This course has been informative, working through a number of different pieces of software and working out which would be best to use in my teaching. This post will focus on a few applications which I have decided to use in my teaching, why I've used them, and how they've helped me create an effective learning environment.
Nearpod is an application which I feel is very useful to my teaching. It allows for presentations to be shown to students individually, rather than them all looking at one screen. Throughout a Nearpod presentation interactive questions can be added, to allow for student engagement. I prefer this to asking students to put their hands up and answer, as that allows for some students to take a back seat and not get involved. Barkley (2010) notes that promoting student engagement can have a positive impact on exam results, which is why it's important to focus on. With Nearpod, every student must provide an answer before you proceed, promoting inclusion of all students in the learning process. Personally, Nearpod works really well for me in certain situations. Every Tuesday morning, I have to teach Psychology in a computer suite. Initially I wasn't happy about this, as my planned lessons didn't involve computers. I found that as I was teaching, some students would log onto the computers and look at social media, as they couldn't resist the lure of the computer in front of them. Since I've started to use Nearpod, I can make the most of the fact that ever student is in front of a computer. I go through the slides I've prepared, and set the students brief quizzes and questions as we work through the lesson. Ingle and Duckworth (2010) comment on the use of Nearpod, stating that if used effectively it can be a good way to interact with those students who wouldn't normally want to get involved. It wouldn't be an understatement to say that Nearpod couldn't be more appropriate for this lesson I have to teach.
Secondly, Hot Potatoes is an application which has worked well in my teaching. The majority of my lectures start at 9:30am, a time when most of my students do not want to do anything which is too labour intensive. Galloway, Rogers, Armstrong and Leo (1997) note that to increase a students motivation, the work should be made more interesting to increase their want to complete it. Some of the modules that I teach are very heavy with content, eg Human Anatomy. I find that going straight into a difficult lesson immediately disengages the learners, and I've lost them for the whole lesson. Hot Potatoes has allowed me to find way in which to ease my students into the lesson, whilst also making it relevant to the content being taught. I like to start each lesson with a round up of key themes from a previous lesson, which I now do via Hot Potatoes. Using JQuiz, I often create small quizzes relating to previous work, which students have a few minutes to complete at the start of a lesson. I sometimes use JCloze to create a blank filling task, where students needed to remember key words and themes from a previous lesson to complete the sentence. I have found that tasks like these allow for the students to engage in a way which doesn't seem like work to them, and get into a working mindset for the content which is about to be taught. After initially being sceptical about Hot Potatoes, I'm pleasantly surprised that I've found a way to make it work for me and my teaching.
References
Barkley, E (2010). Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty. USA: Jossey-Bass.
Galloway, D., Rogers, C., Armstrong D., Leo, E (1997). Motivating the Difficult to Teach. UK: Longman.
Ingle, S., Duckworth, V (2013). Enhancing Learning Through Technology in Lifelong Learning. London: McGraw-Hill Education.
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