Saturday, November 22, 2014

Week 7: Project on the run


Hello everybody,

Week 7 was hot and busy, full of arguments and agreements, problems and solutions.

We meet three times per week and work 1/20 minutes. So on Monday I made some changes in my plan and introduced students one more article which helps them to make their presentations more interactive. We started with ‘Top 10 Slide Tips’  http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/slides.html

In order to get a full picture each student was assigned to read about one or two tips and present it to the class. Then we had a short discussion about every tip answering some questions like: Do you consider this tip to be useful or not? Think about your own PPP slides. How different are they? Are you going to make some changes in your slides? Are there any culture related comments? (All students have experience presenting with Power Point. Most of them are in English). Finally the students were assigned with one more article ‘Best Practices in Presenting with Power Point – from the UO’s Teaching Effectiveness Program’ http://tep.uoregon.edu/technology/powerpoint/docs/presenting.pdf. Two students expressed a will to bring their own presentations to analyze and improve in the class.

We started Wednesday with reflection on the assigned article and carried on running through the presentation created by my student Umutjan for Department use. With the whole class we tried to analyze this presentation according to the tips we agreed upon the class before. Actually the discussion turned to be very hot and lengthy so I did not have time for presenting the Presentation Rubrics. As a result I e-mailed Rubrics to my students and asked for a short written reflection.

I am fortunate to have a group of diverse and very enthusiastic learners, so on Friday luckily we agreed on Rubrics. But all students admitted that they have never had it before. They asked many questions and were amazed to know that Rubrics are widely used in Europe and the USA. The educational system in Kyrgyzstan does not use Rubrics. The second part of the class was devoted to the ‘Interactive Elements’ suggested by Rick Finnan and Donna Show in their article ‘Teaching large classes II – Enhancing Learning by Engaging’. I focused on the part of the article called ‘Small-group Informal learning Activity’.  Most of learners seemed to have never thought about making their presentations Interactive.

Summing up, I would like to say that I feel like learning with my students.

Hugs,

Marina,

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