Paper prototyping has let our students truly work on their collaborative skills, with even the shyest ones and the most distracted ones being forced to step out of their comfort zone. The students had to join the team to come up with a good project and abandon their "slacking" or shying off habits. Now we are starting on drawing in Flash, and the students just take off on their own. Tutorials have helped them greatly in developing better skills of following directions because we struggled with this aspect in the beginning of the course. However, the students like to also experiment on their own and find out stuff works in this manner. I would have never done that- I go by the manual :) But, that's where the major difference between my student generation and my generation lies: they learn new stuff by playing with it whereas we need to go to the instructions manual:)
I am learning a lot from my students and learning more about myself as a teacher. I don't scare away when group work comes in with its noise and perceived chaos levels and have become more comfortable with using technology in my other classes even though I cannot say I was completely ignorant about it before. I believe that this class is equally beneficial to me as it is for my students.
1 comment:
It sounds like things are going great. I have to agree that teaching this course taught me skills that I use in my other classes. My other classes use wikis and blogs and I am working toward a more paperless classroom. Your excitement comes through when you talk about what your students are doing and I am sure that is helping to moviate them. Keep up the good work.
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