Whilst the respective teaching teams pride themselves on creative learning and teaching strategies, illustrated within this blog for example, we should never forget the role that our learners play in this process.
Often, learners will 'take a chance' when delivering an oral presentation, whether it be asking a specific question to a peer within a presentation delivery, return a question to the floor in the q and a session, perhaps raise a controversial subject within a piece of research or challenge conventional thinking. All of which are encouraged in our classes, as long as the content is not offensive of course.
Two such ideas came from a learner in a current SWAP STEM class taught by Mark. He authors that cohort's blog and students were quick to see the benefit of the workings of it, where he encourages members of the class to share good ideas, news stories to discuss, or anything that will generally provide added extras to the group's learning.
Example 1 - one of the students mentioned a very handy resource called Instapaper (I have added the link to the useful weblinks section of this blog too).
The link to this gem is found at: Instapaper
The idea behind this website is that you can save anything, and read anywhere, in a handy all in one place bookmark if you will. This is a very neat website which we could all use, to save time and is 'electronically portable' as it were.
Save anything - save all of the interesting articles, videos, cooking recipes, song lyrics, or whatever else you come across while browsing. With one click, Instapaper lets you save, read, and manage the things you find on the Internet.
Read anywhere - Instapaper syncs the articles and videos you save so that they’re waiting for you on all your devices - iPhone, iPad or Kindle. You can read anything you save, anywhere and anytime you want, even offline.
Create notes - Find that great quote you want to remember and share? Instapaper makes it easy to highlight and comment on text in any article so you can easily store it, retrieve it, quote it and share it.
Example 2 - one of the students was keen to incorporate a learning strategy she enjoys in one of her Science classes, which is kahoot. We had a discussion about how she could utilise a quiz at the end of her talk to assess and evaluate the learning of the audience and we agreed we would do this after the q and a session, so that she could control the length of the actual delivery and not have to worry about the duration of the Kahoot quiz eating into valuable delivery time.
The results were great and a winner emerged. I have to report, that the students didn't know about the quiz prior to the student delivering her talk but she informed the audience at the start of her presentation, thus ensuring active listening throughout. This was highly impressive.
The topic of research was 'How reading affects the brain' and naturally, the student was successful in the assessment.
The link to kahoot can be seen here, and the website can be easily located in the 'Useful weblinks' section on this blog - Register - Kahoot!
This is the final slide with a clear signpost for learners.
We should encourage more of this. Who says learning can't be fun!
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