After visiting this website: http://cie.asu.edu/volume8/number10/, I deicided it would definitely be appropriate to use constructivism in my classroom in which I would be teaching special education. In the website it stated, “Children with learning disabilities will benefit from this approach because of their difficulty in generalizing from the classroom to other settings. With the realistic examples built in to the instruction, the students have specific practice with generalization.” Students with learning disabilities or other emotional or physical impairments have a difficult time grasping and comprehending concepts and new information as it is. I think the constuctivist approach would help to bring in real life situations so they can relate new information to previous knowledge and experience. One exapmle I found was in a regular approach to teach children about money they would talk about it and do worksheets. The constuctivist theory would emphasis using real money that the students could count and use in the school store or a pretend store set up in the classroom. The experience with money would be hands on and a meaningful expeience to the individual student. Lesson plans would be introduced with information the students already know (base knowledge) and then new information would be extended off of that. This will help students with learning disabilities because of their low self-esteem and repeated failure experiences. It will also help to increase their confidence level and not overwhelm them. Other techniques that could be used to help students with LD is brainstorming, mapping, use of graphic orginizers, and self-monitoring. Another important approch to the construcivist approach is to introduce key concepts and ideas that relate to them. Instead of telling all the liitle tidbits of information it is more valuable to teach the big ideas and the relationship it has to other themes. Students would be active learners which is proven to help students to learn and retain information. The constuctivism theory would absolutely be beneficial in my classroom.

Constuctivism relates to technology in it’s large amount of available information and in delivering of it because it promotes the student as a self-directed learner. It allows the student to be independent, individualized, interactive, interdisciplinary, and intuitive. This however creates a problem for students with learning diabilities who need specific directions and behavior modification.