Friday, July 27, 2007

An Electronic Communications Course

So now that it's week three, and the summer school seems to be pretty much set up, and everything is running more or less smoothly, I have a little bit of time to do things like write to this blog. I have been on Blogger daily, but working on The Official Lines E-Comm Teachers' Blog.
The first two weeks of the course was a shambles, I have to say. We had 20 teenagers in each computer room with 12 computers for 90 minutes a day (x4 classes). It was a cattle market. Every lesson was a struggle, and neither Kamil (my partner teacher) nor I, nor the students, nor the teachers who had to sit in to 'help' were having fun. It was Not Good.
So we reworked the whole program. Students have 45 minutes a day with the computers and us, and 45 minutes working on planning & correcting their work in the classroom with their own class teachers. This means that we only have a max of 10 students in each computer room at a time, which is far, FAR better. We've had to plan the 'prep' lessons for the class teachers as well of course, but it's worked out ok so far.
We've made it a quite self-directed program. The idea is that the students choose what they want to work on (apart from the blog and class computer dictionary which are compulsory) and work steadily on their own or in small groups, with the language support and corrections coming from their class teacher, and the tech support from us. The blog has a whole lot of 'how to' posts, linked from the sidebar, so they can work out how to do most things themselves. And as for what they learn, the idea is that it's computer stuff, but also communication & language things. Have a look at the side bar of the blog to see the how-to's and the list of projects we've given them to choose from. In fact, the blog has everything. It's pretty much the whole program, online. It's so cool!

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1 Comments:

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