Thanks Week 6 for the new learning!

Have you ever been to any lecture like this where slides just move on, and their functions are to let the speaker read and get the audience asleep or bored? I have been to many!

But now that I have learnt how to create interactive presentations, I know that the idea is not reading, the idea is letting the audience interact with us. The documents we read gave us some useful ideas for working better on it, for example the blank slide technique, the pauses, so forth. To tell you the truth, creating my interactive presentation took me some time, but it opened my mind because now I understand that we don’t need to be a computer specialist to create interactive presentations. Anyone can do it, what is needed is the desire to make the difference in class!

On the other hand, teaching large classes is a real challenge, it has been difficult for me, for example I would like to listen to everyone’ dialogues practice, but if I do it the two hours finish, and we need to move on the topics. What I do is to be sure I listen to everybody at least once, and then I start the other round. One useful technique to face this reality that many teachers face is working in groups as it makes large classes more manageable.

I was talking to my coordinator at the university yesterday and she made a great point when she said that traditional teachers speak a lot “teacher-centered classes”, when the best is “student-centered classes, One quote she loves and I do too is “Less Teaching, More Learning”. Isn’t that the idea?

Katty