Fishbone is a cool class tool to use with students.  It allows a different way to diagram information to students that's a little more stimulating than the average venn diagram.

Piazza

Piazza is an online site where students can come together to work on a common  question with their instructor’s guidance.  Piazza uses social networking techniques and puts them together to create a tool for learning and understanding.  For example, one can ask a question, another student can respond, and the teacher can approve the response.  However, the same way as Wikipedia, other students can edit the answer until it’s worded perfectly so the other student understands the material better.  It’s like an interactive discussion board that is constantly updated.

            I think Piazza definitely has a future in my area of specialization as an educator.  I plan to teach high school language arts.  Piazza could benefit my students in many different aspects of their language arts education.  An example could be learning grammar.  I could post an example of a sentence and what I want my student’s to find from the sentence.  The student’s could then work together to decipher the sentence and learn from each other.  It could also work with teaching poetry or symbolism in novels.  I could ask my class to figure out the metaphor in the poem or symbols in the novels.  The student’s can work together to come to a student unified answer.

            The only thing I would consider a weakness of Piazza is that I would like to find a way for my students to learn from each other in class, face to face, rather than just over an online tool.  I would like my students to interact in person, as well as over the internet.  Another thing to consider would be the time it takes to teach the classroom how to use Piazza.  Although this is minor, because once the tool is learned, it’s more beneficial for the rest of the class than the time lost learning how to use it.

            I think Piazza would be a really effective tool for classroom management or getting your students to interact and learn from each other.  The tool could be used as a backup explanation from the lesson in class and also a place where students can ask the teacher further questions outside of class.  Maybe they are working on homework at night and need some extra help… all they would have to do is get on Piazza and the teacher would be there guiding and other students there to help.

 

Constructivism vs Objectivism

                Objectivist teaching seems to be a standard style of teaching.  The teacher stands in front of the classroom with authority.  The teacher then gives a presentation over what the student should be learning, and then puts a question to the student to see if they understand the material.  If the student is right, then they are rewarded.  If the student is wrong, then the presentation is repeated until the student understands and remembers the material.  This instruction style rewards being correct and punishes being incorrect.
 

                Constructivist teaching seems to be a more creative way of teaching in that the teacher is actually teaching the students “how to learn.”  In this style of teaching, the teacher becomes a master of ‘the question.’  The question is posed so to bring students to think critically upon previous experiences of their own to form an appropriate response.  Rewards are not given on being correct or incorrect, but on engaging in learning the material based off of the material they already know.  In this way, the student becomes equipped at learning through guidance of their own knowledge.

 

                As a future teacher, I find that both styles are important.  In language arts, sometimes rules are rules such as in regard to grammar.  However, I like the concept of building off of what the student already knows.  If I were to teach constructively, then I could allow students to learn grammar off of sentences they already know and understand.  I could have my students guess what they find to be a correct sentence before displaying what the rules are.  Maybe memorization isn’t the key?  Language arts would be a great field to engage in constructivist teaching because there is already so much creativity allowed.  Even in teaching novels, instead of posing questions testing whether the students read the text, I could ask them questions that brought the themes of the novels to real world problems.  I could engage the students in the text based off what they have already learned in their daily lives.  I would like to put learning in the hands of the students, and teach them how in many ways, they are their own teachers.