Week 7 Reflection

One thing that I took away from Chapter 30 is the importance of visuals in your instruction. I’m a visual learner myself and I like to show my students a couple of different ways on how to do things. As I was reading this chapter, I was thinking of different posters that I could make for my classroom that incorporates more than one visual. Most of my students really struggle with the Quadratic equation; I was thinking of making a poster with an example and arrows to show the steps. Now that I’m thinking of it, maybe it would be a neat idea to have the students make a poster on how they do it!
Another thing that really caught my attention in this chapter is the fact that some media can hinder the learning process. Since I started my undergraduate studies in 2000, you always heard “incorporate media into your lessons.” It never dawned on me that I might be incorporating the wrong media or irrelevant media. I’ve learned a lot from this course and I’m going to try my hardest to incorporate a lot of it into my teaching.
While reading chapter 31, what caught my attention the most was the idea of artificial intelligence. It sounds like an awesome tool to use in the classroom. It also has me questioning my own beliefs of technology never being able to take over teaching! The book states that “at the individual level, future instructional systems will diagnose learning needs, learning aptitudes, and styles; develop instruction tailored to identified needs and aptitudes; modify the level and type of feedback and instructional strategy based on learner responses and progress; and implement best practices guidelines based on up-to-date research findings.” Wow! Working in Adult Education, this type of intelligence would be so helpful. If I knew for each student their best learning style for each subject, that would be amazing. If I could have immediate access to half of this information instead of taking half the school year to work with the students and try different things, it would be so much easier for myself and my students. As educators, we could get a lot of use out of a tool like this.