RE: http://mr-stadel.blogspot.ca
After looking through Andrew Stadel's blog for a good 30 minutes I couldn't find a single topic that, content wise, was sufficient for me to write a blog on. It was difficult as the topics weren't really philosophical as I like them but rather seemingly superficial everyday stories from his classroom. I'm not saying they are useless, rather, I just can't write reflections or further thoughts or critiques on them. Surely, if I had a choice I'd chose another blogger to write on. Anyways, I had to think a while before I could come up with something to write on and to my surprise some profound cliche ideas came to mind. Two weeks ago in my "Designs for Science" class we had a guest lecturer who's primary focus was on visual teaching. That is, using visuals all the time, every lesson to help students be engaged in the lesson and to help them understand better. He argued, rightfully so, that as teachers we have to compete with the world of visual stimulation. Therefore, we must make our lessons more visually stimulating so that it engages the student. What I noticed on Andrew Stadel's blog is that many of his blog posts are about his classroom activities many of those have videos. That gave me the idea of presenting classroom activities and the exercises whether in science or in math in video format. That is, se it up like a movie trailer and ask the students to solve it. The cool thing is that the students if they wish, may respond in whatever format they wish whether that be on a piece of paper, in an email, in a series of pictures, or a video. Watching a video and responding to it is much more "21st Century" than opening the book to page 84 and completing exercises 3-9 don't you think?
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I came across a blog (http://function-of-time.blogspot.ca/2009/05/final-exam-review-blog-is-live.html) that was very interesting and sparked some ideas in my head. The teacher has set up a blog for students and they are to pair up, take a topic and write a post on the blog about that topic so that all students can review it. This is very interesting especially if you've read my previous blogs about review. This review is such a great idea because it is what I find review to be: something that the students take ownership of and do constantly. It is a great idea to have a forum for them to post while having the responsibility to do so as well. I would make sure that it happens constantly and not only before big tests. In a sense this becomes more than just a review, rather a place where the students can interact and help each other with concepts (hence the title above). The teacher's job in all this is to moderate it all and help any misunderstandings that he sees on the forum.
It also sparked another idea in my head. During my university career I had a professor who gave us his phone number and said he is going to be available 3 hours the night before the exam and called the number "the microbiology hotline." Now aside from the fact that he was encouraging last minute studying, I liked the idea him being very accessable when I was doing the actual studying at home though. So I thought it would be a very good idea to have an online forum once a week perhaps at the end of the week when I would be available on a given time to answer any questions that students had from home. Re:
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=11093 Dan Meyer has a blog post about assessing with videos. In it there are three examples of how you'd assess a concept in physics, one of which is a rather thrilling video of a stunt man performing a stunt. Following the video, there is a question that asks students to explain the physics concept that was demonstrated in the video clip. I have always thought multimedia is a very good add-on to the everyday classroom to complement what is being taught. However, I had never though about it as an assessment tool. After reading this blog i realized that unknowingly I used video assessment during my long practicum in Science 10. We were studying the Ecology unit and everyday I would show the class a video (either a BBC documentary or clips from NatGeo etc) and ask the class questions as a review before we continue onto the lesson for that day. At the end of my practicum, I got the students to complete a survey form about my teaching in the classroom. The results showed that THE highlight of almost every student was the videos that I showed at the beginning of the class as either a hook or review. That got me thinking. In today's society, especially in North America, kids of all ages are bombarded with advertisements, shows, movies, music that stimulates all their senses to engage them and in a way "brainwash" them (long story). As teachers, we tend to stick to "boring" ways of teaching. Multimedia is no longer a complementary add-on. It is rather essential if we are to engage the students and actually have a chance at keeping their attention in the classroom. |