listenup

I defiantly believe that there are many ways to teach or convey information to students to help in their learning process. Unfortunately my own background in learning was that of the 1960’s which dealt mainly with ingestion of information from a teacher and rote learning, but never really understanding how to process the information I had acquired. I see the constructivist point of view as that of learning how and where to acquire information, evaluating that information and leaning how to use the information in more than one area of study.
With all the information that is now available to students via web access I believe that students must learn to question the validity of that information and learn to decipher what is most valuable to the student.
I have been able to see the results of constructivist teaching in a classroom environment and believe that this style tremendously helps students acquire, process, and summarize the task at hand. There are many different lesson plans available for teachers to develop this type of learning. One that I particularly like is called “jigsaw learning”. This plan is designed for the students to become the experts on a particular subject once they have completed their investigation (from sources that the teachers has helped to provide) the students present to smaller groups of students their knowledge and also receive new information that the other expert group has acquired.
While on web quest this week I found another helpful program that I would definitely use to help my student develop their investigative skills. http://php.indiana.edu/~kdharper/introduction.htm
This is a great program for learning in a constructivist style with dividing into groups and letting the children present the information they have developed. I believe that people who criticize the constructivist view of learning think that the teacher is not helping to build on the information that is be taught. This is in my opinion completely wrong. I believe that the teacher must put more time and energy in to preparing and helping to analyze the information that the students are receiving and in turn the students develop a critical step in processing and storing the information and also learn how to cross-reference this information when need for different situations that arise.