“A mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled.” Plutarch

Hello Every One !!!

Motto of week six, I would suggest, "transformation of the passive recipients of other people's knowledge into active constructors of their own and other's knowledge."

Week six, like previous ones, brought an exhaustive knowledgeable stuff of articles. The article," Teaching Large Classes II – Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students, by Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw is teeming with techniques and activities to handle large classes like the small ones.

Large classes being an indispensable worldwide fact cannot be done away with. It is a research supported fact that "A university student’s attention span is about 20 minutes at most
(and often shorter)". Hence, it requires a teacher to  strategize to engage the large class  audience like  a small class, by resorting to the techniques like, variety, pace, interest, individualization, setting up routines, speaking style, enlarging the circle, collaboration are but a few to enumerate. The activities suggested for the small group, called with whatever the titles, I almost use in my classes and expectedly others too. However, calling with titles strengthen the pedagogy and activity easy to recall and apply.

 Though today's almost every teacher uses PowerPoint presentations in the class, Deborah Healey's Interactive Powerpoint makes us pause and explore to make the large audiences interactive and engaging. It makes a big claim, "not your usual approach" and surely does justify it; particularly the 'blank slide technique' is a wonderful and novel concept for me to usurp audience attention.

 Moreover, presenting with ppt contains "Best Practices in Presenting with PowerPoint". It points out to the interesting facts, like, when to give handouts and why? Different practices I found the most useful and worth practice in my class include, 'don't parrot PowerPoint', 'Time your talk', 'and Give it a rest', 'Mix up the media', 'Hide the pointer'. Advices like these make really practical tips to practice.

Likely, another reading material, is about, "Using Online Assessment in Face to Face Courses". This informative article opens window to assessment tools that can be used in face to face classes. Using Blackboard facility for designing alternative assessment tools requires practice, for it being a novel tool, only then its suitability and effectiveness can be decided. One of the effective tools I found is Pool Manager, which "allows instructors for repeated use."

An equally effective examiner's tool is "Respondus 4.0".  The Respondus is," a powerful tool for creating and managing exams that can be printed to paper or published directly to Blackboard, ANGEL, Brightspace by D2L, Pearson eCollege, Canvas, Moodle, and other learning systems". Moreover, it claims that "Whether you are a veteran of online testing or relatively new to it, Respondus will save you hours on each project."

Ali

Pakistan