Week 6 - My Reflections

This week has been very important for me as it was dedicated to teaching large classes and making them interactive through different tools and techniques. I have been teaching large classes for many years now and have faced many challenges in almost every session. The biggest challenge, however, was to change the process of one way dispensation of knowledge based on traditional methods. It has always been difficult for me to make large classes interactive for different reasons. There is every chance of students straying from the topic and indulging in useless talks. The challenge of involving maximum students in a discussion is also big. It requires lot of time and the lesson may remain incomplete. Moreover, in the schools where I teach, it is not really desirable to have much noise in the class and even today the teachers who can maintain a pin-drop silence in their classes are considered most efficient.

In situations like this, technology can definitely offer solutions to the problem. So from the many useful articles this week, I learnt about many ways and techniques which will help me in improve in class discussions and promote interaction in the classroom. Use of interactive elements in PPTs is what I consider my biggest achievement this week. In MS PowerPoint, there’s a great possibility of incorporating many interactive tools like ConcepTest, QuickWrite, Audio/Video, Hyperlinks, Jumps to other slides, Blank slides, etc. with easy and interesting animations and no need for online access. I loved our course instructor Courtney Cunningham’s idea of one question per slide in a PPT. I would certainly incorporate it into my future PPTs.

It was also very interesting and useful to read about the Principles of priming, integrating and reinforcing to improve in-class discussions and the use of Blackboard as a tool to support these principles. I can see that my future large classes will be really interactive and beneficial for all the students, the way I have always wanted them to be.

This week was also very important because of a very crucial project step, where we had to implement the technology related change in our classrooms. So I had decided to improve the speaking skills of my students by making use of voice recording tools like Vocaroo. By bringing about this change, I hoped (and still do) that my students will get more time to practice at home and also they won’t feel the hesitation of speaking in the class. My students were very excited when I told them about online voice recording tools like vocaroo and that we will be using these for our speaking assignments. Some of them were already at heels to try their hands at these tools. I gave them small speaking assignments and the results were very encouraging. They responded well and their enthusiasm was reflecting in their recordings. Though they were facing some difficulties in using online voice recorders on their phones with slow internet, I advised them to use the offline voice recorders on their phones and play the recordings in the class next day directly from their phones. I heard some good audios made by some otherwise silent students in the class. I had asked them to talk about themselves, about their likes and dislikes, their interests and hobbies etc. for this week’s recordings. Another topic was “ The use of ipads in Classrooms”. From the next week, they will be e-mailing me the recordings and I will send them the feedback.

 So this week was also very productive like the previous weeks, with the difference that it was also productive for my students.

Looking forward to a more fruitful week.

Darshan