Next year, I plan to make some
changes in my technology use. I plan to
switch from Moodle to My Big Campus, and along with that change, I hope to
incorporate more self-paced learning for my students. I want my students to practice until they
achieve mastery, even though that may mean some students do very little
practice and some students do a lot of practice. I also want to let students pick the type of
practice that works for them, so I will be offering many different types of
activities ranging from the traditional to online games, videos, VoiceThread
activities, and apps such as DuoLingo. I
won’t be ready to incorporate those ideals for every topic next year, but I created
a plan for one of the most difficult concepts: preterit versus imperfect forms
of the past tense. If I can make the
plan work for this topic, I should be able to continue the process in coming
years.
I think that moving towards a more self-paced
learning environment will be one of my most helpful goals, because it will
allow me to give more individualized attention to students, and it will allow
me to do so at the times they need it most, rather than just whenever it is I
can get to them.
Additionally,
I plan to share the information that I have learned with the rest of my
department. I have already discussed
several ideas for changing the way we teach culture to a more student-led
approach. The idea is to give students a
general topic and guidelines and let them investigate any aspect or aspects of
the topic that they find interesting. They will then have to share this
information with their classmates, and participate in discussions, probably via
a message board or through some other asynchronous means, such as Mindmup. We hope that this will improve retention and
be more relevant and useful than assessing student recall of specific
teacher-selected facts. We have talked
about some of the tools we can use for this style of teaching, and we want to
try out a variety of options including Pinterest, Prezi, XtraNormal, and just
letting the students pick any tools that they want to use. As we go through
this process, we will be sure to talk to other departments about what works for
them (our Science department, in particular, makes great use of flipped
classrooms), and, hopefully, once we have a little more experience, we can put
together some lesson ideas that would help other departments and share them
during our in-service training. It’s definitely going to be an interesting
journey for us, as well as for our students, and I am sure that we will be
learning a lot about how to teach as we try to update our curriculum and
teaching methods to make the best use of the modern resources we have
available.
