Tuesday, August 21, 2007
First Day
First day of teaching is always a bit reckless. There are many different ways into the first day, the classroom, and structuring an environment for yourself and your students. The first topic for this collaborative will be first day practice: things you do, things you don't, what works, what you love, what you hate.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Not sure whether or not you want us to initiate a new post, or just reply to your general prompt. I'll go with the later first!
Since I'm only teaching one course this semester, and it's online, I was a little behind the power curve. I just got a partial syllabus out to them today, the second day of class. I know that online classes need to be well developed in the beginning of the semester; however, I can't seem to motivate myself to get much of anything done since I know my roster is going to radically shift and change during the next four days. Inside Higher Ed just posted an article about students who "shop" courses during the add/drop period. Not only does it affect my motivation to prepare (yeah, yeah, lazy Shelley) but it radically affects whether or not courses make. Courses were dropped weeks ago when they didn't have enough students. And students who just started to register and "shop" this week are angry because there aren't enough classes available?
On another "first day of class" note...I'm seriously playing with Google Groups this semester. Always playing! :-)
I too am a huge fan of the Google world for teaching (thanks for the idea). It's been the most effective online tool I've used so far. It does a far sight more in terms of extending an online community with easy and access than Blackboard ever has for my students. I'm generating a Google Group for my Shakespeare section next semester since it's only a once a week class. I think that it will add an important component to class discussion, peer review, group work, all of which ends up getting cut short at some point during the semester due to time.
My first day, particularly online, is always a bit frustrating. In the classroom, face-to-face, the first day always turns out stellar--meeting the students, breaking the ice, talking through course expectations, etc. Face-to-face always seems to generate community really well, or perhaps I feel more comfortable in that environment and therefore it's easier for me to tacitly...manipulate? I think manipulate is probably the right word. To do a little unpacking work, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. Getting assumptions about writing on the board only to completely explode them is fun.
Online however, I feel like even though I've set up the space as intuitively as possible and been as explicit as possible, it never quite gels. Very probably it's because my version of intuitive is not my students, or it could be that only three of my students (out of 20, several dropped after seeing the reading load) have ever taken an online course before. I wonder what kinds of introductory, classroom/community building work people do in the online environment?
Post a Comment