Teaching+with+Technology+EDLD-5364+Week+3

This week I felt a little overwhelmed with the amount of different assignments required for us to accomplish, as of to today, Saturday, I have completed two of the four assignments and am working in the third assignment for this week which is my weekly wiki update. The readings this week were very interesting I learned several new ideas that may help me implement differentiated instruction in the classroom through the use of technology and the UDL Principles. Chapter Six-"Using UDL to Individualize Teaching Methods" was instrumental in helping me create my lesson plan on Cast’s UDL Lesson Builder. It provided excellent strategies that would address the many ways students learn. These strategies focused on the three brain networks, Recognition Network, Strategic Network, and Affective Network of learning. Some of the strategies provided overlapped and would apply to two of the networks, such as the strategy to provide multiple formats and media for our students which addressed the Recognition and Strategic Networks. In my opinion, this strategy was the most important because it mainly focused on providing students choices and multiple means of learning thus empowering the students to want to learn. Technology is the driving force that allows teachers to provide students with multiple media and formats for them to learn, analyze, research and build problem solving skills, and prepare them for the 21st century. I was surprised at how minor the changes I had to do were to align my lesson plan with the UDL recommendations, for example changing the end product of the Anticipatory section from only creating a short written summary to providing students with choices and allowing them to draw a picture and label the characters. This gave students the final choice for the end product to demonstrate their learning.
 * Teaching with Technology Week 3 **

We also learned about the importance of immediate feedback for students and the purpose of the feedback. The generalizations for feedback were: 1. Feedback should be corrective in nature, 2. Feedback should be timely. 3. Feedback should be specific to a criterion. 4. Students can effectively provide some of their own feedback.

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). // Using technology with classroom instruction that works. // Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Chapters 1, p. 41.

I especially enjoyed reading about the data collection tools, the reason for this was that I had never heard of these tools such as Classroom Response Systems, I found this tool to be a very productive and efficient way to provide feedback to students and receive immediate feedback back from students to ensure that they understand the concept. The system uses multiple choice questions to test students’ knowledge and understanding. These questions can be formatted to address higher order thinking skills from the students. A teacher would have the ability to know which students need reinforcement of the lesson and which can do enrichment assignments. I feel this is a great technology tool for all teachers to have available and utilize in class.