Standards have altered teacher preparation programs and curriculum requirements in schools. The intention behind standardization is to ensure equivalent and consistent instruction and to provide measurable outcomes. Do you believe that the implementation of standards identified by national, state, and curriculum organizations has accomplished their intent? Explain why or why not.
I agree with the statements expressed in the question. The first chapter of the textbook offered us with several standards generated by different national and state organizations, such as ISTE, P21, TEAC, Common Core and so on. Based on these standards, local schools are able to integrate technology into daily teaching and learning thus students would fulfill the requirements in the standards. To check whether they have helped the nation or the state accomplish their intents, I think we can think about what possible benefits these standards can elicit.
According to the textbook, accomplished practices will be generated after the state decided on the standards. With the accomplished practices, three parties will be benefited. Firstly, teacher education programs are able to integrate technology skills into their curriculum thus pre-service teachers would match the technology standard of the state or the nation. Secondly, it will be a good reference for school administrators to evaluate new educator candidates. They can design the technology level test based on the standards thus choosing the best ones. Assessment of students is easier because of the standards. Just like other subjects, standards for students’ academic performance are guidance for the state test. Then standards on the technology skills would have the same effects. Thirdly, there are benefits for teachers themselves. If they were under the united standards, which means they may learned similar technology products and instructional strategies, it would be much more convenient to understand each other thus they can better communicate at some online teacher forums to exchange new ideas towards technology teaching.
Thus I agree that the standards do help the nation, states and other organizations accomplish their intents.
▩Chapter Two - Question Two
Different students have different learning styles and their learning styles influence their learning. As a teacher, you should understand your students learning styles when preparing for the classes. Discuss your understanding on different learning styles and its influence on learning.
First of all, according to the textbook, the notion of learning style belongs to Psychological factor which is one of the influential elements towards learning communication. On the basis of learning styles, each individual has his or her own preferred way of receiving and decoding information. In the book, it is expressed as “Sensory Gateway”. There are mainly three categories of learning theories, including auditory learning style, visual learning style and kinesthetic learning style. People of the first kind may learn best from auditory information. Visual learning style people learn most effectively from when they were presented with visual information. People of the last category learn best from movements. They are so important educators’ teaching and students’ learning because learners studying effects would be influenced when the format of information changes.
One thing I noticed is that the textbook didn’t mention that usually people are of mixed learning styles, which means normally, we don’t only belong to only one type of the learning style. But I like how the textbook mentioned that technology will help a lot dealing with students of various learning styles. Since the technology products, such as Chromebooks and iPads, can processing information of numerous format: text, audio, static image, dynamic video or animation and so on, they can adapt to any type of learning styles actually. Thus using technology properly in or out of class would help teachers a lot. However at the same time, it brings teachers with more pressure cause teachers may spend more time on the preparation of the class materials.
▩Chapter Three - Question Three
This chapter introduced you that lesson planning was an outgrowth of your instructional design. The DID section helped you see the overall organization of your instructional unit, and this lesson plan section helped you address what you would do to achieve the unit on an instructional day-to-day basis. Now identify, describe and use the most common steps in lesson planning.
To achieve the unit on an instructional day-to-day basis, the textbook offered us a sequence of mainly four steps, which are Ready the Learners, Identify Target Objectives, Prepare the Lesson and Check for success.
Ready the Learners requires teachers review the learner characteristics listed in the formerly finished DID model. Also, choosing the instructional strategies to evaluate and remediate their entry skills is the other important task in this stage. Then teachers should identify target objectives, during which educators choose only one or several objectives from the overall unit objectives in the DID phase. The objectives chosen should be able to be realized in one-class time cause this is the lesson plan stage instead of unit design stage. The third phase is preparing the Lesson. It’s “The Heart of The Lesson Plan”. Three steps should be accomplished including prepare the classroom, summarize the plan using the pedagogical cycle steps and identify & list required technologies and materials. The last phase for the lesson plan is checking for success. The key point in this phase is to prepare assessment instruments in order to get learners’ feedback then based on which, teachers would be able to decide whether they should continue going to the next lesson or just stay at the current one and review it for students to better master the contents.