Anchored Instruction March 12, 2010

The anchored instruction model is a great model for “real world” instruction and helps students develop problem-solving skills. This model is useful for teaching combinations of skills, even across subjects. So I think this model would be good for interdisciplinary instruction. I can see this model being effective in many if not all subjects/situations as long as it is designed properly. The main barriers I see are cost and expertise. I think to keep this model interesting enough to engage students; the design needs to be really good. This can be expensive (i.e. software, training, etc.). Expertise can be a barrier because scenarios like these cannot simply be put together overnight. The data or “story” provided to students must be very carefully thought out AND tested. I can see this model going bad very easily without testing the questions vs. data given.

What I really like about this model is that it challenges students to pick out the relevant information out of a whole bunch of facts and other stuff, and actually do something with it. The Jasper Experiment article talks about students becoming “independent thinkers” rather than just fetching and computing. Students actually have to figure out what the problems are instead of relying on someone else to state them. I think this is what makes this model so effective and so much like real-world problem solving. I also think it is interesting that this model helps instill in students how important further learning is. It may even help them to want to be life-long learners (that term we hear all the time in education – actually, that term is appearing more and more in school mission statements).  I can see this model working well in my area, like for health related case studies.

I really like the Everglades example. The way the videos help the students develop “mental models” before they begin their tasks was great. It was also helpful to have the interactive activities, like the text boxes that pop up for students to practice typing words or speaking them.  The support features in the software were nice. The project “A Walk to the Pier” was also a good example and the videos were helpful. I also think it was a good idea that a recap of the “facts” was included as text at the end of the videos. The Jasper Series is also interesting. After reading about it, I checked out the summary of the stories and I can see where this series would be very engaging for K-12 students. I also think the Scientists In-Action series described in the second and fourth articles is very interesting as far as simulating apprenticeships and allowing students to actually test out the theories they are learning about.

I definitely see a need for multimedia when anchored instruction is delivered over the Web. That is made very clear in the third article where all of the teachers and students immensely hated the paper and pencil tests, but liked the videos. At a minimum, photos need to accompany the stories to help the students understand and relate to the people, places, and things. There are several free online resources for photos that can be used for education that don’t have typical copyright constraints. A couple of examples are Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ and Stock.XCHNG http://www.sxc.hu/. Stock.XCHNG also has photographs for sale and they are pretty cheap (like $1) if you can’t find any free photos that will work for the story. I’ve been using both of these resources for several years and have been very happy with them. In addition, videos and “virtual worlds” as well as audio would be great too. Software I’ve mentioned before (i.e. Flash and SecondLife) can accomplish this. For audio, GarageBand (http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/) is a good tool, but even better is the free tool Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). FruityLoops use to be a really great free audio tool, but it isn’t free anymore. I’m sure it is still really good though – for those that can afford it. iMovie (http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/) is a good video/audio tool and is very easy to work with. It can record your voice, plus you can put in photos, other video clips, and PowerPoint slides and export it all for the Web. Alice (http://www.alice.org/) is a free virtual reality tool for teaching computing. ActiveWorlds is another neat virtual reality tool (http://www.activeworlds.com/). One last tool that would be useful is interactive games. Panda3D (http://www.panda3d.org/) is free software for building games – really neat!

Overall, I think this model is very useful. It would be very time consuming to do it right, and probably expensive if you had to hire designers and programmers. I would definitely be interested in using this model in my own teaching. I’m wondering – does anyone know of anywhere that either has free or sells modules like this for health care?

Advertisement