Hello Math friends,
It has been a bit of time since my
last post. We had a week of flexing, then reading, and now we are back to the
grind, the home stretch. This week we continued to focus on new and exciting
teaching strategies we can use in our upcoming placement. We focused specifically
on blended learning this week, and how we as teachers can use technology better
in the classroom.
Our classrooms are becoming more
and more connected to the real-world via technology, which is allows educators
to extend the reach of their learning past their school walls as well as out of
their hands as it is a main way to develop more student centered learning. When
it comes to the use of technology in my classrooms, math focused or not, I tend
to look at the use of technology as somewhat effective. I believe technology is
routinely used as a distraction for students after they have finished their
required work. Instead, using technology in the class needs to enrich an
improve understanding instead of just take up time.
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| Retrieved from https://goo.gl/5bzU2F on October 21, 2017 |
That notion if woven into SAMR, which
is a model designed to help educators infuse technology into teaching and
learning. It enables teachers to gauge how technology is utilized in
classrooms. The focus is on how technology is changing the learning for
students and not the technology itself, which is crucial for using tech in math
class. SAMR is an acronym for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and
Redefinition. Each word describes how technology can be used in order to alter
how the students learn and execute and activity. I really liked the ideas behind
the Augmentation aspect of the SAMR Model, as it focused on how students can
use technology to improve how they complete a task, without changing the original
task. An example of this would be having students use some of the iPad’s built
in tools such as the thesaurus, dictionary or speak mode to augment the
classroom task. Allowing he students to alter how they get to their final
result of a task could allow for more students engagement as they feel more in
control over their learning.
Below is a helpful link for those who want to know more
about SAMR model, and how to approach any lesson across any discipline with
this way of thinking in mind.
The SAMR model is just one of the
strategies we focused on that taught us how to blend our learning for our
students. I consider the whole idea of blended learning as being a great
background ideal to have when doing any long range planning. We routinely hear
about how our brains are muscles and they get stronger the more we use them,
like regular muscles. I can take this thinking a little bit further, focusing
on the importance of confusion. When training your muscles, it is important to
embrace muscle confusion by completing different variations of an exercise, as
your muscles can get bored with a certain way of doing something, which makes
the action itself less effective. This way of thinking describes why blended
learning is so important. Not that is creates confusion, but it allows students
to answer, complete and conduct various activities and tasks, many ways.
Blended learning models like SAMR allows me as a teacher to design lessons and
tasks that ask my students to use many different skills instead of just relying
on one or two.
I will be remembering the SAMR
model for long time now, because I think it is a great tool to use while in the
beginning stages of unit and long range planning.
Thanks for reading,
Mr. Primeau
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