Week 6: Engaging Students vs Large Class vs Interactive Power Point

Time flies like an arrow! That's what I'm having now. The clock is ticking! Two more weeks to go to share the project reports and about three weeks to finish the final draft of my Project Plan.

Wow! What a marvelous weeks we had!

Engaging students in class is one of the ways to enhance learning process. Just like Smith said that a teacher requires not only knowledge of subject matter but also knowledge of how students learn how to transform them into active learners. and further Johnson mentioned that "Learning is a social process that occurs through interpersonal interaction within a cooperative context. Individuals, working together, construct shared understandings and knowledge."

Both says about interaction between teacher and learner, it's all about interaction. Creating an interactive class is one of the ways to keep the students engaged and participated in class activities. There are some general lectures of interactive activities based on http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/interactive/whatis.html such as:
Think-pair-share, Concept test, the Question of the Day and Longer activities.
These types of activities provide feedback on what students have learned, enabling us to either discuss a particular concept in more detail or move on with confidence that students have mastered that concept. 

Large class. In my experience, to almost always have large classes in every semester becomes common to find some lacks in our teaching -learning process. So indeed, me as the teacher has to work harder to create the various activities that can involve all students in the same time and limited time. In my case, I always give clear instructions at the beginning of the class so the students know what to do and  pay attention to. 


Another thing to consider when facing a large class, is what we call Just In Time Teaching (JITT). It can improve student learning and increases in-class teaching effective teaching and learning practices. It specifically:
- improves students' preparation for class
- enhances student motivation for learning
- promotes on going formative assessment of student learning (by both instructors and students)
- informs in-class activities that target students learning gaps
The key to successful JITT implementation is developing a set of effective questions that will be posted online for students to answer before the next class. 


Just like Donna said, that  Power point is very commonly used in teaching, but it is rarely used interactively. This is the thing that some teachers forget to (even me sometimes.) The interactive one is kind of teacher's effort to create an interesting class, to keep students awake and to get students' attention to materials given. What more important than those mentioned above is  to have students better understanding about the goals of the lessons. 


In my project, in the near future I plan to put technology into learning process. I and my co teacher are going to work together and use Self Access Centre as a media of supporting class activities. We will also use Class Blog  as a media of evaluation and communication. We'll use this to show students that it will work for improving their writing ability. We'll put some goals to achieve  and of course provide the ground rules earlier to keep everything under control and work properly.


Interaction is the key!