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= What is Meaningful Learning? =

**Meaningful Learning:**
>
 * Deliberate effort to link new knowledge with higher order concepts in cognitive structure
 * Learning related to experiences with events or objects.
 * Affective commitment to relate new knowledge to prior learning.

For learning to be meaningful, the students need to be engaged and want to learn.
 * Meaningful learning promotes curiosity.
 * Meaningful learning is usually interactive in which the students are involved in hands on learning.

A setting in which primarily lecturing and taking notes takes place does not promote meaningful learning. Students need to be able to apply their knowledge in a hands on way in order to make their learning meaningful.

** Active **
__Manipulative and Observant__  Learning is a natural; adaptive human process.

** Constructive **
__Articulative and Reflective__  It is essential that learners articulate what they have accomplished and reflect on their activity and observations - to learn the lessons that their activity has to teach.

** Cooperative **
__Collaborative and Conversational__  Humans naturally work together in learning and knowledge-building communities, exploiting each others skills and appropriating each other’s knowledge.

** Authentic **
__Complex and Contextualized__ <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Learning should be embedded in real-life, useful contexts for learners to practice using those ideas.

** International **
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">__Goal directed and Regulatory__ <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> All human behavior is goal directed. Everything that we do is intended to fulfill some goal.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> In order for students to learn with technology, teachers must accept and learn a new model of teaching. Teachers need to allow students to construct their own meaning and manage their own learning. Teachers can not tell students how to think or what to believe in. Students need to be able to think for themselves. Students need to be able to expand their thinking process and think outside of the box.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If a student learns <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//with// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> technology, they are learning about topics other than technology, while using technology as a tool for learning. When students learn <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//from// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">technology, they are learning the things that they can do by using technology.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When students learn <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//with// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> technology, they must interact with the technology. An example of the would be the students actively using the SMARTBoard. The teacher may choose to have the students dissect a frog using the SMARTBoard or interact with a map using Google Maps. In these examples the students are <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//actively// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> using the technology to move things around. Another example of learning <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//with// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> technology is when students search the Internet for information and they learn about a topic that way. They are learning through involvement.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Examples of learning <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//from// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> technology would be presenting content knowledge to the students through PowerPoint presentations or with a video from YouTube. Students receive information from presentations that are presented with these technologies. They may take notes from the video or the presentation but they are not actively interacting with the technology. Learning <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//from// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">technology is students learning content using tools such as PowerPoint, Microsoft Word and the SmartBoard.

How does //technology// foster learning?
Technologies should be used to engage and facilitate thinking. Some examples of how technology can foster learning includes:

1. Technology as tools to support knowledge construction: for representing learners' ideas, understandings, and beliefs: for producing organized, multimedia knowledge based by learners

2. Technology as information vehicle for exploring knowledge to support learning by constructing: for accessing needed information and for comparing perspectives, beliefs, and worldviews.

3. Technology as authentic context to support learning by doing: for representing and simulating meaningful real-world problems,situations, and contexts - for representing beliefs, perspectives, arguments, and stories of other for defining a safe, controllable problem space for student thinking.

4. Technology as social medium to support learning by conversing: for collaborating with others and for discussing and building consensus among members of a community.

5. Technology as intellectual partner (Jonassen, 2000) to support learning by reflecting: for helping learners to articulate and represent what they know, for reflecting on what they have learned and how they came to know it, for supporting learners' internal negotiations and meaning making, for constructing personal representations of meaning, for supporting mindful thinking.

How does //technology// foster thinking?
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Technology fosters thinking because it requires students to think and reason for themselves. When students use technology they are learning how to problem solve, organize information, and determine what information is important and meaningful. Students learn from thinking about what they are doing, and the thinking process they use. Thinking mediates learning and learning results from thinking. Technology fosters thinking because when students look up information, there are sometimes a million results when searching for something. Since there are a million results there are a million different answers. How do the students know which one is the answer to their question. To do this, teachers need to teach children how to browse the web and find important information. Children need to learn how to know what information is helpful and which isn’t.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Technology fosters thinking through research and curiosity. Students are engaged in the technology which then fosters thinking. They are having fun interacting with the technology and learning in the process. Depending on the activity the teacher has the students completing, the students may be forced to think about current events through the use of technology.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Students are made to problem solve through the use of technology. They have to problem solve to make different technologies work.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Technology is a way for students to keep up to speed with the rest of the world. They are able to form their own ideas and opinions and then through the help of teacher instruction, they can find information through the use of technology to support their ideas and opinions. This is very important for students to learn how to think as individuals. Students will learn how to back up their own opinions and express their thoughts.