I believe that the Integrated Learning and the Riser Model would be worthwhile to explore in teaching material to students of any grade. Gone are the days of the teacher lectures and the students absorb material in order to regurgitate on a test. Due to the vast learning styles of students we are obliged as teachers to offer all students a way to grasp a concept or lesson. Today’s students are very aware of technology and can become bored very easily with just reading or being lectured at.
I love the idea of breaking down the interactive modules across all the classes. This helps to engage students in their learning environment to learn to think outside the box. They would no longer segregate classes into one box or another when in this line of teaching they might start thinking about how does this crossover to Math, English, or Foreign Languages. In the Integrated class lesson plans the breakdown such as Life Skills, Curriculum Tie, etc helps the teacher to be able to keep their focus on teaching their content area along with applications to real life. The students again are allowed some creative freedom which helps them to feel like they can engage in the activities because they have a vested interest.
To incorporate modern technologies helps the student to have a voice in how they learn best. Even though some of the strategies may not reach out to each student, every student has an opportunity to be touched by one of the strategies if teachers take into account learning styles and base their curriculum around that in order to engage all students.
Fundamentally we need to incorporate technology into the learning environment in order to help our students become competitive in the global market for jobs. Students will need to know how to think critically through websites, programs and anything else technology throws their way in order to compete with local and foreign markets.
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When I was in High School, my school tried to do a similar model as TEAMS where we were expected to Write Across the Curriculum. We didn't do this very often, we had one huge project on the Holocaust were we wrote a lot of journal entries and incorporated different classes into our journal entries. Unfortunately, most of my teachers didn't embrace this and simply told us to write a paper that some how incorporated their subject and hand it.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how I feel about having our students rely on technology so much. It is definitely important that our students know how to use modern technology but I also think it is important that they know how to use low tech as well, paper and pen. It bothers me that there are a lot of students, you can even see this on the college level, that don't know how to write complete sentences, they use abbreviations like in text messaging. I don't know, maybe I'm just saying I hate text messaging.
I really like that this model encourages students to look at the subjects they are studying as building off of one another and not standing alone. It is very important that our students know that what they are learning has real life applications.
There are many different learning styles and I agree that this style of teaching reaches a variety of those. I also agree with Nathan, that we don't want to completely rely on technology. The great thing about TEAMS is not all the four different stations focused on using technology. One was a text station for written work. I also loved the collaboration between teachers and lesson plans so that students may better comprehend how the subject relates to others and everyday application.
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