Carol Holzberg's Profile

In addition to becoming an educator, I am a behavior analyst. When considering behavior, a reinforcer is considered to be any stimulus that, when presented, will cause an increase in the target behavior. Thus, if I want my students to engage in the behaviors of focusing on and synthesizing information, I need to provide them with a great deal of reinforcing stimuli. Class lectures, though sometimes needed in small doses, generally do not serve as reinforcement for the behaviors I wish to see in my students. Videos and other mixed media on the other hand, are often quite interesting to students and therefore they often do serve to reinforce desired learner behaviors.

I found this week’s readings quite interesting in that when considering media for classroom use, I need to be mindful of the fact that some types of visual media might be far more effective than others. In addition, different types of media might promote different types of learning. As I work with students whose abilities vary to quite an extreme, choosing appropriate media for each student is something I will need to greatly consider. I found the concept of reducing students' cognitive load quite interesting to think about. Visual media that is stimulating does exactly that as students have to process far less due to the removal of extraneous stimuli and information.

I greatly enjoyed watching some of the videos for class and can see how incredibly effective they would be in teaching a class. The Mentos/Soda video has the capacity to serve as a great tool (I actually did this one myself a few years ago. What fun!). As students from some of the schools are work in often do not have a wide variety of life experiences, watching videos such as this one allows them to at least take some part in experiencing so many different things. This video would be wonderful for use in a science class. Students could watch and discuss chemistry principles and such without the added expense and mess of doing the experiment themselves. In addition, I loved the fact that the video was actually done as student homework. This student was able to share her project with the class on a much more intimate level than if she had just presented a paper on the topic. It also presumably allowed her family to get more involved in her education as they completed the project with her.

For my second video I watched the Bill Nye video on quick sand. It was fast and fun and very informative. The pace would easily keep students actively engaged. It also presented the visuals in a variety of different formats so as to arouse the interests of different types of learners. As it was fairly quick it could serve as a great mini lesson for beginning a larger unit.

In assessing whether video makes a difference in educating my students, I think I could just observe their behavior in order to discern whether or not the video impacted their learning. During ineffective lessons, students are often doodling or half zonked. When the students remain actively engaged in th