Category Archives: Teaching
Technology Education and Problem Solving
I have been thinking a lot about how to teach my Technology Education students how to problem solve; this is really important when you are trying to teach your students in situated learning? When they leave my classroom and return to their offices, they will undoubtedly have problems implementing their new skills nearly right away. [...]
Do your students really know their learning goals in technology education?
Goals are being met I have been asking my students to fill in a little survey at the end of class. Questions on this survey include how the class was able to meet their goals. Here is my process: When asking my students to introduce themselves at the beginning of class, I write down their [...]
Evaluating Technology Education Course Design
I have spent a lot of time talking with you about updating your technology education to improve learning for very complex topics. This week’s post is about evaluating already existing curriculum. An assignment for my 1 credit hour course that accompanies me teaching a for-credit course involved getting midterm evaluations from students and then assessment [...]
What are your student’s technology education goals?
Course Goals OK… so you are teaching a technology class and you have it all planned out. Of course, you need to teach discrete steps so your students can learn how to use the software or write the code–whatever you are teaching. I have discussed planning your course with meaningful goals, such as when you [...]
My second semester teaching undergraduates
I am learning the difficulties and joys of teaching undergraduates. Many of them are young and idealistic, but at the same time they are not mature enough to realize how important and unique they are in attending a higher education institution. Many do not realize how fortunate they are and how valuable their learning is.
Creating Goals for Learning
What are Goals? It seems as though my undergrad students are having trouble deriving learning goals for their lesson plan assignment that was due Friday night. They are giving me objectives but not goals; I saw very few of 35 lesson plans that had anything similar to goals. I remember the first time I had [...]
Major Educational Goals and Significant Learning
Fink has described some major educational goals that adult educators often have for their students. The following is a table from his book that give examples of what he sees as major educational goals. Learning How to Learn How to be a better student Learning how to engage in self-regulated learning or deep learning How [...]
Does Classroom Management = Caring?
Caring is so important to learning I am preparing to lecture on how to manage classrooms behaviors tomorrow morning. This week’s learning theory flavor is Behaviorism; I am not a big fan of this theory, but it does have its uses. We are using Woolfolk’s “Educational Psychology” textbook for our required texts, and she is [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
