Trends Analysis Project

Please see the attached Trends Analysis Project on multisensory learning:

multisensory-learning-pp1.ppt

When “less is more”

This week I read through Richard E. Mayer’s Multi-media Learning chapter on the “Coherence Principle.”  In his principle, he says that “less is more”.  I’ve been struggling a bit recently in my trigonometry classes keeping the student’s attention when lecturing about graphing trigonometric functions such as Sine, Cosine, Tangent, etc.  I watch the students stay with me for a while, but then, I see most of them loose interest.  Some of them start nodding off, others start working on the homework assignments and then others are in la-la land.  Only a few stay with me in the lecture. 

 After reading Mayer’s Coherence Principle, I am starting to second guess some of my teaching methods.  I’ve been wondering if they are in overload (Mayer’s limited capacity principle)  or if I loose them because they are lost in the concepts. I think it may be a combination of the two reasons.  I really haven’t figured out how to present this graphing information differently, because there is a lot of material to cover, but I know I need to figure out a different way. 

 Although Mayer’s principles and concepts are designed for multimedia learning, I am finding that they can also apply to other forms of learning.

Yay for the Plain English Tutorials!

What a great deal – these Plain English tutorials have helped me to understand a bit better, social networking on del.icio.us and RSS feed.  I believe that I have successfully subscribed to some of my classmates blogs and I now understand a bit better about using del.icio.us to help organize and save time when looking for websites of interest. 

I wish I would have visited this link earlier, but better late than never!

http://www.commoncraft.com/show

RSS, Del.icio.us, and Practicioner Reports

I have been and still am confused about what RSS feed is and adding a widget to my blog.  I tried multiple times to add the icon (or whatever it is called) to my blog for the RSS feed, but everytime I added it, all of my bloglines got deleted.  I am trying to research how to add this feed and what it really means, but I am not having much luck.   I’m hoping to get help with this in class this coming week.

I’m also trying to learn about del.icio.us  accounts and how to use del.icio.us, and what the benefits are.  More on that later.  

I haven’t quite decided who I am going to do my “Practicioner Report” on, but I have narrowed it down to a couple of people.  I know I need to decide soon so that I can proceed. 

This Week in Current Trends and Issues:

This week we (Team Mathematics) completed our Induction to the Field Report.  It is nice to be done with the report.  I was responsible for the History of the Field portion of the report.  I found the evolution of today’s Instructional Technology interesting through the visual, audio-visual, radio, instructional television, computer and internet usage.  Although I did not write the sections of the report on the definitions, organizations and journals and blogs, I did see some references to these during my research in the history portions.  I’m interested to see what is next in our trends and issues class.