WEEK 6

 

 

 

 “ Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.”  Chinese proverb

 

 

 

Dear All,

 



Well, it is such a hectic time of the term. Students are getting out of the conrol so are the teachers. Aftera busy week with lots of meeting, I am back sleepy... They say it is because of the spring, but I do not want to put the blame on the season. I definitely need  time to have a rest. I am looking forward to the weekend when I will meet my 11-year old niece and 4-year old nephew. This Sunday is the Mother's Day and they are so impatient to choose a present for their mum. I am planning to take them to the Galata Tower to show them the view. Hope it will be an unforgottable day for them.

As for the weekly assignments, Robert wanted us to use at least two articles about applying technology into large classes.  Though we were taught what the ideal classroom conditions are, just few of us are lucky to have those conditions. Especially the number of students in our classess is quite far away from being the ideal.

In their article- Teaching Large Classes II – Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students-, Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw outline some drawback of large classes, some of which are lack of motivation, lack of motivation, and inadequate facilities. Yet, things are beyond our control, and we need to teach those large classes.

They briefly state how students involvement and their being active learners are important.

In 'Using Technology in Teaching Large Classes' from the University of Oregon's Teaching Effectiveness Program (TEP), TEP provides some sources of information to apply technology in large classrooms.

1- Online Assessment: TEP recommends Blackboard, which provides immediate feedback since scores are logged into the online Grade Center, and Respondus, which enables exams to be printed or published to an online learning system.

 

2- Improving Lectures with Technology: TEP warns us against a possible threat so that we could take some precautions to avoid a likely technology-related inconvenience.

3- Course Site: TEP recommends that we should check other course sites while preparing ours.

4- Enriching Discussion with Technology: TEP states that students' involvement is important, so we need to encourage them to provide responses. We should also make sure that everyone remark upon a students' response.

Both In 'Best Practices in Presenting with PowerPoint' from the UO's Teaching Effectiveness Program, and in 'Creating Interactive PowerPoint Presentations for Teachers and Students' by Drs. Terry & Cathy Cavanaugh from Florida Center for Instructional Technology, some tips are given while preparing a power point presentation, which reminds me of PechaKutca- a Japanese word- means a kind of presentation method in which each one of 20 slides is presented in 20 seconds- 6 minutes and 40 seconds in total. Though I have never tried it myself, I first became the withness of it  in 2009  TESOL  Greece. It was awsome.
Here is an example. Hope you enjoy it.

I do believe that as long as we make it clear enough for our students, they will get used to technology integrated lessons. For instance if they are required to follow their online assignments, pacing and scores, they will after a while will find it easy.

In addition, I do like power point presentations useful to some extend because sometimes the speaker just reads the slides, sometimes it is more than colorful etc. We should also warn students before asking them how to keep their presentation simple but informative, yet not boring.

Apart from the power point presentations, I can recommend http://prezi.com.

I tried to do my best for a good interactive presentation. I guess I need to practice more because I do not really think that it is interactive enough. I found some very helpful videos in the internet. One is called Making Powerpoint Interactive  and the other is called Action Buttons:



 

 

In spite of  all these explanations in addition to Kayyum's, still I couldnt prepare the one I had expected. On the other hand, my classmates are amazing. They are incredibly professional.

My primative presentation is available on Robert's wiki:)