Skip to main content

Trying a new teaching strategy


I am an IT faculty and because of the ever changing nature of this field, the most important skills our students need are two fold - they need to comprehend the technical side of things but most importantly they need to be able to learn on their own. Their success in their workplace is dependent on their ability to adpat and learn new skills as they progress. Students need to be self-learners as well as life-long learners. They need logical skills. For example, instead of learning a programming language they should learn logic to adapt to any language. Students need to understand that what they learn in class is just the beginning and no way near to the end of their learning journey.

The non-cognitive skills in my opinion are more important than their cognitive skills and these are skills which will determine their success in the future. Unfortunately, most of the time more weight is given to the cognitive skills because the non-cognitive skills are often difficult to measure or are not part of the course outline.

I teach a course this semester called CIS 1503 – Introduction to multimedia. This course is offered to year 1, semester 1 students. It incorporates the use of various multimedia tools to learn and apply multimedia design principles. One of the tools that students use this semester is Adobe Flash CS4 where they are required to build an interactive website with Adobe Flash. Normally for this level of students, I would teach them the tool using a very traditional approach. I would normally do a walkthrough with them step by step to build a website.

However, I decided to use a different approach this time. Students needed to learn how to build an interactive website using Flash. So I started my lesson with introducing Adobe Flash what it is used for. The students and I shared many examples of websites that use flash. We talked about the drawback of using flash as well as the advantages. We talked about the purpose of using flash in their course. Then the students launched flash and were familiarized with the interface. They were then assigned activities to create something simple using flash – the UAE flag. They helped each other since they were already familiar with using drawing tools Photoshop. 

And now for the hard part, getting them to create an interactive website in flash which also required using some code for the buttons. For the next lesson, I found a video on YouTube that demonstrates the steps to build a website in flash clearly. I then shared it with the students and assigned them an activity in class where they follow the video and build their website. As opposed to me walking them through the steps, students were encouraged to watch the video and learn on their own. My role was just to facilitate their learning and help them out with any challenges they face. I tried to reduce their anxiety in a new environment by going to through the flash environment in the first lesson. What was the outcome of this teaching strategy? Read it in my next blog…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Education Technology Project

I'm an IT teacher and teach mainly practical courses that involve technology applications. One such course I'm teaching this semester to two section is CIS 1203 - Web Technologies . Throughout this course students learn about the web and emerging web technologies. They learn to evaluate websites and plan and design their own. This course is a very hands on and practical course. I've decided to use education technology tool in this course. There are two Web 2.0 tools I want to use in this course. The first tool I want to use is  Facebook , as a means to build a PLN between the two sections taking this course. The reason for the choice of this tools is two fold. One thing is that students need to be exposed to various web based emerging technologies as part of the course. The other reason is that I would like to expand the students understanding of the potential of social networking tools beyond entertainment.  I've read a lot about how facebook can be used in a clas...
2 comments
Read more

Lifelong Learning

Learning, the way I see it, is by default lifelong and always has been that way since the beginning of time. Learning has no end. I don't think there was ever a time period where one could have said -'OK, now I learnt what I need to know in school. It's time for me to apply what I've learnt at my workplace and not learn anything new in the process!' Whether information age or not, this was never the case. So what's new now, in this knowledge society? Well, it's not the fact that we need to keep learning but pace at which learning needs to happen. The rate at which technology is changing is so rapid that we constantly have to learn and relearn new things. We need to prepare students for jobs that do not exist yet and prepare them to be proficient in their work in a short period of time. According to Toffler (2001), "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." ...
4 comments
Read more