Week 6 Reflection

 

   Another wonderful and productive week has passed by. I guess this week was the corner stone for the final realization of the projects and plans. As usual, we were given a lot of interactive teaching & large classes information to share and discuss on Nicenet as well as on interactive PowerPoint Presentations. Below these lines, one can find the highlights related to the aforesaid topics.


   Interactive Teaching & Large Classes: It is well-known that teaching in large classes can be challenging and at times very frustrating. However, there are some tools and techniques that can help us to have more interaction among students and thus more learning to happen. One tool that might work very well is Nicenet. This website offers you the opportunity to make every body participate without being put into the spotlight through a series of discussion topics posted for every single week. By doing so, the teacher can have feedback from all of his or her students, and not just about some during class time.


   Regarding this issue, a technique that would go hand in hand with this website could be the Just in Time Teacher (JiTT). What this technique does is basically use "a brief-base question delivered before a class meeting" (quoted from What is Just in Time Teaching?) Once the students have responded to the JiTT activities- in this Internet Classroom Assistant called Nicenet- the teacher can gather and process the information before the class starts, so that he can only work in class on those learning gaps that weren't not very well covered by the students previously. This strategy works as it encourages motivation and preparation before the class as well as it promotes ongoing formative assessments. Needless to say, it also targets students' learning gap.(http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/justintime/indexhtml)


   It is also important to mention that the strategy Think-Pair-Share can be used to mitigate the one way street called lecture mode. It basically provides students to think about one question or problem that the teacher lectured about (usually after 15 minutes).Then, the student has to turn around and share it with a partner and, if time permits, share that piece of information with the audience later on. This activity is very dynamic and also lets you do some others variations like in Think- Pair- Square and Concept Test.


   Interactive Powerpoint Presentations: I thought PowerPoints presentations could be O.K. However, after having read how to create interactive ones I realized that this technique can benefit both small and large audiences. It is not just O.K. It is one of the BEST Tools to implement in the classroom. I always had the curiosity about how people did jeopardy games. I used to say to myself that they were vey difficult, and guess what? I was right. It was one of the most difficult tasks I have done, but at the end I am glad I learned how to do it for my students´sake


   Implementing Technology Tool: I started implementing, discussion topics, on Nicenet, for my Introduction to Literary Studies class last week on. I started to do so as I didn´t get as much feedback as I wanted to from them. Out of my 25 students, only 5 responded actively in my class during the first four weeks. I was very disappointed. I was very enraged with me and I blamed myself for their lack of participation. Just then, we were given some tools and techniques from our webskills course and, no doubt, I chose NICENET. This is how I used this tool on them:


   Firstly, I said to the class, on the last week of April, that we were going to try a new tool for the class along with Edmodo. They all agreed and I proceeded to create a Nicenet thread on May 1st. They were also required to turn in two replies: One answering the prompts by Wednesday 7th, at midnight, and Two; answering the classmates´responses by Sunday 11th, at midnight. The same way as we do with Donna. Regarding this topic, 15 of my students did turn in their responses on time, which is 60 % of the class participation compared to that of 20 % (5 students) in the first four weeks. Only 3 students (12 %), turned in one day later. As a result I had an overall 72 % of class participation, which is 67 % increase.


   Even though all of them agreed to sign up and do the participation on Nicenet, there exist still seven people (28 %) that haven´t responded to the prompts. Two particular things to mention while my students were responding each other is that they didn´t quite understand how to post their answers. Most of them just replied to my post, leaving classmates without the chance to reply to them. To solve this problem, I told them on May 9th, that they had to use "Post new message to the Crucible" instead of replying to me. The other "obstacle" or confusing moment was when one of my students, created a whole new topic. Again, I had to explain that they could only reply to the prompts or disccusion topics of the class and to respond to each other´s messages.


   Finally, this is my second week of implementation, and I hope to see those seven people responding to Nicenet. I also tend to implement JiTT next week on. I will keep you informed how all this goes. I can´t wait to see more positive results. Once again, I am so happy to belong to this turning point course. Thanks Donna, thanks a lot dear colleagues!