The week 6 titled "Creating Student-centered Classes and Interactive PowerPoint" dealt mainly with two issues: teaching large classes and the use of PowerPoint to increase interactivity in the classroom.
The topic of large classes is pretty new to me as for many years I have been teaching groups of students not bigger than 15-16 students. Anyway, the ideas presented in the readings on the webpage: http://tep.uoregon.edu/resources/largeclasses/usingtechnology.html can be used in any classroom.
The quote I find very useful here is:
“ Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.” (Chinese proverb)
I would like to focus more on presentations here; PowerPoint can encourage student learning by engaging them more in the learning process as multiple learning styles can be reached easily. Adding animations, inserting multimedia or using interaction seem to be working well towards students' success as we need to teach to as many of preferences in how we learn best as possible. Thus, some points to remember (do's and don'ts) are: break the ice, eg. effective openings, eg. start with a joke, don't make the brain switch off, use the hands-on approach, don't run over the time, involve the audience, use the menu, make the structure very clear, use visuals, summarise what you've said at the end of (or throughtout) the presentation, don't patronise and remember about the standing room.
Another very intriguing topic discussed in week 6 was the use of interactive Powerpoint - never done before by me thus quite challenging.
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