Elements of Instructional Software

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
1	Elements of Instructional Software:
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3	Instructional Software	Instructional Uses	Examples	Benefits	Limitations	Effectiveness	Integration into My Classroom	Meet Students Needs
4								(Marzano's Nine Strategies)
5	Applications	Enhance student's personal productivity.	Infinite Campus	Provides meaningful purpose to assignments and achievement. Can connect to real-life experiences.	Not really meant at a teaching tool, but rather a communication tool.	Teachers use to communicate with parents and students. Provide purpose to assignments as a way to show student growth, not just grades.	I use Infinite Campus in my classroom as a way to communicate to parents and students. I also use this a way to promote student growth and communicate the students' growth to their future teachers. By having a grading system, it provides the students with a purpose and meaning to each assignment.	Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition through communication.
6	Drill & Practice	Reinforce instruction. Provide ways to memorize through repetition.	mathpractice.com; http://science.widener.edu/svb/tutorial/; http://www.aplusmath.com/; Flash Card Machine' Quizlet	Provides immediate feedback. Provide students with more motivation to succeed.	Misuse of drills - done too much or for too long. Criticism from Constructivists (creates isloation intead of integration.)	Set time limits for drills or amount of practice.	I provide my students with the ability to make their own Flash Cards with Flash Card Machine. This program is free and the students can access it at home or at school. The students use this when memorizing the science vocabulary for an upcoming test.	Homework and Practice; Setting Objective and Providing Feedback
7	Instructional games	Motivates learning through activitiies versus assignments.	Quia.com, Hoodamath	Makes learning fun.	Sometimes it is hard to decipher games versus educational value.	Teachers need to make sure that students will be motivated, not discouraged by the games. Choose appropriate games that do have educational value.	I have recently discovered Quia. This program is a wonderful tool because I can create my own review games for students. Many of the kids really find this a great way to study. I like it because it allows me to make my own review games OR I can get ideas from other teachers!!!	Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition through games.
8	Multimedia	Interactive Tools that can enhance learning in a variety of ways.	VoiceThread	Students actively engaged! Appeals to all learning styles such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.	Effective software.	Teachers should use multimedia as a way to address all learning styles.	I've used VoiceThread with my students for science projects. Many of my students like to create presentations with VoiceThread because they can add pictures, voice overs, music, videos, etc. to their presentations. Recently, many of my students chose to use this multimedia tool for their cell project.	Reinforcing Effort; Setting Objectives
9	Problem-Solving	Emphasizes 21st Century Skills of critical thinking and cooperative learning. Provides content area skills or content-free skills.	WebQuests; Tom Snyder Productions	Help students work together in small groups. Improves interest and motivation through a series of activities. Active Engagement!	Reliability of software. Teachers having a hard time being faciltators vs. direct instructors.	Teachers should provide support and encouragement. Provide a reflective learning environment vs. directed environment.	I recently created my own WebQuest for the digestive system! Although my webquest is meant for the students to find information versus solve a problem, the students have been assigned other webquests for such a thing. When my students were studying ecology, the students used Tom Snyder Productions to discover the problem and design a solution to the declining Sea Otter population.	Cooperative Learning
10	Simulation	Allows learners to visualize situations that may not be possible to create in a classroom.	Phet; Virutal Dissections	Money Saver! Let students repeat simulations over and over which is not always possible due to lack of resources. Can cover more material in shorter timespan. Safer!	Misuse of simulations; still need to provide students with real experience.	Provide simulations as supplements to lab experiments or ways to enhance the content, but not to replace the real experiences.	Due to lack of resources, I'm not able to provide my students with as many dissections as I would like each year. So, I've used a virtual dissection program (Froguts.com) to provide some extra dissections. My students still get the real life experience with a few actual dissections, but these virutual ones allow the students to get even more experience. This year, the students are using the virtual Frog dissection on the iPad alongside their actual specimen. The virtual is there to provide more information and visuals of how to cut the actual specimen instead of written directions. I'm hoping this will really help the visual learners.	Nonlinguistic Representation; Identifying Similiarities and Differences
11	Tutorials	Allows the learner to learn something new. Guides learner from beginning to end.	Moodle; http://science.widener.edu/svb/tutorial/	Self-directed; self-paced. Provides instruction when teachers are unavailable.	Provide direct instruction versus allowing students generate their own knowledge.	Assign individually to meet each student's individual needs.	This is something new I'm currently looking into. I would like to create tutorials for my students on how to use some of the software they could use for their science projects. I just found out that Moodle is a tool that can be used to create podcasts and upload to my website for the students. I haven't used it yet, but plan to you soon!	Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
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15	Resources:
16	Roblyer, M.D., & Doering. A.H.(Ed.).(Recent edition). Integrating educational technology into teaching. Boston, MA: Allyn&Bacon.
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