Dear Everyone,
It's indeed a pleasure to finish my assignments on time.I was fascinated by the discussions on engaging students and numerous ways technology can be used to teach large classes. I read the articles carefully and accomplished my tasks very well.Out of all the articles ,I particularly liked the article on Enhancing Learning by Engaging students from Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw .The techniques described there, are forms of alternative assignments.Basically I learned that "learning is a social process that occurs through interpersonal interaction within a cooperative context" as suggested by the given quotations on http:/www.ntlf.com/html/lib/quotes.htm.I was educated about cooperative and collaborative learning experiences ,and small group informal learnjng activities.Specially I like think-pair-share, and concept maps which can be used in both brain storming and feedback sessions
.Creating interactive Power point presentationswas attracted by me a lot.I created my first interactive power point presentation .I felt very excited. It was on summarizing.
The third and last assignment was on the project task.Certainly the whole week was dedicated on this and I had a very tough time.I was encouraged by the problems.Earlier ,I was planning to show a video presentation on edx organized by Harvard university and MIT.But later I had to change the topic and conducted a multimedia presentation on EDEX2012) .This is an annual event organized by the Royal College union(my own school) It is a fantastic source of information on career guidance .Certainly it was an event they all had participated earlier and they wanted to know the details once again.It was a collection of chances they can have after the advanced level Examination.Students were particularly interested in knowing about scholarships by foreign universities.I told them about the discussion forum . Here Courtney , my dear lecturer ,suggested me to use nicenet as a tool.Here I was confronted with some practical problems and I couldn't meet the needs of the students.Ultimately I created another Blog and asked them to write on it about their aspirations of their future career.(based on the information they got from the multimedia presentation)thirty students posted their the reflections on the Blog.on the relevant page and commented on their ideas.The students who commented on the Blog were taken for the project ,though the multimedia presentation was shown to about 75 students.Next I created a power point presentation on summarizing and showed to those 30 students .and instructed them to write a summary on the relevant page of the Class Blog. (They were taken to the Interactive White Boardroom.)They all have done it and I commented on it.I thought of giving them some more texts to be summarized.Meanwhile they would be instructed to create their on blog.sfor future activities.Definitely with loads of difficulties I was able to accomplish my tasks .Hope Courtney would apologize to me for not informing the details beforehand.
I learned a lot through my experiences.!Thank You Courtney and all friends.
Warm regards,
Disna
Hi Disna,
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you had quite a productive week 6. You learned a lot and began to implement your final project. I apologize if you encountered problems with nicenet, but am glad to hear that you created a blog instead. This was a learning experience indeed.
From what you described, the students did well with the blogs. Now that they have been introduced to blogging and had some experience with it, they may be ready to create their own blogs. My advice here is to make sure that you give them a clear purpose for creating and posting to the blogs. They will be more successful that way. For example, if you want them to use it as a place to summarize texts, require them to post a summary of however long you determine and then comment to another classmates about something that was different about their summary and that classmates. You could even pair students or put them in small groups and have them only comment to the people in their group. This ensures that everyone will find comments to their summaries.
I hope you continue to have success with the blogging! Thanks for sharing your experiences thus far!