"INSIDEPIDP"
My Journey, Learnings and Experiences...
Are educators the most difficult learners? In this blog I am the subject of my own research. I want to analyze myself, my posts and thoughts about being a teacher and how they change at each step with each course I take in the PIDP And I just hope I stay an unbiased, critical analyzer of my own learning.
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Lesson Planning Resources
 Bloom's Taxanomy and digital toolsSince 1956, bloom’s taxanomy has been the foundation of most modern educational systems. Today we have officially entered into the digital age, everything is becoming digitized. Understanding the tools and technologies for teaching in the digital age as per the taxanomy is important. I am a technology monger and knowing the right methods of enabling learning via technology is dear to me and thus I really like this table detailing various digital tools as per the taxanomy. |  Applications &Tools 4 BloomAgain another resource that caught my attention is this image suggesting the various applications and tools available online and on various gadgets that can support learning in the digital environment. It was a very intriguing realization for me to figure out how the tools that we use for fun and interaction in our daily lives can be real aids in a formal learning environment. |
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POSITIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
This emotionally over-whelming talk gave me the ‘wow’ I was looking for. Encouragement and saying, ‘Wow’, and saluting learning, is what Mitra calls creates learning.
Trust, encouragement, acknowledging, admiring, providing resources and enabling is what creates a positive learning environment.
My senior at work used to tell me when I was a young teacher that as teachers we are like potters who keep their hands just around the mud and let the mud take the shape. We need to be firm enough so that the mud is safe while evolving and yet take care that we don’t spoil it by the pressure. That is when creativity happens.
MOTIVATION
Rita Pierson in her talk asks every educator to make their students feel big and capable of doing tasks that they are otherwise not very confident of doing. That is the best motivational technique for me. Intrinsic motivation has a long life and creates true learning. To intrinsically motivate students we need to learn to believe in them and make them feel confident and powerful about their own capabilities. Today’s classrooms should not be places where just content is delivered through lessons, rather they should be places where students fall in love with the process of learning. And that can only happen when we create a motivated learning environment.
Give them just grades and they get greedy. :) Give them a purpose and they excel.
ASSESSMENT
‘Give them grades and they get greedy’.
This phrase rings in my mind every time I think about assessment. I think that assessment should be authentic and should be capable of measuring the real-world mastery of subjects in students.
This particular article really caught my attention and I think it can be a real resource for planning assessment criteria. In this article various studies have been organized as per subject areas and the criteria for authentic assessment has been outlined for each subject area. It gives practitioners a true sense of how they can view authentic assessment in the context of their field of expertise.
INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES
Instructional strategies may vary in every situation, group type, subject and topic of study and also as per the expected outcome. The key idea behind choosing an instructional strategy is creating an engaging and powerful learning environment where students participate and willing take on the responsibility of their learning.
This image has very clearly grouped various instructional strategies according to the instruction skill. With such a large array of strategies sticking so clearly in one image, it becomes easy for the instructor to pick and choose the right instructional strategy as per the lesson being planned. Indirect, Experiential and interactive instructional strategies are comparatively powerful ways of instruction according to me.
