Vygotsky and Personal Learning Environments

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2009/10/vygotsky-and-personal-learning-environments/

Vygotsky and Personal Learning Environments

This article is very interesting; it truly reminded me of all the discussions we used to have in the Education Psychology course about Vgotsky versus Piaget, and Skinner during last semester.

Vigotsky’s definition of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers". Simply said the ZPD is the area between what an individual can achieve on their own and what they can achieve with assistance.

I certainly agree with his theory when he advances that students should be allowed to reach the top of their ZPD, and should be judged on their ZPD: indeed many students may not perform well under the pressure of the limited time of exams in order to be accurately evaluated and receive the grades they deserve. I have seem many children (relatives, friends, neighbors) that have similar issues, they just do not perform well during standardized tests, but are across the year good students.

I truly believe that -although it sounds complicated and complex to implement it- educators should consider evaluating students on how well they have reached their optimal potential within their ZPD, instead of "teaching to the test" and being evaluated on how well they prepared for the test.

MLS vs PLE

LMS vs PLE http://mohamedaminechatti.blogspost/2010/03/mls-vs-ple.html Although I found the title of this blog a bit confusing - to me it seems to imply that one may be better than the other - I believe that the PLE and the LMS can not be mutually exclusive because we simply need both of them. If I think about most students' experiences, through the academic world, they have been exposed to LMS from a young age; the information was centralized, the expectations and goals were clearly defined, and for the most part knowledge was unidirectional with a beginning time and an end time. Basically they had to adapt to the system. On the other hand, with the proliferation of technology, PLEs - such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, My Space, YouTube, SlideShare, Google,...etc - are now very much accessible to users, and the beauty is that users do not have to comply to any system, they can select their own learning systems/topics/time and develop their own community, and network of knowledge sharing. In essence PLEs are flexible and completely "user-centric". In conclusion, I believe that ideally incorporating some level of PLE into the LMS would be very appealing and beneficial to today's end users.

Dangerously Irrelevent, Technology, Leadership, And The Future of Schools: Is individualized instruction a bad thing?

Please find the blog's url below:
http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2010/10/is-individualized-instruction-a-bad-thing.html/comment-page-1#comment-34585

Title of the blog: Dangerously Irrelevent, Technology, Leadership, And The Future of Schools: Is individualized instruction a bad thing?

My response to the blog:

I believe that educators should provide individualized instruction when needed because “one size doesn’t fit all”; in other words there are diferrent types of learners in a clasrroms (i.e. visual, auditory, kinesthetic), not counting students with learning dissabilities (special needs students) and gifted students. Whenever appropriate, I believe that using assistive technology to make content more accessible and more meaningful to students should be a priority. Technology per se is not always the solution, it is rather the way we use it to achieve a specific goal that is the solution. Regarding the discipline aspect, althought I believe that teachers should demande respect and discipline in the classroom, all of that “good stuff” should start at home, and parents are just as accountable.

Wiki in Education

Title of the Article: Wiki-Centric Learning

http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/09/15/wiki-centric-learning.aspx

I found this article interesting because it gives detailed examples of how wikis can be utilized in a classroom, it underlines that a "technology-centric" classroom where pretty much everything revolves around wikis is possible. Indeed,  it shows the multiple ways of using wiki such as quickly accessing handouts, assignments, PowerPoint presentations and other materials as well as creating online collaborative workspaces for students.
Although I have not used wikis yet, after reading this article and some others online, I truly look forward to using it with my future students mainly because it is not only simple and non-geeky, but it is also adaptable depending on what you want to accomplish. The biggest benefits of wikis are fast, efficient collaboration for projects, papers, and websites. I can see how much it can be useful for students because they make group projects easier to coordinate and teachers can interact with students throughout the course of a project or assignment, see their progress, and give them feedback along the way.
As more and more teachers learn about wikis, their simplicity, benefits, and the fact that it can bring them closer to their students, to other teachers, as well as to librarians, I believe that the use of wikis will grow.