Week 6 Engaging Students

This week’s main focus was on how to engage students especially in large classes with the help of technology. And I find the most effective way for me to manage large classes and enhance students learning experience is to use an interactive PowerPoint. I explored several articles (Adding Interaction to Your PowerPoint Presentation, Adding Multimedia to PowerPoint, Presenting with PowerPoint) related to the topic and learned many practical skills of making PowerPoint more interactive. Then I created a PowerPoint slide incorporated interactive elements like sound files, images and quick-thinks and uploaded it to the class Wiki.

Another important thing for me to do is to begin implementing the technology-related change in my class. After the study of the previous week, I have decided to create a WebQuest for my final project. The content of the WebQuest is based on one of the Chapters in our course book I am teaching this semester. I am very glad that Sean had approved my idea about this WebQuest and he also gave me some suggestions on helping my students make their own WebQuests. But as a beginner of WebQuest, I think that is too ambitious for me. So my present plan is to make my own WebQuest and walk my students through it. With the combination of PBL and WebQuest, I could make a change to our traditional way of teacher-centered teaching style and students would genuinely experience autonomous learning under the guidance of the teacher.

I devoted a lot of time designing the WebQuest as it would be the key for my final project. I did come across difficulties while making it but I managed. Here is the URL for my WebQuest AIDS ABC on Zunal.com: http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=221506. I am going to present the WebQuest to my students and ask them to work on it next week. We will find out how the students would respond to it very soon.