While I was teaching IT and Games related modules, I had the following problems managing the learning progress of students, especially for the academically weaker students and students with poor attendance rate:
1. For many lessons, there many steps to perform using the software program in order to complete a task. The weaker students would not be able to follow the same pace as the rest and I need to repeat the steps again for them, sometime more than once.
2. For most of the practical lessons, they were not stand alone topics and it was not possible for students not to complete the previous lesson, before they moved on to the current lesson. For the students with poor attendance, they would not be able to follow the subsequent lessons when they returned to class after their absentee.
The problem led on to bigger problem in student motivation and management: after not able to follow the lessons, these students lose their interest in the module, turned up later for lessons and may subsequently led to frequent/long absenteeism.
Analyzing the factors that were within my control and evolved my solutions based on tried methods as shared by other teachers on a few teachers network website, I started to blog my lessons with step-by-step tutorials and to make the tutorials interesting, I have embedded images, online slides, pdf files and videos.
During lessons, students that were not able to follow the same pace conducted in class, they were able to refer to these blogs on their own pace to complete the lessons. For students that were absent from previous lessons, I would able to give them an initial briefing of what they have missed out and they would be able to catch up on their own, using these blogs. If students still not able to follow after using these blogs, I would revise the blogs to include additional instructions or mini-steps.
As a reflection, I feel that my efforts in using the blogs are beneficial to the academically weaker students as well as the poor attendance students: (1) students were more motivated as they were able to perform regardless of their speed and speed of the class; (2) students were trying to find their own answers to their queries via these blogs, they became more independent learners; (3) as the teacher, I had more time to focus on the extremely weak ones (about 1-2 students per class) to help them with their unusual problems encountered due to their misunderstanding of the steps.
Summary of blogs created:
| Blog | Highlights |
| - Online Tutorials | |
| - Videos Tutorials | |
| - Videos Tutorials | |
| - Online Tutorials | |
| - Embedded pdf Tutorials - Online solution to problems |
0 comments:
Post a Comment