CEdO525 - Week 3

 

For this week's assignment we had to read the article The use of advance organizers in the learning and retention of meaningful verbal material and also watch a Podcast called Maps Alive( http://tlai1.podomatic.com/player/web/2006-03-28T06_58_51-08_00). 

I was then asked to review three online tools for the purposes of comparing/contrasting them. I choose Webspiration (http://www.mywebspiration.com/ ),  MindMeister (http://www.mindmeister.com) and Exploratree http://www.exploratree.org.uk. To complete this assignment, I went through each site and looked at the examples that were provided and then attempted to at least start something new to see how easy it was to manipulate the graphic organizer. Of the three that I chose to delve into, I found Webspiration to be the most visually pleasing and fun to use. The examples in Webspiration appeared to be more interesting than those that were created in the other two programs. I did like the MindMeister set-up as well, just not quite as much as the Webspiration. Exploratree seemed to be the most basic of the three and created results that, while potntially very useful in certain settings, did not appear to be as fun to work with or manipulate. To make things even more interesting, MindMeister also comes as a mobile app. Not exactly sure how one would weave that into the classroom setting, but it's still pretty cool!                     

I was then asked to post a a reflection on the discussion board for each of the strategies studied this week: Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers; Nonlinguistic Representation; Summarizing and Notetaking . I think that I will have a tougher time this week with making a direct correlation between these teaching/learning tools and my world of work. Cues and questions are two items that do come up routinely in the office. When asking someone to complete a task I can prompt them with a cue (something that will make them recall a previous instance of completing a similar task and perhaps any feedback that they received at that time). I don't know that the questions that I ask are aimed at getting the same results that a teacher/student relationship is aiming for. It is not unheard of for those that are answering to me to have a vastly greater experience and knowledge of the subject matter than I do at the time. The only concrete example of a Nonlinguistic Representation that immediately comes to mind is our Incident Command System's "Planning P"(depicted below). This tool is used to guide responders through the initial stages and planning cycles for an incident response.

I am able to see the summarizing and notetaking skills of my personnel when I take  someone with me to one of meetings and ask them to take the notes and prepare the meeting minutes. Due to the fact that I have been on both sides of this process I have been able to pass some decent guidance along to my scribes. Personally, for some reason, I tend to take many notes during meetings and then use the X symbol next to those points that either need immediate/further action or research.