Tools in the Classroom

Discuss how you, or other teachers, might use some of the tools you've learned about this semester to develop instructional supplements for their content area. Try to be specific as you discuss this. What could you (or others) create, specifically, that you could use to help students learn? Discuss how this relates back to cognitive information processing. Then, describe how you (or others) could have students using some of these tools for learning content. Try to come up with specific examples of this. Then, discuss how this use of the tools relates back to either cognitive information processing or constructivist learning environments.


This year I have focused a lot of my energy on applying the practices/tools we have learned in class to my own classroom. It is difficult to incorporate all of the CIP ideas in each lesson, but I have continued to practice this idea throughout some lessons. One lesson that allowed students to use technology in the classroom while focusing on the CIP involved the terms "fact" and "inference". The students had to find clipart in the web and insert it into the "online inspriration website". While on the website they created a a web to 5 facts about the pictures and 5 inferences. They colored "facts" red and "inferences" blue. The students not only learned the defintion of these two terms throughout the lesson, but they also committed this to their long term memory when they had to apply the learned information to their own project.