Exercise 1: What are the Possibilities? There must be fifty ways to teach your learner. Or a thousand. Using technology lets you amplify the teaching strategies you already use and opens up new opportunities that were not practical before. In this exercise, you'll explore existing courses and begin to discover and categorize possible teaching techniques. With any luck, you will leave the exercise with a headful of new ideas for your own courses.
The Task
After studying several different courses that make use of technology, you will work in a small group to generate a list of possible uses of technology to enhance teaching and learning. After compiling a list of what you actually observed in the courses, you'll work together to generate additional possibilities that occur to you.The Process
Each group will consist of those seated in the same row in the lab.
- As a group, you will study all of the sites listed below. Since there isn't enough time for each of you to visit all of the sites, the first order of business is to divide up the list among yourselves.
- Next, explore the courses you've taken on. Your task is to look for different ways in which the course uses technology to handle communication, learning tasks, and resources. Jot down some notes on the worksheet provided so that you can share them with your teammates when the time comes.
- When time is called, compare notes with your colleagues and see which items you have in common, and which were unique to the sites you looked at.
- Within your group, you'll then brainstorm additional ideas for using technology in teaching.
- Finally, we'll discuss your findings as a whole group and draft a preliminary list of possibilities.
Resources
Here are the sites you'll be exploring
- The W. E. B. Du Bois Virtual University
- Greek Prose Style
- Women in Antiquity
- A Survey of British Literature
- College Writing on the Internet
- Hypertext and English Studies
- InterQuest: Introduction to Philosophy
- Introductory Microeconomics on the Web
- World Cultures to 1500