Monthly Archives: September 2008
Greedy company bailout legislation and a very busy web site
I guess the House of Representative’s web site has been completely overloaded with us normal folks wanting to see what the *#!! the $700 billion to the Secretary to the Treasury is all about. Our congressmen (and women) have literally received millions of emails about this legislation, so the national servers have now been pretty [...]
Significant Learning? Who cares.
Caring, huh? My instructor for my independent study on teaching in higher ed has led me to the significant learning model of L. Dee Fink and his Significant Learning model. I like his model because it includes all the principles I think are important for our instruction. Significant Learning Elements (Fink, 2003) Notice how caring [...]
Turning Learning Goals into Significant Learning
I have been working on instructional goals for a class assignment. I am reworking my Dreamweaver classes based on backwards design and Fink’s significant learning, and I am struggling with how to translate my goals into significant learning. I want to teach my students more than Dreamweaver; my students must learn how to use Dreamweaver [...]
Goodbye Summer
I missed a lot of summer. I spent so much time working and studying that I missed summer. It is a shame, but at least I spent a lot of time with my kids. Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. — [...]
My day…
Take a gander at my day yesterday at work two days ago Maybe other doctors will
Choosing Technology Education Curriculum
Are Computer Textbooks Any Good Without our Help? Much of the time, technology educators teach out of the book. Often, we use a computer textbooks’ table of contents to prepare our lesson plans (Fink, 2005). This is such an easy method that we commonly use it to help make up time while we scramble to [...]
Situated Learning in a Computer Lab?
What is Situated Learning? Situated learning is placing your learner in an authentic environment that mimics the thought processes and actions of a real-life task. We do our best to recreate authentic learning environments so our students can easily transfer learning from the discrete tasks taught in class to the real world. But that is [...]
Constructivist teaching in the technology education classroom
What is constructivism? Constructivism is different from objectivism. Objectivist’s teaching techniques involve the idea that all knowledge comes from outside of the individual and that the teacher give all knowledge to the learner; however, a constructivist’s teaching methods involve the idea that all knowledge comes from within the learner, that learners must take information and [...]
