Day 2: Thinking about constructivism

Today in class we discussed constructivism and how it centered around students learning through their experiences in the world rather than focusing on the teacher "giving" them knowledge.  I think that teaching seen in classrooms now is progressing towards constructivism in the new generation of teachers but has not reached a point yet where classrooms are completely centered around utilizing this theory.  I try to relate my lessons to my students' personal life experiences as much as possible in my class.  I wonder how closely discovery learning ties in to constructivist theory.  In discovery learning, students are learning through their experience as they engage in the classroom activity.  Hence, they are learning from their experiences.  Discovery learning is not often implemented by teachers today.. I think that it is a fairly innovative teaching technique that is useful, but takes a lot of creativity to apply in the classroom.  Students discover the answers through following the guidelines of the activity rather than learning the concept first and then practicing it.  I think that students would find discovery learning engaging because it peaks their curiosity.  However, it could become frustrating if there is not enough scaffolding for all students to reach the point where they discover the answer and have their curiosity satisfied.  However, in returning to the topic of constructivism, I believe that it can be very affective in a learning environment because people are always more interested in any topic if they understand how it is relevant and applicable to their real, everyday life or when they can draw from personal experiences to enhance their knowledge of the material.

My experiences with educational technology growing up

When I was a child, we learned how to type and use different programs on the computer.  In elementary school, I remember using this fun program where we created stories.  I really enjoyed that program but I do not remember what it was called.  I also enjoyed playing math games.  I found them very useful in practicing basic concepts as well as entertaining.  In middle and high school we learned how to conduct research on the internet as well as how to use Excel.  Other than that, we did not use technology much in my class.  I remember thinking that technology was very frustrating most of the time.  I disliked using excel tremendously.  I would rather plot the points myself and create a nice graph by hand.  I also found sitting in a computer lab boring and tedious.  Students would often try to go on the internet instead of doing the classwork and if I missed even a single a step of instruction when learning how to use a site or program I would feel completely behind and lost.  However, I did enjoy conducting research on the internet very much.  When internet first developed it was very useful.  Today, it is extremely cluttered and it can be very difficult to find valid, reliable internet sources unless you have access to legitimite online journal environments and search engines.  I think that the new technologies available today are capable of much more in terms of educational use than I experienced growing up.