Week 6: Engaging Students / Large Classes and Interactive PowerPoint

Large class. Do you have this in your school? We don't. Our classes have in average 27 students. 30 will be the largest number of students in class. However, from time to time, we do have a lecture where we combine all five classes from the same form in one big room to undergo one lecture-style lesson. Sometimes we do that too when there happens to be a lack of teacher due to unforeseen circumstances like sickness, out-of-school duty etc. Handling a large class is not an easy task, especially with younger students who just love to talk and move around a lot. They are more energetic and requires full attention. As for the older ones, the usual problem is inattentiveness due to boredom. This requires motivation.

So, what I learnt this week is related to this problem. We talked about how tools like PowerPoint can be used to attract students' attention. In using PowerPoint too, there are various ways that we could do to make one presentation interesting and powerful to retain students' focus and attention. However, teachers/lecturers should bear in mind not to over-use it. Students will get bored too when we use them a lot, to the point that we rely entirely on the PowerPoint to do the lesson or we just read-out-loud points on the PowerPoint. Techniques such as ConcepTest and QuickWrite may be used along with a special blank slide within the PowerPoint presentation, just to switch students' view. We could also create a quiz using PowerPoint by adding hyperlinks etc. All these are called interactive PowerPoint method.

There are also alternatives to PowerPoint that I learn this week. For example, Prezi, SlideRocket, 280Slides and ZohoShow. These alternative add some spice to the presentation, making it more interesting and appealing for students. Well, who doesn't like something new, right? So I guess I'll be learning more and more of these tools and apply it my lessons. :)

As for the project, I haven't actually done the WebQuest lesson to my students. However, I tried one lesson plan (the one we did for Week 4 on Technology-enhanced Lesson Plan) without Internet in class. I've prepared beforehand by downloading the audio file and have the materials ready offline. It works! Students love it that we do something different and I believe I can expect them to be more enthusiastic when we do the WebQuest lesson this upcoming week. Hopefully... Anyway, one lesson I learnt when doing that lesson is to have Plan B ready because in my situation, things can go wrong anytime.

Anyway, have fun teaching everyone!