The ITEC Blog

This weeks reading are from Chapters 3-5, in Teaching for Understanding with Technology. The basic premise of the chapters is teaching using a generative topic, which is a topic that is multidisciplinary, gets the interest of the teacher and students, and is rewarding even after you have finished using it in class.

My UbD, I believe is a generative topic for several reasons. First, it grabs the students attention because they love spending money and they seem to think it “grows on trees”, since advertising is a way of spending money, then it fits into the grabbing the attention requirement. Secondly, advertisements are something that we see everyday, you don’t have to connect it to real life because it is real life. Finally, this unit can be connected to technology, business, English, and math classes. It is an interdisciplinary topic, if you think about it!

I am planning on using Internet explorer, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Media Player, MS PowerPoint, and MS Word at the minimum for this unit. So, I am including the technology and one thing that I need to add to my UbD is the technology goals or standards that are going to be covered in my unit.

The final idea the chapters touch on is collaboration. I think that collaboration makes learning fun and it gets kids to understand why they need to learn the quadratic formula or the correct way to write a 5 paragraph paper. It can show them that what they are learning really does matter.

There needs to be more collaboration within the local school systems, states, country, and even worldwide, just like there should be more differentiation in the classroom. However, it’s going to take a few teachers who are willing to take a risk and show that collaboration does work. When other teachers see a creative and exciting learning environment where the students are actually learning the material the teachers are going to be more eager to give it a shot. “Teachers who are courageous learners themselves are more likely to foster their students’ courage to learn” (p.78).