Learning from my colleagues

A while back I wrote a post about learning from my learners.  Yesterday, I was lucky to have a colleague assisting in the classroom, and I found it very interesting to learn from her.

I had a student struggling with a particular aspect of their course (English skills).  Having spent some time with him already, I was finding it difficult to explain it any other way, so I asked my colleague to help.  After a little thought, she explained the subject completely differently to the way I had been doing it.  She was extremely patient with the learner, getting him to think about the subject in a way that was more meaningful to him, rather than looking at it in an abstract manner.

It made me reflect on how I had approached the subject, and gave me ideas on how I could do it differently next time.


My final thoughts?  That teaching is not easy - it takes a considerable amount of effort, creativity and skill - and that we, as teachers, must never be complacent about our work, but rather that we should take every opportunity to expand our own thinking and share good practice.

Social Networking Session

I think the session today on social networking went very well.  There was a lot to cram into a few hours, but all the sign ups seemed to go pretty smoothly, and everyone seemed to get to grips with posting tweets and the basics of facebook.  Not so much time for blogging, but hopefully enough of a taster to get people started.  Is this the future?

Social Networking Session

I've been running a social networking session today at the Learn IT Monmouth.

Social Networking Taster Session

Over the last few days I have been busy preparing for our taster session on Social Networking, as part of Adult Learners Week.  I will be covering Facebook, Twitter and Blogging.  I think it'll be a great session, as I'm going to encourage all the learners to Tweet during the session using a hash tag.  Hopefully there will be lots of interactivity.

Letting my learners do the teaching

In my web design class yesterday, we did a recap of adding an image to a site.  Well, I say we - I decided at the very last minute to pick on a capable students (who was at that moment being distracted by some other feature of Dreamweaver) to talk the rest of the class through the process.

She started to talk - and I politely asked her to take my seat at the IWB monitor - and talk it through from there.  The rest of the class were delighted, and it was a successful few minutes.  We gave her a round of applause for her efforts, and I then decided to take it a step further and asked another student to talk the class through adding a rollover button.

What was most interesting to me was to sit back and observe the learning process taking place.  I could see who was struggling much more clearly, and found it fascinating to see how the 'teacher' dealt with stragglers.

Not only was this a more engaging method of learning for the students, I think I really learnt something here as well - it gave me breathing space to take stock of what learning was really going on in the class.  I will definitely be doing this again.

Be careful what you Tweet

I'm following with interest the story as it unfolds regarding a guy called Chambers who tweeted that he would blow up an airport if he didn't catch his flight after a heavy fall of snow.  Stephen Fry has given his support to Chambers' appeal, joining many others in saying that the tweet was taken out of context and was clearly meant as a joke.

Not sure if I agree or not - on the one hand we should all be allowed to joke, but on the other hand, we all have a responsibility to censor our 'comments' as appropriate.  There are some things I would say in front of my husband that I would never say in a classroom, and there are some things I would say to my friends that I would never say in front of my husband.

What do you think? http://bbc.in/gcy09m

Learning from my students

In my web design class there is a young artist who is building a site for the local art community.  He often asks me in depth or difficult questions for things he want his site to be able to do.  In the past, this might have worried me as I can't always answer his questions, but today I realised what a joy it is to move beyond the constraints of what can be done easily, and to challenge both his and my learning.

All too often we limit ourselves to the things we are familiar with, instead of taking a step back and asking "what do I really want to achieve, and then trying to achieve it.  This is perhaps one of the advantages of not knowing the software.  My student has a "surely this is possible" attitude which makes us both try that bit harder to find a way of doing what he wants.  Great stuff.