week 13

    Teachers are constantly designers.  Designers have to layout plans to follow so that the result is the best outcome,  teachers have to do just that.  Teachers have to design their lessons around the type of students that they have and around how the students learn. So every time they teach a lesson it is completely different.  Even the way that the teacher lays out the room arrangement affects how well the students are learning and so the teacher learns to design and adapt a room for the type of classroom setting.
    Scratch is a very important and useful program for in the classroom, mainly a programming classroom.  Scratch helps new students that have never programmed before the basics of programming and how it works.  This program takes graphics and by clicking and dragging the user can create a very simple program.  Now while this program cannot replace the normal way of programming it can help teach basic concepts, which is why it is so useful for programming classrooms.
    Digital storytelling is a new way to help allow students to be creative.  Digital storytelling requires that a student write a story, then after that is organized the student has to become digitally creative.  To be digitally creative the student must make a video to go along with their story, then using the appropriate software  edit the video using their imagination.  This form of story telling allows for the development of creativity in many new and different ways.  Since there are so many ways to edit something digitally there are nearly unlimited ways for something to be edited.  Thus promoting new and creative ideas.  I believe it would work in my classroom because I enjoy when the students are creative and I tend to do anything that will promote this.
    Visualization is very important to completely understanding math. Math and especially in the higher levels of math deal with very complex concepts that involve functions.  The functions get warped in such ways that many times its very hard to understand what is going on, but with visualization it helps the students completely understand what is going on during the problem.  There are many programs that help to visualize what would be going on is such problems probably the most popular being a graphing calculator. 
    I do not believe that someone can completely rely on learning from a television.  While this form of teaching can be very affective in some situations. Most types of learning need to be active and involved so that the student can fully understand by asking questions and get hands on experience rather then watching someone else accomplish something.  Many times while watching the tv the viewer can “zone out” and not really pay any attention to what they are looking at.  While learning something that the viewer finds completely interesting from a tv, may be a good use. Attempting to learn something that the student is not interested at all in can be very hard.  Where having a teacher could help the student in ways a video cant.

                    references 

Jonassens, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. M.,Grismond, D. (2008).  Meaningful
           learning with technology. Columbus: Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall.