EDC 665 - Week 4 Blog

Using the same learning experience you reflected on last week, did each activity explicitly map to a goal? Implicitly? Did this impact your learning during the activities?

As far as the learning experience was mapped, not every activity mapped to a goal. There was a goal explicitly stated, however, there was a large amount of empty steps for reaching the goal. This makes me believe (and understand) that there are multiple ways to reach a goal. What I see in my teaching is that when I allow students the opportunity to select the "how" rather than give explicit directions, I am far more pleased with the outcome.

As a tangent, my students were learning about animal adaptations and they took an animal and were asked to (goal) change the environment of the animal... hence adapting them to their new environment. For example, a polar bear in the desert or a fish in the sky. As silly as the goal was, the students were extremely interested and creative.

Getting back to MicroWorlds and my own learning experience, I believe the mapping of the project was mapped implicitly, given the amount of tutorials and purpose of the learning activity. I believe the expectation was to work together, hence sharing our ideas to create a "how to" base. In the end, I was surprised with the amount of diversity, but impressed with the knowledge I gained mostly from others in the process.

This absolutely impacted my learning. Given a specific tutorial, I believe our voices would be one in the same as would our products. I am often pleased and hope to share these same kinds of experiences with my students as I am open and allow for the implicit side of goal setting and mapping.