By Sophia Strickfaden Recently, I had two colleagues email for ideas on how to assign their students video creation tools. They needed it to be a group collaboration for a class project.
So, I went to work. In my search, I came across many tools (i.e Animoto) that seemed promising, but either cost money or didn’t seem reliable. After digging for a few hours, I went back to my original tools: iMovie and Adobe Spark.
0 Comments
by Sophia StrickfadenHave you ever wondered what exactly is happening when students are staring blankly at the lecture slides or finding it difficult to respond to your on-the-spot questions? There are a variety of reasons students have trouble staying engaged and responsive in a course. Some of these reasons have to do with the architecture of the brain.
These 5 principles of cognitive learning are based on a comprehensive list provided in Online Teaching at Its Best by Linda Nilson and Ludwika Goodson (2018, pp. 79-82). All of these principles apply to face-to-face, online, and any type of learning environment. Minimize Cognitive Load Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 1988) is the idea that our brains have a certain capacity and demands on this brain capacity impact our learning outcomes. In other words, if you think of a student’s cognitive capacity as a bucket and you fill up the bucket to the brim with ideas and new information, then adding more ideas may put the bucket above the student’s capacity to learn. This is one way we understand why students may miss the mark or not remember information clearly. Cognitive Load is dynamic in many ways, if anything, because we haven’t figured out quite how the brain works exactly. Yet, what we do know is the mind has a limited capacity to gain, retain, and recall information, which calls for us to package our learning content and lessons into chunks for the most efficient learning possible. Now, imagine the brain capacity bucket is filled with various different elements. Perhaps in this example we have dry beans, grains of rice, and water. Each of these elements represent different details of different categories of information. Right now, it’s all mixed together as if you were to plan to make a bean and rice soup. The mixture looks rather homogenous with various grains of rice, individual beans, and water to fill in the spaces between the two. Now, imagine placing separate cups in the bucket. One cup contains beans, another contains rice, and another contains the water. Now, we have organized our ingredients in the bucket according to category. This is how students learn best, by well organized, easy-to-understand packages or chunks of information. They may not have soup at this point, but they certainly have the ingredients in understandable cups and quantities. |