Making Concepts Come Alive Classrooms Dont Have to be Deadly or…

Making Concepts Come Alive

Classrooms Don’t Have to be Deadly

or…

We Have A Tough Job

Diverse Students

Diverse Instructors

Diverse Delivery Demands

We need good tools and strategies to help us do our job right!

Student Diversity

Vast range of experience Traditional vs. Adult Hardware vs. Software

Full Spectrum of Learning Styles Auditory, Visual, Kinesthetic, Interactive

Full Range of Needs ESL Physical & learning handicaps

Delivery Diversity

Face to Face Large lecture format Small lecture format 14,10 or 8 week semesters With or without lab

Hybrid or Online Different forms of Internet access

Dial up, Broadband

Instructor Diversity

Full time Instructors to full professor

Adjuncts New or “seasoned”

Different levels of expertise, interests and knowledge base.

Different amounts of start-up and prep time

Dilemma

How, as instructors, do we: Manage the diversity in students? Manage the diversity in delivery

methods?And…

Keep the students interested? Does the “sit down, shut up, listen

and learn” method really work?

What We Are Doing

Sequence and select topics with spin toward student interest

Increase classroom interaction

Inject current events

Use of ART and images

Weave in multimedia

Smarter assessment strategies

Important in any classroom environment

Use the same set of teaching strategies to any student…

Sequence and Select Topics

Sequence and Select topics with a

spin toward student interest:

Home Networking

CD Burner Installation

Mobile Technology

Classroom Interaction

Increase Classroom Interaction Group Projects – Web Quests

Design Your Own Borrow from the Web From the text

Spam spam spam spam

Classroom Interaction

Team Times Gizmo, Inc. from page 147 of Tech in Action

Let the students be the teacher PPT presentations Organizing Key Terms

Current Events

Current events Tech TV Newspapers: in print and online Web Work

You Gotta Have Art!

Lots of ART ready to go From the book and Different from the book

More Art

3D renderings

Multimedia

Multimedia Tech TV Warriors of the . Net Our Own Animations SoundBytes –

Virtual PC Tour (Chapter 2) Installing a Computer Network (Chapter 7) Labs

hands on learning even at home

Smarter Assessment

Assessment Combination of projects –

multi layered, multi-purpose Feather in application skills

PPT projects Word/Excel skills

Automated training/testing to be more efficient in delivery

And all this means….

We are constantly Reinventing Repackaging Redesigning

…With little time

Consider This Scenario… Assigned a Sound Byte as pre-lecture material. Want today’s lecture to build on that and to

provoke discussion. Need to reorganize PPT and find coordinating

animations Need homework assignment Also want class materials shipped off to

supporting BBD site

Ten minutes to lecture!

How to Organize all THAT!?!

Present IT! The “Next Gen” Instructor Resource CD!The “Next Gen” Instructor Resource CD!

Contact Information

Mary Anne Poatsy

[email protected]

Montgomery County Community College340 DeKalb PikeBlue Bell, PA 19422