The brush of your steps.

                This chapter covers a lot of technologies that allow us to improve learning in the classroom. Some of the key components that a lot of the technologies seem to focus on are: ·          the understanding of what the student knows before the interactions, ·          what erroneous preconceived notions he has (conceptual barriers), ·          and implementing methods that experimentally have shown to tackle these conceptual barriers and achieve basic learning. These technologies have different uses and applications in learning, which is generally not attributed to the development of new learning theories, but rather to the core benefits of technology in general. Firstly, communication is one of those huge benefits new technology has brought along. One of the benefits of that in education is in the pos...

This chapter addressed the effectiveness of teaching in three common fields in elementary, middle, and high schools. These fields were History, Mathematics, and Science. It was very explicit and provided examples on how being an effective teacher does not mean that one can teach every field, and that the most successful teachers are actually incredibly resourceful and proficient in their field. Further, their skills are tailored to the specific field in which they teach. They retouched on some examples of History we had seen before, and how it can be a field to learn facts in, or a field where you study and interpret certain events in order to deduce what actually occurred in history. The example of Bob Bain struck home quite quickly in the sense that I was really disappointed in my experiences in History throughout school. I had never experienced a professor like him or Ms. Kelsey, whose strategies seem to actually engage these students in a historical adventure which I now seem to...

                This chapter was very interesting in tackling four concepts which I will explain in moderate detail to tackle the idea of learning and the effect the environment can have on that. The first type of environment (and it is often noted that none of these environments is exclusive of the others) is learner centered. In this environment it is important to recognize where the student is coming from. This is not strictly cultural, but also involves previous learned knowledge from past grades, and any other factors outside of the classroom which contribute to his/her experiences. This idea has been proven to be significant with experiments asking students to relate home experiences to their current work, and it thereby improving test performance on reading. While focusing on the environment may be essential, it is very difficult to determine what is stored as experiences. To narrow that down, knowledge – centered environments (the ...