Week 13 - Reflection/Activity

Chapter 30 addresses concepts to help students with cognition and learning. I believe it is important for teachers to utilize a variety of instructional styles to improve students’ ability to learn and comprehend information presented. Students learn in a variety of styles; therefore, it is crucial that we, as teachers, provide them with a variety of activities to help them access and gain the knowledge they need to know. Some techniques I enjoy using in my lessons include small group and partner work, hands-on projects, partner dramatization analyzing, webquests, video, and music.

Another concept that can be applied to learning is repetition. When I refer to repetition, I don’t mean rote memorization, but students’ exposure to the same information in repeated episodes. The more interaction they have with repeated information, then the more likely students are to remember and comprehend what is being taught.

Regarding the online applications that I reviewed for this week, I examined Google Documents, Ajax, and Zoho office suites. I use the different tools for Google quite frequently. Google Documents I find to be useful at times, however, it does change my formatting–something I am working on overcoming. It is handy because I don’t have to worry about pulling out my jump drive all of the time–and then possibly forgetting to take it to work. The comparison between Ajax and Zoho was an easy choice for me. I like Zoho much better. It appears to be more user friendly and can be easily maneuvered. Ajax seemed to be cumbersome and required me to download programs, whereas with Zoho, I could use them through online access. I also like the ability to be able to work with the last handful of documents even though I might be offline. While reviewing Zoho, I also found some of the features that appealed to my husband. He is a salesman in the truss industry and keeping track of appointments and jobs can be interesting at times for him. He liked the idea of being able to access information easily.