Marking Midpoint of Journey
The voyage of discoveries continued this week, too. Less technological, more academic, as it felt at one point. But when the PPT assignment began, technology stepped forward to occupy the seat of command. The interactive activities joined in to meet the needs of large classes. Teaching large classes, the topic of the week, just had to arouse keen interest. Jesse, the guest faculty, had everybody giving close, intense reading to the articles by Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw. Jesse highlighted the importance of engaging Ss in self assessment activities and in using rubrics we had experimented with the previous week. I liked her recommendation about making individual feedback more global than local. Some of the participants, as I see in their posts, said they were overwhelmed by the numerous activities they learnt of to tackle large classes. Truly so. Think-Pair-Share will stimulate Ss to think and speak and contribute just as collaborative learning will hone their problem solving skills. The demonstration of Think-Pair-Share on /www.youtube.com/ really helped. Concept tests, Quick-thinks, Concept Maps involves multi-sensory learning which will suit Ss with different learning styles. I liked the Minute paper activity. On C-SPAN channel in the US I used to watch senators make One Minute speech in the House… capturing the essence of the problems the public faced in their areas. I was amazed by their brevity, and modified and adopted it as an activity in my classroom situation. There were more inputs on large classes from another article which stressed on the relevance of technology in large classes and gave ideas like making use of video clips, podcasts, wikis, animations, simulations, etc. The best part was that I got to read in detail about all these tools of technology, in one of the links, we are using in this course. Jigsaw variation is another activity which works well in large classes comprising of small groups although in one of the articles it has been prescribed for only small classes. To summarize briefly: we have to create small classes amidst a single large class where Ss learn from participation with the peer group. And for this we have to have interactive activities. technology aids this. It comes packed with several and with tools to make or modify more. Even the brighter Ss who know the answers well can develop clarity and skills of organizing and expressing their thoughts with the help of such activities. I liked Jesse’s Cheat Sheet idea and got clarification on clickers. The former, useful for me as I can be bad with names when the class has 60 trainees, the latter worth acquiring for trainees. Imagine getting feedback from all of them can become so easy; just a click away.
There were sessions on PPT as well. This is one tool, I feel proud to acknowledge, I have been using for 12 years now. But I used to always call my Technical staff to make insertions of audio/video clips when I needed them. Here I did it myself. Tried various interactive techniques like blank slides, etc. for which I found the microsoft.com session the most useful. A number of doubts I had like inserting hyperlinks, etc got clarified. In fact I even used the PPT I have posted on wiki page with my teacher trainees on Friday morning class. It worked very well. The session became a setting clearly marked with class participation.
Needless to say I will continue creating interactive PPTs with ideas picked up during the week for my teacher education programs which invariably have large classes.
Looking forward to the journey next week
Sharda
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