When given this weeks blog prompt, "Think back to an educational experience that you had that was NOT well designed. If you now had the chance to re-design that experience using multimedia in your lesson design, what would you do differently and WHY? Remember to include some ideas about assessing multimedia learning in your design."
I remember a pre-calculus course from high school that was terribly ill designed. The teacher would teach us for about 5 minutes at the beginning of the class and the remainder of the time was spent with the students trying to teach themselves the material while the teacher sat at his computer. This class was extremely difficult because the teacher did not really teach, so we had to rely on the poorly designed and confusing book to teach us trigonometry and other important mathematical concepts.
If we as students had had access to some of the open source software that is available now, like The KDE Education Project, I feel that we would have had a better time at teaching ourselves. If the teacher could have used the computer to teach us about sines and cosines I think that we would have had a better time at visualizing the material. Any type of multimedia would have been better than the brief lessons that we got.
Teachers should use multimedia as a resource to help themselves and students in the learning process.
2 comments:
Unfortunately, I think similar situations happen in many mathematics courses. The graphing calculators and programs like SAS and MatLab are also really helpful tools for viewing sine and cosine curves.
Jennifer
Christy,
I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding a teacher taking advantage of visualization tools. Still, all the tools in the world won't remedy bad teaching. Good students will find a way to work around if they can, especially if there are good tools available like you identified. I think I was mostly fortunate with my math and science teachers, back in the day when none of these internet tools were available (even personal computers DID NOT EXIST), but these good teachers found ways to help us visualize things with manual graphics--it can be done. Only point here being that I hope we don't accept bad teaching and just work around it---we need better teaching know-how.
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