Effective Instruction

These are two good articles.  I did see similarities in both the articles.  The articles seemed to focus on students' needs the most.  They both talked about the prior knowledge of the student and how it relates to the material to be learned.  They also stressed that in order to have effective instruction it needs to be well paced, motivating, and have a purpose.  Feedback was also common for these articles. 

However, the first article went more into detail about QAIT (quality of instruction, appropriate levels of instruction, incentive, and time).  It also mentioned cooperate-learning, collaboration, talked about time, and some ways to motivate students.  It also expressed that students need to be excited about the material to be learned.  It went into how classroom management can help or hurt effective instruction. 

The second article mentioned reflection as a way of being a part of effective instruction.  It also talked about feedback more than the first one.

Why is effective instruction so important for us as TIS professionals? 

• Feedback is important
• Work with various groups of studetns
• Teach different concepts across the curriculum
• Creating motivation 
• Collaboration within school or classroom
• Is held accountable

What is our role when it comes to helping teachers be effective?

• Help them with motiviation
• Collaboration in the classroom or school
• Purchase materials, software, and provide professional development with training when necessary
• Work with all types of students, staff, and teachers
• Is liaison between teachers and administration
• Follow the rules and help support the goals of the school and teachers

Concept map

I hope that this will work.  I used wordle.net to create it.  

This week we began studying presentation design. I had no idea...

It is funny but I have been talking to my students about how to design a better powerpoint.  I have watched Life after Death by Powerpoint several times before and agree with him completely.  Some of the things that I can't stand is when my students go crazy with the animations.  It is like he said, the flying lines are so distracting.  I used to like them and think that they were interesting but now they are just annoying.  I like to use a few to put my point across but only a few. 
As I went through these presentations, I realized that some of it looked familiar.  I have seen some boring powerpoints in my time.  They left me feeling tired and bored.  Then I have seen some great ones and I get excited about the topic.  These powerpoints capture my interest through their use of effective images.  I think that images are awesome at grabbing my brain.  The more interesting the picture, the more I want to find out what they picture relates to.  I had no idea about the different places you can find pictures to use and to get higher resolutions.  I am starting to realize that I hate using clipart.  I would rather go and find pictures and I will check out the sites from these presentations.  One other thing that I haven't really thought about was the practice and prep time.  I have slapped together presentations with little thought and put too much info on the slides.  I have started to come away from that.  I now look more into using images and less words on my slides.  Plus I stick to a few points and then talk about things that relate to those points in my presentation. 
I also like the idea about CRAP.  It is a great way to set up and check your presentations.   Notice that I say presentations instead of powerpoint.  I have started to expand away from powerpoints.  I have used glogsters, prezi, posters, classtools.net, and others to create presentations.  I want to learn more about other presentation tools.  Hopefully, I can start creating more with these other presentation modes.