FLEXIBLE ENVIRONMENT (week 1 )

--Originally published at lehrersimon

 

Hello everybody,                                                                                                                                                 First of all, for being relatively new at this content, I had a good first week. I was able to choose whenever I wanted to work on my assignment, reading recommendaded liturature etc.  I had various options to communicate with Ken or with April ( being a bit conservative  I´ve choosen for email) , I could choose a language to communicate,  I could choose between a day- and eveningsession on hangouts, even got invitations to join them,  could choose between reading articles and seeing videos, and had time enough to avoid having stress with my wife about caring for the kids and all  other work and activities that needed to be done last week.

So starting up gave me a pretty good idea of what we are talking about !

Reflecting on my current status:

• I establish spaces and time frames that permit students to interact and reflect on their learning as needed.

 

I think that this part is going rather well, I plan activities by week, students know what they have to do, when to be ready with their activities, and when they will be evaluaded. ( I also tried to make frames for a longer period but for me this didn´t work out )

 

• I continually observe and monitor students to make adjustments as appropriate.

 

Here is where I see that there is a lot to improve. My only contact outside the classroom is by email. Due to a very busy professional life, having young children and a wife,  I often see their comments late in the evening or the next day. When they communicate on facebook, it´s even worse. I also noted that my students prefer using other ways of communication.

Being a student in this course , I appreciated the quick respons I got after posting my blog. In classes I do monitor what my students are doing and try to help them where they are having problems to move on. So it´s also about defining my personal attitute to modern communication.

 

• I provide students with different ways to learn content and demonstrate master

Yes and no !  I use lot´s of different materials in my classes; books, interactive lessonprograms on the internet, videos and articles ( most of them are a combination from written text and video ), and I like to use music in my classes.                                                       So here I think I´m doing well.   What´s missing or can be improved is to mix them up, preparing  classes in a more consistant way.  I link the different ways to learn, but we aren´t working on them at the same time.   This means that my students aren´t free to choose, they have to do them all, only  at different moments. So maybe we are working double or  at least it isn´t flexible !    At Tec we have our students evaluating / grading us and what I´ve learned from this semester´s ctitics coincides with this.

Well the only thing left to be done for this week is the video, I´m not so keen on grabbing myself , but I´ll give it a shot. I wish you all a nice sundayafternoon and we´ll be in touch next week !