Edutainment... is good?

Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the balance between Content and Entertainment. I read a KSL job add that was asking for an 'Edutainer' to give English lectures at a boarding school. It surprised me because they came out and called it as it was. They were looking for someone to entertain, and maybe slip a little bit of content in. For some reason in my mind the term "edutainer' had a negative vibe to it, something that American education has digressed into. Now! I may be changing my opinion of it's place in modern education and instruction.

Reason 1. Entertaining an audience with the motive to teach them something could be translated into capturing the audience. If no one is listening or even cares than what's the point of going through the rest of the lesson or lecture? Gong says that a teacher's success is measured by the efforts of their students. If your students aren't into what your teaching than you're toast...

Reason 2. If I'm entertained, I'm motivated. In today's lesson with Carissa's candy sculptures and Rashel's bumper chairs I had an enormous amount of positive energy towards learning! Each lesson left me wanting more! I wanted to design what my flower bed in real life could look like and then develop a new energy to run my house.

Reason 3. Pedagogy is the art of teaching. Teaching often isn't as simple as 'One plus One equals two.' Each teacher is on a journey to becoming a better teacher, and refining their presentation skills along the way.

STL 5 - 20 min lesson

I thought Charades went really well! The class got into it and seemed like they were having a good time. They had a chance to get out of their seats and participate in something not so ordinary. Charades brought a lot of positive feedback.

Though I did work on the speed of my speech, I blew past a lot of good discussion. Todd made me nervous with an answer that I wasn't expecting. From there I was just trying to get through the material and done with the lesson. I should have asked someone else the same question and brought up a little more class discussion. Todd's answer was simply, "Yeah..." I could have fired a follow up question asking him why he thought, 'yeah..." And then I can ask others what they think and why!

Another good comment that I want to address was the fact that once my charades activity was done, I didn't return to it for class discussion. It would have been great to use the Dam and Corn Field as a framework for discussion on environmental impact from technology.


PE Teachers...

Just because you're a succesful coach does not mean that you'll be a successful PE teacher. I took a exercise Wellness class at BYU-I from a man so large that he couldn't hardly jog a lap, let alone the 6 minute miles that he required of us. Most of his lectures were side tracked with stories of his glory days and his personal philosophies - regardless of what the book said. Now here's the kicker. The tests were written according to the book, contrary to most class instruction.

I'm experiencing a similar thing right now in a coaching class that I'm taking from BYU's Track and Field head coach. Though Mark doesn't lecture wellness blasphamies, his mid-term wasn't very consistent with his lectures. Instead of asking us to describe a phase or technique within in an event like he did each lecture, he hands out a 50 question bubble sheet test that asks very specific questions that Mark mentioned in passing. And, without a textbook to refer back to and so much variation in the articles we're collecting from the internet, consistency is impossible.

Tomorrow we'll get our scores back. The nice thing is that Mark bailed the whole class out by saying that we could argue for our answers. And that questions largely missed would be thrown out. :)

html=death

For three days now we've been working on HTML coding. I've never really been exposed to the language before and was pretty much completely lost the entire lecture that Andrew gave on day one. A few connections started to happen on day two when I got to play around with dreamweaver on my own. Finally I jumped on Lynda.com and went through their basic html tutorial to be able to piece together a workign three page website. I probable put in five or six hours of work for a smurf-blue-barely-passable website.

So! A few things that I would have done differently, had I taught HTML to myself. Start with the wire frame. I need to see the overall picture before I can start visualizing what goes where and what to type when. From the wire fram pull out a column of HTML coding to the left, and CSS coding to the right, explaining how HTML and CSS interact. Then I would get into the dirty with specific codes for headers, columns, links, etc. I just didn't have a very good overall picture of what the heck was going on when I was supposed to be learning it.


Disciplining my Neighbors

I'm finding that the same skills and tactics taught to manage a classroom of children are useful in managing the adults around you. I manage an apartment complex for families, mostly students, in Orem. There are 32 units divided up into eight fourplexes that are built around a cul-de-sac. There are certain rules and regulations that the owner likes us to encourage tenants to follow. Rules such as: pay your rent by the 5th of the month or you'll be charged a late fee. Or: don't park in the circle or you'll be cited for a parking violation. As soon as I let a few people get away with parking in the cul-de-sac it seemed like the entire complex was parking in the circle. I couldn't all of the sudden tag them all with parking tickets... that just doesn't seem fair? So! I decided to turn over a new leaf, and bring along some consistency. I posted a parking notice on everyone's door saying that we would begin enforcing the parking regulations the following Monday (today). I printed up a bunch of parking violation warnings and plan on citing each car that I see parked in the circle, even for only a moment. :)


Elders Quorum - Picking on Richard

Our presidency thought it would be a good idea for the elders to review the Priesthood Ordinances from our handbook. We don't carry around our misisonary hand book in our white shirt pockets anymore so most people are pretty rusty. This last week was my turn, and I thought it would be fun to talk about dedicating homes.

I put together a little handout that would have made any RS president proud that included instructions and suggestions for dedicating one's home. I had this awesome anticipatory set mapped out in my mind where I write on the chalk board, "I want my home to be..." and then list a thousand things that the body of the quorum shouts out to me. I wrote my sentence on the board:

I WANT MY HOME TO BE:
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I looked around the room to see who was following so far and called out Richard's name. I fully expected him to be on the same page as I was and be able to participate in my little activity. Instead, Richard says, "Yeah?" It took me back for a moment, thinking, how could you not understand what I'm asking for? So I gently asked him to fill in the blank after my prompt, "I want my home to be..." Next I called on someone else for additional help. They knew right what to do.

I learned two things from this. First off, I should have vocalized the question, "What do you want your homes to be." And second, it probably wasn't a good idea to randomly pick on Richard.

TSA

The TSA's were a joke.

A visit with Bill Valora

Mr. Valora made fun of the kids, criticized their work, made public their faults, and each one of them loved it. He gave out attendance tootsie rolls and prefered that his students address him as Bill.

Bill taught an Intro to Motors class. Most of his students were freshman, although there were a few upperclass students as well. The kids were divided into pairs and assigned a motor to dissassemble piece by piece. They stood at a workbench with a board full of tools and buckets to place parts. I really liked that Bill stopped the class periodically to give instruction and remind the kids of certain procedures. He would then wander around checking work over shoulders. This usually led to another lecture moment where he explains to the class how to do, or not do, what a certain student had just done.

Bill's second period was a basic metals class. The kids had previously finished a project and were now starting on a new one. Bill started with a mini lecture in class, taking care of a few house keeping items and basic instrucitons. He drew an orthographic view of the dust pan that the kids would be making and explained a few basic procedures. Class moved out into the shop where the kids gathered around Bill's workbench. The rest of the class period Bill explained and showed how to correctly make a tin dustpan. The kids seemed to follow along fairly well for most of the lecture, but honestly I was quite bored. All the information was knew to me because I'd never worked with sheet metal before, but I still had to stand there for an hour and watch some dude make a box. Not very exciting.

I need to figure out a way for effective 'active learning.' Where we do a small demostration and then let the kids try it. Then we regroup and move on to part B. Dr C is famous for having hour, two hour long lectures in his woods class. The information is good, but I have to stand around a table saw for so long that everything that he's said has now run together and I can't really remember anything. I really think that he could break his lectures up a bit to be more effective.