Dear All,
The week seven came with new colours. (Aside: The colour metaphor comes here because we are celebrating Festival of Colours known as Holi in India). It came with colourful lessons on teaching large classes with myriad number of students (large classes). It also gave colourful articles in pdf, presentation and you tube videos to prepare painted interactive presentations.
Well, if I give an objective, frank and distant overview (wearing BLUE cap of Edward De Bono), I would like to say that this week did not give much new things to learn. I say NEW things. In all previous week, delicious, rubric, web quest, search engines, blog etc brought wonderful surprises. Surprises because I was using those things but here, in this course I found NEW meaning in them and learnt innovative usages.
So far as last week and its two major topics of discussions are concerned (viz. teaching large classes and interactive PowerPoint), I did not get innovative ideas form the reading resources. Yes, I enjoyed reading Chinese research articles. I was happy to learn that Chinese classes are also overcrowded like Indians, to learn English. We Indians always believed that Chinese do not care for English.
Any way, I personally believe that managing large classes require incessant new ideas and innovative implementation of those ideas in the classroom. No one technique can work for longer time. The teacher has to go on changing methods of teaching and activities. Task based, story telling, role-play, play-cards, group activities, games, presentations etc needs to be incorporated to make class live and interactive.
My recent experiments with technology also help as one of the method of teaching innovatively to large classes.
Well, so far as PowerPoint is concerned, I enjoyed watching YouTube videos. As I am using ppt since long, I did not find anything very interesting.
Yes, the way simple ppt and interactive ppt (iPPT) are differentiated was interesting. I got a word for my workshops… iPPT. Initially, I found Quiz interesting on PPTs. But as I now work on Moodle, I find it far better than iPPTs. I would confess that I was not using other component of ppts often in my teaching. Now I will make optimum use of it.
Though this week did not gave anything new as a surprise as it was in previous week, yet I learnt that ‘Knowledge is not Power unless it is acted upon’. Only knowing things is not important, what is important is using it, and implementing it innovatively in the classroom environment. This is the valuable lesson for me from the seventh week of this course.
Dilip (India)
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Dear Dilip,
ReplyDeleteLike you, I also tell that this course has given us a new meaning in many of the things that we knew earlier. This week also forwards us to think differently in some of the known items.
Thank you,
Mahamud
Dear Dilip,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your perspective on this week's web learn ing. I agree with you that there is not one ultimate technique to last forever. I guess we have to keep thinking about new methods that work in class whether it is temporary or not.
See you next week.
Sincerely,
Kazumi
Dear Dilip,
ReplyDeleteIt is true that we had heard about the things we are learning in this course before and maybe used some of them, but as you say we learn new ways of using them. I don't know how many times I have used PPT before, but I have never included interactive features, which adds quite an important dimension to it.
Like you, I also use Moodle, and I think that it is a very useful and effective tool for communicating with your students, posting relevant material and links, as well as setting up tasks that they can do either individually or collaboratively.
I like using technology in teaching and I have always tried to find ways to use technology with my students, and this course has helped us learn new ways of teaching and learning with technology, and I'm so glad about it.
Best regards,
Nina
Dear Dilip,
ReplyDeleteAlthough we did not expand our topics that much in terms of novelty / quantity, a lot of new quality has been added to our existing knowledge. All of us who have posted their comments here seem to agree on that.
What was completely new though was leaving the safety of our discussion boards and reaching out toward our students, colleagues on the course (looking for peer reviewers) and looking at some of their projects. Your students' literature blogs are wonderful - I loved the John Donne one in particular.
Thank you for teaming up with me.
Best regards,
Andreja
Thanks to Nina, Andreja, Kazumi and Mahmud for your comments.
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