Type I and Type II Technology

Type I technology is technology that students can use on their own with no help from a teacher. They are programs that help students repeatedly practice such skills as adding and subtracting, typing or colors and shapes. Type II technology is technology that is used by teachers to enhance their teaching. Examples include the use of power point, smart boards and graphing calculators that can be hooked up to be viewed by the whole class.

Maddux, Cleborne and D. LaMont Johnson. "Introduction". Type II Applications of Technology in Education: New and Better Ways of Teaching and Learning. The Hawthorn Press, Inc. 2005.

My MEL Experiences

• Student/teacher relationship: Junior year of high school i was in an AP English class. The teacher I had was Mr. Wells. He was excited about English and writing, he was funny and very positive. The class was very discussion based and in the past I had found difficult to share in the discussion because my teachers would ignore my hand in the air. Previous teachers were tired of me doing most of the discussion so they would refuse to call on me. It made me feel like an outsider and I eventually stopped bothering to participate. Mr. Wells made me excited to get involved again and made the other students feel the same way so I didn't feel ignored or too smart.
• Autonomy: In the same English class as before all of the topics for our papers were decided by ourselves. The teacher gave us a topic but we had to pick exactly what we would write about. For example, the last paper of the year was on love and I decided to write my paper arguing that it is possible to fall in love more than once. I based it mostly on my own experiences since my mom and dad are divorced and remarried, and my grandmother has remarried after the death of my grandfather 19 years ago. I argued that seeing them find love again proves to me that it is possible. It was easier to write papers for this English class because I was able to find something interesting about each topic to write about and therefore, make it relevant to me.
• Avoid Rewards: Throughout high school I took Spanish and all four years I had the same teacher. Her way of motivating us to participate in her very wacky class skits was by giving us stickers after. We ended up competing to see who could get the most stickers on their binder before the year was over. I think that some rewards are just fun and silly enough that it makes students want to participate. After all, they were just stickers and we could have bought them at the dollar store. I could see why other types of rewards would be a bad idea though. They would get so used to getting rewarded they would expect it every time.
• Helping Students Succeed: A big part of this one is having high expectations for students. My director for all of my high school plays probably had the highest expectations for me in school. As the four years went by and I got more and more involved in the theater I found that I got even more challenging roles. I always rose to the challenge of doing my best in these roles because I knew I was expected to. It was expected that I would have my lines memorized first, that I would know my character inside out and that i would deliver on the night of performance. My most challenging role was probably as Maggie in Act 3 Scene 5. I had to play the part opposite my younger brother. There was a fake kissing scene that looked very real offstage.
• Hands On: I actually really hated these things in school. They involved getting up and moving. Also, they usually happened in science class and were called labs. I am really bad at labs. I follow the directions completely and still manage to somehow do very poorly. All of my friends loved them though so they helped me not fail science by helping me with the labs and I put the readings in language they could understand and helped them do the equations. I really don't know why the hands on activities are so hard for me.

Chapter 2: Respect, Liking, Trust, and Fairness

Something that surprised me in this chapter were the comments about respect. Students seemed to really stress that teachers needed to respect themselves and their students before they would respect their teachers.

This surprised me mostly because it seems so obvious. I have always been taught that if you want to be respected it is necessary to respect yourself and the people around you. I would assume that more teachers would understand that. The fact that students felt it needed to be said suggests that there are a lot of teachers out there who don't respect themselves or their students.

Chapter 1: Knowing Students Well

In the first chapter one of the students makes a comment about a survey her history teacher gave her on the first day to find out more about the students. The student states that this is the first time a teacher had asked about how she learns.

This surprised me because I always got sick of being asked those same questions over and over again by all of my teachers. My first day always consisted of teachers going over their syllabuses and then handing out these surveys that every other teacher in the school seemed to have. I always got really sick of having to give out the same information over and over again. But, I suppose that it is helpful information for a teacher to have and that it would make some students feel like the teacher cared about who they are.

Learning Style Inventory Results

These are the results of your inventory. The scores are out of 20 for each style. A score of 20 indicates you use that style often.

Style Scores:

Visual 6

Social 13

Physical 8

Aural 4

Verbal 20

Solitary 15

Logical 12

For my Edu 221 class I had to take a survey on my learning style. The survey results are posted above. My highest score was in verbal, with a perfect 20. This makes sense because I spend so much time reading and writing in my freetime. I was also required to do a paper version of this test with Dr. Grace today and that one also says that I am very verbal. However, it gave my secondary learning styles as a tie between logical and intrapersonal(solitary) and the online version has me has more social than logical.

learning-styles-online.com. 2007. 21, Jan. 2009

http://www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/results.asp