Without sounding too arrogant, I have been amazed at
the amount of ideas for teaching Maths that I have come up with in response to
the weekly embedded tasks. If I take that number of ideas and multiply it by
all the students in this course and then add in all the ideas that those ideas
spark suddenly the amount of ideas is growing exponentially. That’s just using
an online community the size of this class imagine what all the teachers in the
world could come up with!
This is why online learning communities are so
useful, as they connect an unlimited number of people all with a unique
perspective that can contribute ideas to the collective knowledge and can be
customised to target a specific area. For instance just within one school you could
create a; teacher online community, school online community, student online
community, parents online community, school/local community online community
the list is endless and the end result essentially is enhanced communication and
passage of information between all participants.
As a distance student who works full time I can
often feel a little isolated and as if I’m trying to assimilate huge text books
all by myself. However throughout the course of the last seven weeks reading
and commenting of other students blogs has considerably lessened that feeling
of isolation. I formed a small group with two other students to collaborate
with by reading and commenting on each other’s blogs.
Both of these students are younger than me so I have
found their insight fascinating and invigorating. Another point I noticed was
that one of them was a very visual learner. Through her blog postings I have
come to a much better understanding of how to interest and target visual
learners. The other student is very digitally savvy and curious, her blog
postings highlighted how much research I need to do into digital tools just to scratch
the surface of what is out there and available for free. I particularly thought
this comment was an excellent example of constructive criticism by a colleague.
I took the same points, however I
slightly disagree on your final point. Teachers should always cater to the
students and teach in a relevant way absolutely, however I think that if a
teacher is uncomfortable there should be some lenience. For example, if I were
to realise that Wiki's would help a class, yet I am uncomfortable, I might skip
it for that term and then over holidays make it a point to learn myself and
become more comfortable. Perhaps even asking for a PD on newer technologies
once a year sort of thing. Teaching something you don't know is worse, because
students can tell no matter how much you try to cover it up and then you lose
respect and their engagement
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