Nature Vs. Nurture in Education

H1 – Honor student diversity and development

Throughout my experience with both psychology as an undergraduate student and my new experience with education as a graduate student, human development has been a large part of my educational endeavors. Principle H1 addresses this explicitly saying that educators should honor student diversity and development. One of the most prominent debates in both fields is that of Nature vs. Nurture.

Pressely and McCormick (2007) bring up the argument that nature can only be taken advantage of if it is nurtured as well. I feel this is especially true in the education field. As educators we must take what is given to us (our student’s predisposed genetic build up) and foster and teach them various skills to allow them to be even more successful in life.

With this perspective, that nature and nurture are in part, equalities, as an educator this needs to be kept in mind. I cannot dismiss students based on learning disabilities that they had no choice of being gifted with and students that were genetically gifted should not receive the majority of my attention solely because they are more advanced. This dynamic of student abilities and skills will provide me a challenge to accommodate each student and their needs whether it is because they are at an advantage or a disadvantage.

Pressely, M., & McCormick, C. B. (2007). Child and adolescent development for educators. New York, NY: Guilford Press

Educational Technology 6432 Course Reflection

P4 – Practice the integration of appropriate technology with instruction.

Throughout EDTC 6432: Computer Authoring, we explored many technological tools that can be used both by us as educators but also by our students. This course directly applies to HOPE principle P4: Practice the integration of appropriate technology with instruction. At first, the course was confusing and challenging because we were able to, essentially, create our own curriculum of what we wanted to learn. This was different than previous courses I have taken and therefore I was a bit thrown off. As I understood more what the course expectations were, I became more comfortable with the material, assignment quests and overall goal of the course.

The two aspects of this class that stood out most to me were the Scratch challenges (MIT program to facilitate learning how to code) and the Review Games quests. As a student I always enjoyed the days in school that we played a Jeopardy game as test review or got to go in the computer lab for educational review. I want to be able to bring that same fun into my math classes and I am now armed with tools to do so. While completing the Scratch challenges, I created a couple of games and one quiz. The quiz challenge was the most useful as I could create a math review quiz for my students. The link to my first review quiz is below. They could complete it at home and submit their scores to me or complete it during class time if the technological access provides. In class we looked at the use of a Random Name picker. I liked this idea and took it a step further and created another math review game. Instead of inputting names, I put in math review problems for a geometry course. A question would be picked at random and, in teams, students will answer the questions for points. A link to this game is also below.

Overall, with the ups and downs of this course, I believe that technology can be highly useful in the classroom and I look forward to exploring more tools and utilizing them for many different uses in my classroom.

Scratch Review Quiz: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/64269362/

Random Problem Picker Review Game: http://www.classtools.net/random-name-picker/85_JGKN3E