TIP Presentations

The TIP presentations have been very informative. I think more classes should go over strategies to use in the classroom. I spent years taking education classes and at the end of them I kept thinking that I still wasn't prepared to be a teacher. I am not the most creative individual. Sometimes I need help in coming up with ideas and fun strategies to use in a classroom. I even have this issue in coaching football, as a lot of coaches might. This is why their is a widespread sharing of drill tapes. We have thousands of videos on our computers in the office with examples of practice drills from other school that we can use with our players. All of our coaches watch these videos to see if we can come up with new and beneficial drills for our players to go through. This is why this class has been so beneficial to me. We have gone over lists of strategies to use in the classroom. I can keep this knowledge and my bag of tricks to refer back to, almost like my drill tapes in coaching, and I can use them in the future if I ever need to. The TIP presentations have really given me an overload of material and strategies to use. Not all of them will necessarily apply to high school history students but a majority of them do, and the other ones have given me ideas of other things I could do in my classrooms.  

Direct Instruction

Direct Instruction can take place in any classroom where there is a large set of content to be covered. This strategy may not always be the most fun to employ for yourself or your students, but sometimes it is a great way to get a lot of content to your students. Direct Instruction doesn't have to always be boring though. The teacher can make the lecture a lot more interesting by adding a PowerPoint as a visual and maybe attaching pictures to this presentation or video clips as examples for your students. The teacher can also add in some supplementary reading that the students may find more interesting. Direct Instruction is a very important strategy to use even if it is not always the most popular strategy. Some students may even prefer this strategy. Some might not like being in a group discussion or a whole class seminar, and simply prefer being provided the material from their teacher, studying it, and then being assessed on the material.

Socratic Seminar

One of the strategies we discussed recently was the Socratic Seminar. This was an interesting model, and could work well in a high school history class. There are plenty of debatable topics in history. This would be a good chance to use this strategy and have the students discuss possible scenarios and outcomes of historical events. A teacher could use it in so many forms, such as taking a historical event and discussing what the outcome would have been if certain variables were changed. This is a good chance for the students to think critically, and learn from each other through the class discussions.

Their are a few negatives to this strategy though. One of the negatives is that students who do not like to speak in class may not participate. Discussions may be a few students who like to speak out going back and forth. The teacher needs to figure out how to make the students comfortable in the setting and figure out a way to get students more involved. The teacher also needs to be aware of the potential for the discussions to get faced paced and jumping all over the place and for certain students to not get a chance to speak.  

TWS

I think the major thing I am getting out of the TWS is the idea of really focusing on the small details of the lessons. Usually I would plan a lesson but not really focus on how the contextual factors will really come into play. I would have the learning goals and objectives but I might not have really focused on how my activities and assessments are going to address those specific goals. The TWS has really gotten me to take an in depth look into the planning of a lesson to make sure that everything I am doing is really being beneficial and is the most efficient way to get the material across to my students. By really going this in depth I think it will make for a better lesson and really reach my students. I think this will also help me to think more in depth about how I plan my lessons from here on out.

Project Based Learning

I enjoyed the virtual class we had last night on project based learning. It gave me a good chance to really examine it in depth. The Buck Institutes website was really in depth and had some great videos on there explaining what PBL is all about. I did not realize how complex it can get when you are trying to conduct one across all the subjects. It takes a lot of cooperation between teachers to be able to tie all the concepts together to fit into the different disciplines. It also helps when teachers have some concept of how the project relates to the other subjects, therefor they often have to learn the material in a different discipline. This is not any easy thing to do and takes a lot of work on the teachers part. I do, however, think it is worth it, because PBL is a great way to get students to think critically, work together, and use the tools necessary to be successful in today's world.  

Jigsaw Cooperative Learning

I think the Jigsaw method of cooperative learning is a great exercise. Not only does it allow students to work together cooperatively, but it allows them to work on several other skills as well. During the jigsaw exercise students can work on social skills and communication skills. They will also be working on note-taking skills if they are writing down all the information that they are obtaining. I think the jigsaw method is also a great way of getting a lot of information in a short period of time. I think the jigsaw exercise could be used a million different ways in a history class depending on the topic that is being studied. If a certain war is being studied each group can study a specific battle in depth then they can switch members and each learn about a specific battle. If the student are learning about early America and Indian tribes they could each teach each other about a different Indian tribe.

I think the graffiti method could be used on those same topics but maybe for more of a review, with each group describing each event and then summarizing what everyone has said at the end, and coming up with the important information that would be needed for the test.

Reading Selection #6

"It's In The Game." Irish Sports Daily.Com. 2010. Irish Sports Daily. 4 March. 2010
 http://www.irishsportsdaily.com/football/2045-its-in-the-game

I decided to use this article, because it had a direct correlation with me as a football coach. This article discusses XOS PlayAction Simulator, a product of XOS Digital, Inc. This simulator is a virtual training tool for football players. It plays just like a video game, such as Madden or NCAA Football. The thing that makes this simulator unique is that it has been modified from the game to a more realistic version of football. The main reason it is a good simulator is because a team can load their offense onto the game and a player can run his own offense and help him not only learn the plays, but how they are supposed to look and what he should be looking for when he runs those plays. The simulator can also allow the coaches t create a list of the plays they would like to run and the types of defenses he wants them to run against. It really is the best thing for learning outside of actual practice. A couple of paragraphs really stuck out with how much this program can do:
“We go so far as to give coaches, when they’re scripting the session, to specify who can and cannot catch a ball,” Tsai said. “For example, on a given play against a certain defense, if my read is to the X receiver, and I throw to the Z, we can actually force an incompletion, interception or whatever, to ensure that wrong receiver doesn’t get the ball. That’s just another mechanism to provide feedback for the player.”

 “The main benefit there is, your starting quarterback, he’s going to get most of the reps on the practice field,” Tsai said. “But your second-stringers and the younger guys, that can just sit and observe and watch film, they’ve got a way now, where they can train and go through that decision-making process in a virtual environment.”

This coaching tool is a really impressive piece of technology. I knew that you could play a video game and put in your own playbook to help your players learn the offense, but the aspect of it that I did not know and that is so impressive is the fact that you can script the plays and defenses and have a certain look to a certain offensive play. It is also amazing that the technology can understand when a player made the wrong read and throw and force the negative outcome to occur as a result.

If this technology isn't efficient, effective, and engaging I don't know what is. This allows coaches to virtually get in extra practice time. This is the next closest thing to actually physically running plays. It allows players who may not get as much work on the field to stay prepared. It can also allow players who are hurt to still get in practice. It can also prepare a player for an upcoming game, because they can run their plays and put in the opponents defenses to work against. It is efficient, because it won't take as much time as a normal practice would and you do not have to get all pads on and what not. It is effective, because it simulates almost exactly what a player will see on the field. This simulator is probably more engaging then it is anything else, because the players like to play it. To them is seems just like they are playing a video game.

Overall, this simulator would be ideal to have as a couch. I would definitely love to have it for my players, the only problem is I am sure it costs a boatload of money. This is probably why only a handful of schools have it, and those schools are the major division one Universities.