I learned a lot while attending the TLT symposium this past Saturday. The keynote speaker was the was best speaker I have seen at a conference. I think it further validates his credibility that the underlying theme of his presentation was on making ideas stick and I still vividly remember the majority of the presentation a few days later. It really resonated when he discussed the concept of sticky ideas and related it to urban legends. In order to get students to remember we really need to find a way to grab their attention. This reminded me of the interest approach Dr. Curry mentioned in a previous class regarding crop circles and how they related to irrigation methods. The unexpectedness of seeing an image of crop circles at the beginning of class acts to really pull in the students’ attention and participation. As Dan Heath directly quoted, “unexpectedness buys attention and curiosity sustains attention.” I was really interested when he talked about the concept of “the curse of knowledge.” I thought that was an interesting factor that many teachers don’t take time to self-reflect and consider before teaching a class.
The individual seminar I found most intriguing was on the topic of using virtual reality in the classroom, specifically using it to facilitate “virtual field trips.” I had no idea that Penn State has 3 virtual reality rooms on campus. While sitting in on this seminar, I thought of the potential connection between VR technology and achieving higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I was also very surprised to see that the VR field trip showed better performance results than the actual field trip. I do see many potential pitfalls to the widespread use of this technology, though, with the main concern being cost and logistics, especially for larger classes. I found the seminar very intriguing as I had never even considered the use of VR for facilitating learning.
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