Technology and Hypotheses

I think the most important thing about the different strategies and technologies mentioned in this weeks resources is that the new technologies "allow students to spend more time interpreting the data rather than gathering the data." Students still need to be a part of the data gathering process, but the more important part of the process (especially from a constructivist point of view)is the problem solving/invention/etc. portion. The suggested strategies of spreadsheets, data collection tools, and data websites are only useful as they accomplish the generating and testing of a chosen hypothesis.

So the ways that these technologies correspond with constructionist learning theories is the way that they make the student think and work while connecting what they are doing with prior knowledge and the situation in which they are learning the material.

Cognitivism

One of the ideas behind cognitivism is that the process the mind goes through to learn can be changed and improved. The learning techniques suggested in the reading this week address this idea. The use of various different advance organizers provides a mental layout for students to follow in their learning. At first they are guided and shown exactly how to draw and fill in the graphic organizer. Eventually though the graphic organizer provides a pattern that the students can fill out on their own to help them organize their thoughts, or maybe some students don't even need the physical organizer anymore but the form has enabled them to organize their thoughts in a logical manner. The same idea applies for the many different summarizing and note taking strategies. You start out with a pattern for the student to copy so that when the pattern is taken away the mind has been trained to process information in an organized manner.

Behaviorism in Practice

I really liked the idea of tracking effort from this weeks reading. Showing students that effort equals success in a concrete manner like that would seem to be a very effective teaching strategy. It is also a very behaviorist strategy. It is showing students that this behavior leads to this result. Good grades result (for most students) in rewards and poor grades result in consequences. The author suggests setting up a spreadsheet to track this, which I guess you could do, but it seems like just trying to shoehorn technology into the process. I guess if you have a class set of computers that you have easy access to that would work well, but for how much time getting a class to the computer lab takes use a sheet of paper would be just as effective.

The strategies suggested in the next chapter are more project-based ideas. The use of word processing, spreadsheets, multimedia software, etc fits better into the constructivist theory since the students would be associating the learning with the way that they learned it, not just the stimulus-response pattern of behaviorist theory.