Tag Archives: video recording

• Easy way #1 | Have students solve problems as a group, and write clicker questions for each other – See how Ditlev Brodersen at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Aarhus University, Denmark, tried this out in a course on Advanced Biochemistry (you will need to download the full report as PDF to read more about what he did).
• Easy way #2 | Organize ignite talk sessions with your students – As a group, or as individuals, have them prepare 5-minute talks with 20 slides total, which automatically move forward every 15 seconds. They’re like ‘mini-TED talks’: both focused and engaging. You can think of prices for best speakers, best presenters, best visual artists, etc and have the students in the audience be part of the jury. Or make it the format of your final evaluation, but still practice that format for presenting in class, perhaps also using video recording for helping with improvement.
• Easy way #3 | Assign collaborative tasks through Google Drive and MindMeister  - Group work in general is quite engaging and motivating, which can both contribute to increasing learning. But group work often goes wrong –one student talks too much, another too little, or students lose track of time– unless clear guidelines and rules are followed.  One of these rules is to make sure the group keeps track of its progress and produces a concrete output. Google Drive (former but expanded Google Docs) makes it quite convenient to organize collaborative tasks with students. Google Drive now incorporates MindMeister, which can enable students to create mind maps that connect to their Google Drive documents. The whole Google Drive+MindMeister suite is also now incorporated into the brand new Chromebook Education pack, which, after Apple’s iPad, seems to be yet another strategy to supplant PCs in schools.

Alright, just three easy ways, as I promised – easy in the sense that they won’t cost you anything (you don’t even have to use clickers) and they correspond mostly to slight but significant adjustments of current teaching practices. Although it might take some time at first to get set up –as when pursuing any new avenue– think about the resulting engagement and motivation of your students, and how rewarding that will be for both you and your students!

But did those ways appear as being ‘easy’ to you just as I announced it? Were you more like “yeah, that’s totally easy, I can do that no problem” or more like “oh, no way – I can’t use clickers/ignite talks/MindMeister that easily in my exercise sessions”? So, were you, or not, somewhat turned off after the “easy” announcement that was meant to be comforting?

If you were a bit turned off, or felt under pressure, or were looking for excuses why this would not work for you, don’t worry – that’s just a normal reaction to hearing the word “easy”. As teachers we like to use that word with our students to appear comforting and reassuring. But most likely what we achieve actually is to scare our students or have them feel bad about themselves (see number 24 on the list). Telling them for example a particular concept or assignment is “easy” will often make them feel they can no longer just ask any question about anything now, and they were probably not very eager to doing so to begin with… They also don’t want to say something that could reveal they are missing a point, which would be just like admitting the task was not “easy” to them, in front of you and all their peers!

So stay away from the “easy” word –I promise I will do the same, even though these three ways are easy…