Week 6 Reflection

This week, in reading and discussion on nicenet, our focus was on creating an interactive and engaging class.  Our task was to create an interactive power point; and project was to keep note on the change in our class brought about by the technology and the final task was to write and comment on the blog.

The article “Using technology in teaching large classes” focuses on online assessment and improving lectures with technology. The articles shed light on making better and effective teaching and learning when comes teaching in large classes. As we all know, teaching in a large class is daunting and requires a lot of efforts and techniques; by reading the articles I got the idea on drawing the students’ attention and engaging them. “My students are lazy. They don’t study. They don’t concentrate; they better prefer to make different excuses.” We always blame our students this way.  The articles in our reading section this week can help solve such problems.

According to the articles, the classroom can be made more interactive and engaging by interactive lectures, just in time teaching, creating memorable lectures, collaborative and cooperative learning, on-line assessment and so on. We can use the technological tools like nicenet, webquests and interactive power points as well to make our class more interactive and engaging. To engage students more in their research and independent learning, project based learning could be better. This week, the idea of creating memorable lectures from attention to comprehension to integration enticed me.

After completing discussion section in nicenet, I started creating interactive powerpoint. It was the most difficult and time consuming task for me in webskills  till today. It might be because of my naivety in technology. Ultimately, I made it but have a doubt whether it is ok or not for our instructor.

 “How to create an interactive quiz using powerpoint master by Simon Slangen, “how to create and use interactive powerpoint quiz games” and “creating Interactive powerpoint presentation” by Drs. Terry &Cathy Cavanaugh could not help me much because I hardly understand them. However, the tutorial on interactive powerpoint on http://www.pitt.edu/~poole/office 2010lesson10.pdf helped me create interactive powerpoint.

This week, I introduced my technological solution ( i.e, Nicenet class) to my students to make teaching and learning more effective.  Five days back, I had created a nicenet class and gave them(my students) class key. Next day , I found more than 50% of the students joined the class and posted their introduction. Out of 75 students from three sections, 68 has joined the nicenet class. The remaining will join soon. It is a good response from them.  In nicenet’s document section, I have posted an article on writing essays and gave 2 links:  Perdue writing lab and essay sample on social issues. I found them quite eager in searching those materials in nicenet and discussing about them. It is the positive change I have found  in my students this week.

Cutting the long story short, this week I have come to know about interactive powerpoint and interactive class, which I think will help me make teaching and learning much better.  Though both were new to me a week back, but now I cherish knowing them thanks to Webskills.

Sitaram