Teaching colors?

Today I “sprinkled” a non-traditional activity into the classroom. According to the curriculum I need to follow for the first twenty days of school, today was the day I was required to teach colors. For high school students this is a topic that is as interesting as grocery shopping with your parents. For myself, as a language teacher focused on communicative skills, I was dreading this day - how often do we talk colors? I figured this would probably be a good opportunity to step out of my approach and try something non-traditional and influenced from my constructivist class. I decided to not think about teaching and instead play an easy game that involved colors. Speaking absolutely no English (a department policy), I came to class with a bunch of colored 2 x 2 cards and started to play a card snatching game. The rules of the game are fairly simple: two players stand with a desk between them and their hands to their sides. With five colored squares laid out in front of them, as soon as they here me call out a color, the first person to snatch up that colored card from the table wins a point.


The game was simple, tons of fun for us competitive folks and yielded surprising results. I did not speak any English to the students and they managed to play the game, recognize the colors, and enjoy the game in about five minutes. We played almost the entire period and then I debriefed the activity at the end with a quick assessment. All students learned their colors and enjoyed themselves with what I thought would be an otherwise boring topic. The greatest surprise for me was my reaction at the end of the activity. The break from the teacher-centered environment energized my spirits and allowed me to enjoy observing the class rather than conducting it.

INSYS 527 – If I “copy and paste” my Word document into my blog will I learn more?

So here I am, once again, writing another blog entry. My main question for this entry is as follows: Is the blog a tool for learning or are the learning experiences a result of an experience unrelated to the blog?

Today, I am leaning towards seeing the blog as a super cool, efficient, web 2.0 tool with nothing new to add to current learning experiences. Reflecting on the actual value of the blog tool, is there any cognitive experience that is improved with a blog that did not already exist with the word processor? The blog writing tools are actually pretty weak compared to any word processor. With that in mind, why are we using blogs? I have personally assigned blogs for the ease of accessing all of my students’ reflections from anywhere with an Internet connection. I have not assigned blogs because I think the tool will help them learn better. In my current class, I appreciate my instructor's approach: she has assigned a weekly reflection either through a blog entry or a submitted Word document. This approach indicates to me an emphasis on the reflection – not the technology. Perhaps it is not the blog that is facilitating learning, rather the reflection and synthesis. With this thought in mind, it reminds me of David Jonassen's mindtools. Jonassen has an interesting point when he states that we need to recognize that “computers are lousy teachers.”