Lesson 7: The Brain & Web 2.0 Tools

This week we learned about the importance of the brain in learning for students.  We focus so much about practices and strategies that will help students understand a topic, but we can also gain a lot more insight on the learning process by looking at the functions of the organ that does the processing itself.  We looked at the correlation between art forms and the growth of knowledge in other content areas.  I think practices that involve us using multiple parts of the brain are more effective to build learning in students.  When you become accustomed to using many parts of your brain you will be adept and using it in other areas as well.  When you use more of your brain you are more likely to commit learning to memory. 

Another important practice that can help learning is the use of games in learning.  This has to be very purposeful because games can quickly become about the winning or losing aspect and learning doesn’t matter as much.  If you maintain that balance you can present interesting and informative games that students will be engaged in and learn through their engagement. 

We were asked to choose one of the web 2.0 tools that we have learned about in our tech explorations and apply that into the classroom and evaluate its use and effectiveness in the class.  I chose to use webquests in my classroom and made a webquest specifically for my content area that I could use in the first few weeks of school.  Webquests are great tools in that you have everything available already on the internet so students can complete the activity just as efficiently at home as at school.  Webquests also bring out more engagement and interest from the students.  This does not mean you can have any normal workbook page as a webquest.  There has to be real world applications into your webquest or its not being used in a purposeful manner. 

I completed my webquest with my students this week and it took a couple days to complete but I really enjoyed the products that were created as a result of the webquest.  The students created more in-depth maps of the school and incorporated elements just as a professional cartographer would.  The objective was to learn about elements of maps for students to make better connections and understand what maps are trying to convey to them.  This is the same webquest I posted in lesson six from QuestGarden. 

The students were indeed very engaged and had creative products in the end.  They showed an increase in knowledge about geographic elements within maps.  I wish that I would have provided more in-depth activities on the different elements however.  All I had was for students to provide basic understanding of the element such as latitude and longitude and then had them incorporate that into their school maps.  I would have liked to have extended this by having students apply understanding of the elements in another form other than the visual maps.  I enjoyed completing this activity with my students as it made the class more interesting and built comradery with my students.