Program Learning Outcome 3 to “Design learning opportunities that apply technology-enhanced instructional strategies to support the needs of all learners”

           Program Learning Outcome 3 to “design learning opportunities that apply technology-enhanced instructional strategies to support the needs of all learners”

Introduction

           I have learned so much from my previous courses that I cannot discuss them all here, some are design, differentiate instruction and new tools such as Jing.  I have included a redesigned assignment completed in a previous course. There were some issues I faced during this process but was able to complete the project.

            The main thing that I have learned is that instructors do not stop learning. Instructors learn as much as they can from education, peers and experience and then progress with furthering their knowledge to further students’ knowledge.  Designing a presentation, assignment or other piece of educational information can be difficult in any learning environment. Instructors need to be able to reach all of the students as once, in other words instructors need to be able to differentiate instruction. Many factors need to be established before you can even start a project. According to Hall and Meyer (2003), To differentiate instruction is to recognize students’ varying background knowledge, readiness, language, preferences in learning and interests; and to react responsively. Then design can begin. Hall and Meyer also state that, Many teachers and teacher educators have recently identified differentiated instruction as a method of helping more students in diverse classroom settings experience success.

Instructors should try to reach all learners in every lesson, visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Visual learners tend to favor pictures and visual presentations. Having a visual stimuli will help visual learners with the understanding of the topic. Audio is also a great combination with visual.  Auditory learns tend to hold information better through listening and speaking. It is also a great idea to add some hands on element to the presentation for those kinesthetic learners. Kinesthetic learners prefer to work with their hands in a hands on project and tend to favor group work.  Many student learn in many different ways and as many of these ways should be covered as possible. Indiana University has some helpful tips for reaching visual, auditory and kinesthetic learns some of those include; Visual- turning notes into pictures, mind mapping and color coding concepts, Auditory- record lectures, study groups, and reading aloud, Kinesthetic- frequent study breaks, actively learn something new such as reading on a treadmill and chewing gum while studying.

Revision

            The project that I revised was from EDU 658 Instructional Leadership. Looking back at some of my older project I can defiantly see room for improvement, which is always good. This project was completed on the topic of Communication. It started out a small PowerPoint presentation without any instructor’s notes or audio. It has grown in length, but not overwhelming. I have added audio as well through the use of Jing. I have also edited the information to fit the 7x7 rule, I tried to make sure that all of the information that was presented was less than seven lines and seven words per line.

            I added some new information to further thinking and knowledge. Since this was a previous assignment I was able to review the information presented with new eyes and was able to answer a lot of the questions that the presentation left open. I was able to sit down and think about how I could react students from all different learning styles. I added some more detailed information making the presentation more understandable. I added a graphic on each slide hoping that this would help the visual learner in understanding. I also decided to create this presentation in PowerPoint and then add audio through Jing. This enables the kinesthetic learner to have to get involved in order to be a part of the presentation.

            Jing is a free tool that allows users to capture images and videos and allows then to edit through SnagIt and share it on screencast.com. It sounds like process but went rather smoothly. I did have to download Jing to start and that process took a while complete, I do not know if my connection was slow that night or what was going on. Once that was completed I took a tour of the site and was able to upload by presentation and record my audio without a problem. It was very interesting to revamp an old project into something new. 

Conclusion

            In the presentation completed I was able to take information obtained from previous classes 

and add to the presentation to make it more understandable for the students it was intended for. I did 

have some difficulty in adding everything (which I am sure I did not) If work was always perfect 

there would be no room for improvement. I did have a struggle with Jing but was able to overcome 

the obstacle by watching some getting started videos. 

Slide Presentation Link:
slide Presentation