The Constructivist Approach allows students to become independent learners and critical thinkers. Teachers step out of the traditional roles of lecturers and become more involved in the learning process. Students work together, along with the teacher, to solve problems, investigate topics, and create projects to share their new-found knowledge. I will use this approach when I become a teacher. Traditionally, Social Studies courses have utilized traditional lecture style teaching practices. This is one reason why kids have grown to dislike these classes. They are viewed as boring and unnecessary, but this does not need to be the case. In my Social Studies classroom, students will take an active role in earning. They will investigate various aspects of history through the methods of the Constructivist Approach. I want my students to be interested in history and find the relevance by making connections to the present. They will form sound opinions on different historical events based on their research. My students will become critical thinkers, a skill they will need to succeed in the future. To learn about the constructivist approach, my partner, Michelle Nolte, and I researched each aspect of this teaching method and created a presentation through Google Drive. We then added a lecture to the presentation through Screencast-O-Matic. The Screencast presentation is below and the regular presentation is below that. Screencast-O-Matic is a free program which allows you to add video or voice to a presentation. It then allows you to upload it to the site, and share it to other locations as well. This will be helpful when I begin my teaching career. I plan on having a webpage so that my students have a place to access any information I present in class, or that I feel is relevant to the subjects I am teaching at the time. Screencast-O-Matic will allow me to upload presentations and lectures to my webpage so that I will not need to waste time in class going over this information. I think that class time should be reserved more for the research and collaboration instead of the traditional lecture and note-taking. If my students need to review all or part of a presentation it will be available to them at all times. Before once a lecture was presented, it was over. If you forgot to write something down, or the teacher was talking too quickly, then that information was gone. Now students are able to pause and rewatch the lecture over and over until they got all they need. I think this would be a wonderful asset to any class. Here is the actual presentation so that you can go back to watch the videos and review on your own.
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