I think the progress we have made in the past three years since I have been working here is phenomenal. I do think that we can improve our curriculum even further. With the Senior Capstone as the final unit of a students ITA career, we need to make sure that we teach students how to work independently.
One of the issues with a lot of our students is hand holding. I like the idea of what we talked about today with minimizing the use of step-by-step activities. These activities really do not teach the students anything other than to follow directions. They really aren't learning as much that they could be. I kind of see this like attending one of my science laboratory sessions. For the first 10-15 minutes the instructor will show up the set up and how to do the experiment. For the rest of the 2 hours and 45 minutes we have to answer the lab report questions and turn in the final product. I think we should give students a step by step instruction in a word document or on the student wiki with how to do a problem. For instance, if the first time we taught students how to do motion tweens in Flash was with this idea, sure it may take the students 10 minutes to figure out that they need to convert their object into a symbol, but they will probably not forget that mistake if they figure it out on their own. It might also be cool to have students doing a worksheet while they are doing the activity. We tried work sheet during lecture, that didn't help but we haven't tried the second idea.
I think we can take this to do list activity a step further by creating easy, intermediate, and advanced challenge problems during Exploration. Talking to my sister after ITA today, she was VERY discouraged about the comment that those students were just not as "gifted in Flash." I don't think it is necessary to split the students up like that every session, because the students that really understand the material will gain even more knowledge by teaching it to their peers. If we have a variety of activities with a range of difficulties, all students will be able to get the basic fundamentals and some students will be able to go one step further. One of the easy problems for starting a unit could be a matching game using Tenzin's activity with being able to identify the tools. A lot of our lessons right now for exploration I feel are in the intermediate level. So the students who are really struggling are falling further behind and the students who really understand the material are getting frustrated with the slow pace.
I think it would be helpful for each student to get a syllabus of the unit. Then, the students who missed a class will know what they missed and the students that are following the syllabus will be able to anticipate what is going to happen. So far, I have really only seen this done in Many Uses and I think the students liked having an idea what was going on. This will also force us to plan ahead.
We are doing something wrong with how we present our BTW. While we always aim for 100%, for some reason that hasn't happened for any unit yet on the first try. This can easily be solved by lessons that directly relate to the BTW and us telling the students "you will need to know this for your BTW." Students will then pay more attention to the activity and have some motivation of why they need to learn a certain concept. Also, I think the instructors need to make good behind the wheel examples by the first day the unit is taught. That is happening for some units but not all.
Basically this is all I can really think of. My mind is filled with Physiology and Biochem info right now but to recap:Teach students how to work independently and troubleshootGuided worksheet during the activity that forces the student to explain why they are doing a certain task (i.e. after the student makes a symbol in Flash and drags it on the screen 100 more times, have the work sheet question say "why is it important to have symbols")Easy, Intermediate, and Advanced activities for the students that cover the BASICS first before all of the fancy stuffUnit syllabusBetter BTW Introduction
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