What are two ways you believe you can apply ideas in this chapter to improve your teaching/instructional design work?
One of the most prominent concepts that I have highlighted, starred, and circled in my brain is the idea of incorporating appropriate visuals to accommodate my text. (As an aside, this will definitely require that I learn how to perform a screen capture on my Mac, as this is the platform of choice that my school has adopted.) I found it particularly interesting that the level of sophistication of the visual has little to no bearing on its effectiveness, as it pertains to learning. Obviously, it is easier to produce learning materials with text alone, but after reading the chapter, I am convinced that a small sacrifice of time will be far out-weighed by the benefits of educational gain.
Another very interesting concept was that of the working and long-term memory. I couldn't help but consider the comparison between our brains and computers (RAM *working* vs. ROM *long-term*). It was humorous to me about how our working memory capacity was described as "seven plus or minus two chunks of information." As the book went on to describe the inherent limitations of the working memory, I found that it all seemed very logical. This understanding will help me in my teaching profession because it should help me consider which elements of rich media are helpful to the learning process, and which are more distracting. Like a PowerPoint with too many animations and sound bytes, which are meant to do nothing more than "wow" the audience, it will be important to remember that just because I can, doesn't mean that I should. In the future, I will need to be more selective about the type, frequency, and amount of rich media that is incorporated into each lesson to ensure that maximum learning occurs.
I found this chapter to be very informational especially since we have to use a lot of visuals to teach our classes.
ReplyDeleteI too will take into account the limit of working memory when planning out lessons or giving instructions especially more then the seven plus or minus two. I find that sometimes my verbal directions can get a little long and writing these out on the board will help students to see what I want them to do.
I fancy myself as someone who takes into consideration the importance of presenting information in many ways. After reading this chapter, I've reflected a bit and found that I sometimes resort to verbal-only directions to save time. I'm glad that the chapter stressed using graphics so much because I know it will force to put in the extra effort to incorporate rich media to present info in many ways. I agree that I will have to be aware of the type, frequency, and amount of rich media I'm using.
ReplyDeleteHuman memory is an important topic in education. As teachers (myself included) we often want/need to cover so much material/information in a certain amount of time. We often forget that we must give our students the means and the time to transfer all the information we are giving them from short-term/working memory to long-term memory.
ReplyDeleteThe talk of visual aides was also interesting to me. I try to mix up things so much in my classroom and have different forms but it is almost solely while i am teaching a unit. just like Kelly said i rarely show visuals while giving directions or other procedural tasks. according to the this things could be a little more effective if visuals are added the correct way.
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