Week 6: Reflections

This week, we have discussed Learning styles, have created a Rubric for a lesson and begun implementing a Technology-Related change in one of our classes (Project Task). Please note that all discussions I refer to in my reflections below take place in our Online Class on Nicenet.

Learning Styles (Discussion 1):
After arguing that knowing the learning styles of students is equally important to knowing what learning styles are, I provided two links to learning style questionnaires that aim at identifying the learning styles of learners. The first questionnaire classifies students into Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic learners. Teachers can print out this questionnaire and let their students complete it in class. It would give the teacher a good idea about how his or her students learn. The second learning style questionnaire tries to identify the learning styles found in Richard M. Felder and Barbara A. Soloman's article LEARNING STYLES AND STRATEGIES. This would be good to use in a lab that has access to the Internet, where each student completes the questionnaire on his or her computer and then reports the result to the teacher.

In the same post above, I selected some technology-related ideas, which the reading of this week, Technology and Multiple Intelligences, suggests, to address different learning styles in my class. For example, I chose using Emails, Blogging and Chatting to cater for the needs of visual-linguistic learners, who enjoy writing and creating words, and the needs of Interpersonal learners, who like to get in touch and interact with other people. Other techniques included a WebQuest for Logical Learners; Pictures, Graphs, Tables for Visual-Spatial Learners, and the use of Computers in the class to do exercises for Bodily/Kinesthetic Learners.

Alternative Assessment (Discussion 2):
After reading the article Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students by Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw, I outlined how I would use the technology to enable some of the techniques suggested in the aforementioned article. For example, I would add Minute Papers to a Power Point show to ask students questions that aim at checking their understanding at the beginning and end of the lesson. At the start of the lesson, the questions would be related to the previous lesson. It is important to make a logical connection between what the students did and what they are going to do so that it makes sense to the students. On the other hand, the questions at the end of the lesson would investigate if the students are aware of the most important thing they learned in the lesson and what issues they haven't understood. That would determine if I need to reinforce some ideas in the next lesson.

For a Think-Pair-Share activity, I would download pictures from the Internet and use them to practice speaking in the class. I would give each pair of students a picture and ask them to think about what is going on in the pictures individually. Then I would ask the students to work in pairs and talk about the pictures before we discuss them as a class.

Creating a Rubric:
After reading about Rubrics and viewing some examples, we had to create a rubric for a lesson. My rubric has been created to assess a Five-Paragraph essay that my English Course 101 (Reading and Writing) are writing now.

A Log on the Technology-related Change in my class:
I have begun implementing the technology related-changed that I suggested in week 5, that's blogging. I have launched a blog, Enhance Your Writing on Our Blog, for my English Course 101. We have already stated our first activity, Writing a five-paragraph essay about the Pressures of Being a Student. The responses from my students are impressive! In just four days so far, the comments have reached 51 and expected to rise as not all students have posted their essays, yet.

As show in the link of our blog above, I have shared with the students the objective of the activity (in ABCD) and the rubric for the assessment. The purpose of this is to enable the students to know what they are required to do and how they will be assessed.

This activity will run for one week. The next activity will be posted on Tuesday next week. I will keep a log on the changes that I have witnessed in class in the coming days on this blog.

Yours,

Mohamed