It's been a while since I've written any reflection stuff in the my blog and it seems like their is quite a bit that I need to write about. Eg about three weeks of teaching.
lib video training
It's great to do some evaluations again. It's been a while since I've done any. The main feedback was to do with the hardware not working, which was really frustating. What was great was the appication of the Merrill stuff about instruction and how it's all about building up a almost spiral like set of problems, But because I was supporting them doing the project as well maybe it was a bit like they where just following along. We also all got sick of the footage we where using by the end of the day. One good thing was the by mid way thru the day people started to experiment and play a bit, eg most people learnt about the titles by experimentation not by me showing them.
Diploma students
The learning plans seem to making a really difference with the diploma students, people seem more happy about being do things in the way that works for them. I'm also seeing students starting to take more responsibility for their learning which is really great. I asked this morning about if we should have some sort of system for tracking peoples progress in terms of completion of tutorials and the students didn't seem to like this idea at all. What is maybe not working as well is the software sessions instead of being problems, they have been more like monkey see monkey do sessions broken down into small chunks. Which is not really what I want them to be. What I think this comes down to the fact that I need to change the process of planning these sessions, When I'm doing the session plans I need to focus more on problems the students will be solving. Also only doing these sessions for half the day seems to work really well,
I'm not sure what to write about last Thursday. I'm starting to feel that the students are not well prepared for the problems involved in working with real clients. One think I really need to do is talk to them about how to run meetings. This lack of preparation relates back the problems I see with how the students are developing/being taught the communication and team work skills.
I'm starting to see how some parts of the course could be divided down into parts that could be offered as shorter courses or online.
Not sure how much progress I'm making with flexibility in the area. It's interesting once people are in the course we can be quite flexible, I need to think more about this. I think part of it for me is that I'm getting to know the students individually better. What could be good to do is to draft some templates that could be used at the being of the year to delevop some sort of segments in the groups.