to begin and follow planned learning strategies, do I understand what I am doing, how can I tell if my task motivation is being maintained, what have I learned from this experience that could be used at other times, and what improvements could I make for future learning tasks (Newby, Stepich, Lehman, Russell, & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2011). 

What is the most effective, efficient, and appealing manner in which the to-be-learned task can be acquired by the students?

Teaching the task one item at a time such as characteristics of seals and threats, where they live (Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge) and then move on to commercial fishing and the impact it has on seals.  Group research would be the most appealing to the class and then share what they learned.

 In what order should the learning activities be sequenced?

·       Seal characteristics and threats

·       Alaska’s Maritime National Wildlife Refuge

·       Commercial Fishing

·       The impact

How can I determine to what degree the students have learned the material?

Observing positive gains made by the students will help determine what students have learned.  Students will be tested on the subject to measure understanding.

In the original lesson, the uses of specific technologies are obsolete.  The uses of auditory and visual components are the only ones used which only will address a minimum amount of the needs of the students in the classroom. 

Redesign Lesson EDU697 Capstone, a Project Approach

The Smart Board Technology will be used to create a presentation that goes with the topic.  Tools such as; Prezi, Google Docs, or slide rocket will be used to present and share the presentation.  These tools allow the user to present add voice and videos to the presentation.  The presentation will help students gain knowledge on the topic being discussed and also address visual, auditory, linguistic, and tactile learning styles in the classroom. 

To address kinesthetic or hands on learners, creating an opportunity for a virtual field trip will allow kinesthetic, logical, social, and even solitary learners the ability to visit a place that is too distant and can learn the relationship between commercial fishing, the seal population, and the Alaskan Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.  Students can also learn how the seals and other animals live in the Refuge and what the Refuge des to protect its wildlife. 

Technology will also be used to create flashcards and quizzes that can be administered in groups, as a class, or individually.  Technology will help engage the class by using different techniques then just lecture or reading time.  The quizzes can be made using QuizStar which is an online quiz maker that allows you to manage the class, assign quizzes that can be done from a computer, and it keeps track of scores and student performance.  Flashcards can be made online also and students can practice the key words or take-a-way words and definitions.  As a class, the students will go through these words, but students will have time to break into groups or administer the flash cards by themselves.  As a whole class, the students will be broken up into two groups and have a competitive game of who can get the most points. 

Challenges for this lesson are that it could have a lot of information to give to the students, but preparing a way to make it exciting and engaging.  Technology will engage them, but trying to find technologies that will promote different types of learning styles so that each student will have something to take-a-way from the lesson and to gain knowledge was an issue.  Researching ways to promote multiple learning styles was helpful to find ways to not only promote learning, but also to engage the students.

The use of technology in lessons can enable the teacher to promote ways to acknowledge different learning styles.  Giving the students the chance to see the information applied in different ways will give them an opportunity to gain more information and to retain it better by applying it to different parts of their brain.  My original lesson did not give any options n the use of technology, but pretty much for the teacher to decide for themselves.   With the revised lesson, options are given to show a starting point.