Cognitivism in Practice

When trying to teach students you always want the information to go from short to long term memory and make connections that allow students to be able to recall the information when needed. There are quite a few instructional strategies that assist in this and now technology can expand upon them. One of the all time favorites is concept maps which help learners to organize and visualize information which according to Dr. Orey replicates the network model of memory. There are several programs, such as inspiration, that allow students and teachers to create concept maps allowing them to be easily manipulated and edited as many times as desired. This visual information also provides and supports dual coding of information making it easier for students to remember the information. These concept maps can be used both for organizing information to write an essay or to take notes during a lesson.

In looking at using word and teaching students how to summarize I did not know that word had an auto summarize option. This is a feature that can be very powerful especially for struggling students and teaching them not to plagiarize. I had always wondered why someone would use the track changes feature but it is a great visual model of how to summarize a paragraph for taking notes so students learn to focus on the important concepts. My daughter learned to summarize by reading many passages and underlining key words and crossing out unnecessary information. She spent hours of homework doing this to learn how to read for information and summarize. If she had been taught to use the track changes feature and given text on the computer she would have learned the same thing and would have saved her hours of tedious writing especially when writing is difficult due to hand tremors. I am sure at this point she has lost the connection because it is not a task that she used beyond the 4th grade. However using word it would have had more applications for her since the majority of her research is done on the internet and she could then simply copy it into word and use those techniques to summarize the important information for her reports. Plus she would use it in different contexts building numerous connections helping to store the information into long term memory.