Nate Cannon EDTECH 504 Reflection #2 2/24/2013 After reading all the readings (and because I have never

taken a philosophy course, I read everything that I could get my hands and made sense to me) I can start to see many of the epistemological beliefs and theories in my teaching style. I constantly found myself highlighting little sections from all the learning theories because they were ideas that I have used in presenting material, told my students or even told my co-workers and teacher friends over my nine years of being an educator. I was curious why I was agreeing with bits and pieces of almost everything I read when I noticed that almost all learning theories were in some way loosely related. There was a need at one point in our educational history that needed a new way of thinking and that is how most of our learning theories were created. However, with these new ideas on learning, the old ideas were not completely thro wn out. That made sense to me and explained to me all of the highlighting that I was doing and how I can relate to all the different ways students learn and comprehend math problems. As for the use of technology in my classroom, I have been using the computer program ALEKS in my classroom for the last three years and it has yielded some mixed results. When the student is motivated (whether for remediation or advancement) this form of knowledge follows a constructivist approach where the computer is filling in the gaps of knowledge that the students is missing. When the presentation style of the computer does not help the student, that is where I can come in as a guide and fill in the blanks even more. The problems that this program creates can be complex with many moving mathematical parts but it also has a very simple base where the students can learn the foundation before coming to these intense problems. This program and others that I have worked with (as a student and educator) are things that I can definitely fit into my learning beliefs.