Thinking EdTech: Back to School

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Back to School

I am excited about teaching the introductory educational technology course (W200) for pre-service teachers at IU this year. I am looking forward to seeing similarities and differences between my experience teaching it at IU and the past few years at KWC. So far, I have found that the students are of the same collegiate level - mostly freshmen and sophomores. With 14 students enrolled, my class is smaller than previous semesters, though it could be because I'm teaching this section on a Friday morning. I plan to take advantage of this small class size to really explore the content and skills deeply with the students this semester. Since I'll be teaching two sections in the spring, I want to make sure that I work out most of the kinks this semester.

Besides going over the syllabus and creating new Google, delicious.com, and Blogger accounts, we spent some time this week getting to know one another. We used the ice breaker activity "When I went into my 28816 lab section...." This went really well, as the students seemed to enjoy it and actually started to learn each other's names. I brought packs of mini M&Ms and Reese's sticks to encourage participation and bring about smiles all around. In our class we have a twin, someone who spent the summer in Honduras, two student athletes (track/cross country and football), a member of the Marching Hundred, and someone who worked at a daycare all summer (who I may ask to babysit at some point!)

I decided not to do the wikispaces class profile this week in order to give the students ample time to complete the survey and not feel rushed doing it. I think many of them had difficulty with the questions about educational technology knowledge, but I had briefed them before they began the survey that some of the questions would be very hard and that they were not expected to know the answers at this time. Many finished in about 15 minutes, but some took a bit longer to complete it.

Labels: teaching, W200

posted by SG @ 10:58 PM

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