Connie's+Page

= Welcome to Connie's personal page. This is where I will discover exactly what this wiki is and why I now have a page in/on it. Hopefully I will eventually understand how I might use this in my classroom or maybe even at home. =

"..high literacy is required of almost everybody to successfully negotiate the complexities of everyday life." As a major personal goal for myself over the last two years I have been incorporating different literacy strategies into my lesson planning as often as possible. This quote confirms the need for me to continue that.
 * < [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1254623775/cwhitrow-lg.jpg width="1" height="48" caption="cwhitrow" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/cwhitrow"]] ||< [|cwhitrow]
 * Connection:

Important Ideas: "knowing" now= being able to find and use information, not memorize........again, what a difference from the way I was taught and trained to teach. Your "story" definitely influences your style as a teacher but is not an excuse to avoid change and improve!

Question: My question is how do I turn more of the learning process over to my students? I know I need to do less so they can appreciate and understand the idea of becoming self-directed lifelong learners. ** ||

“What does this article teach us about learning?” (Community space) “How do I understand learning to occur?” “How does what we have explored relate to learning and teaching with technology?”

"Humans are viewed as goal-directed agents who actively seek information. They come to formal education with a range of prior knowledge, skills, beliefs, and concepts that significantly influence what they notice about the environment and how they organize and interpret it. This, in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, solve problems, and acquire new knowledge. " I agree with this statement. My students are all so different and that is why I find this job so challenging. How can we possibly help students learn when they all come from so many different backgrounds? I think learning occurs when connections are made. I think students only learn when they are critically connecting the information to what they know in their world. This is where I have to have all kinds of opportunities available in my classroom for engagement and proof of learning. Technology definitely allows a myriad of connections to be made.

November 17

VyGotsky and Socio-Constructivism

Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies

2 Things I Already Know: 1. The importance of excellent modelling by the teacher. 2. The importance of sharing the "work" with students in the modelling step.

2 Things That are New to Me: 1. "Within the zone of proximal development-instruction and learning occurs." - I find the zone idea especially interesting as I think there are now so many different types of students in the classroom that it makes this all the more important, yet difficult. 2. Some researchers believe that up to half of school time is spent teaching things that most of the kids already know and can do."

"If you can google it, don't test it." 1. What is the value of thinking about socio-constructivism in integrating technology into education? Integrating techology into education allows for collaboration provided all students have access to the technology. 2. Where does knowledge live/reside? Knowledge lives in collaboration and sharing between individuals. 3. What does it mean to know something? To know something means that you have the ability to think critically about information. You are able to join the great conversation and analyze information for validity and truth. 4. Do you have knowledge because you know something or....because you know how to access it ...or build from it or...? You have knowledge when you can access and share information and apply it to your thinking.
 * [[image:http://c1.wikicdn.com/i/edit.png height="37" caption="Edit This Page" link="http://abbotsfordltt.wikispaces.com/page/edit/3%20Socio-Constructivism"]]Lev Vygotsky and Socio-constructivism

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was a Russian psychologist whose work emphasized the essential role of culture and the social dimension of learning. He emphasized that little is learned, particularly cognitive functions that allow us to make sense of and act in the world around us. He explains that we make sense of the world with the use of “cognitive tools”, the most significant of which is language. He explained that learning occurs when it is targeted within a learner’s “Zone of Proximal Development” which is the “gap between what a learner can learn on his own and that which he/she can learn with guidance and collaboration”.

Some key points drawn (and interpreted) from Vygotsky’s work (sourced in Improving Comprehension with Think Aloud Strategies by Jeffrey Wilhem):

• Learning is the sharing of expertise that is given over to students in an exchange between the teacher and the learner. • What is learned must be taught. • The teacher teaches through the relationship cultivated with a student in a context of working together closely. • We must learn ways of thinking and reading in order to participate fully in our culture and to make meaning within it; these ways have to be passed from experts to novices in the context of meaningful collaborative activity. • Almost all students can learn given the right instructions.

Building on Constructivism, Social Constructivism is a learning theory that draws significantly from Vygotsky’s thinking. In this theory, learning is dependent on the social world. “Learning is not solely individual, rather it is always collective, embedded in, enabled by, and constrained by the social phenomenon of language, caught up in layers of history and tradition.” (Quay, 2003) So, learning occurs when we engage with other’s ideas, thinking and processes. Through the social engagement, our thinking shifts. Language is one of the major tools with which we make sense of the world; it is also the primary means by which we engage the social in an academic space. In this theory, language and interaction are the means by which we “construct” or create our understanding of the world around us. ||