Reading Notes #4

Reading Notes #4 Comm 702 Oct. 5, 2011 Margaret Brady

When I am teaching a small class, I like having them work in groups as I believe it does build cohesiveness within the class and allows them to look at the subject matter from all sides. I’m still struggling with how a person does this with 90 students in a lecture hall???

Today, I had my Biology lecture class of 30 students break up into 7 groups and each group had to write a 2 minute speech about an organelle that I assigned them. They also had to draw their organelle on the whiteboard and I brought in lots of colored markers as they were to try to make their organelle look the “best.” They had 20 minutes to prepare their speech about why their organelle is the “best” one in the cell and had to try to convince the rest of the class that they should vote for theirs to win. The voting ballots were passed out to each student and the criteria was judging first through third place for both the drawing and the speech. I graded each group on their presentations and counted the winning ballots and gave those points as extra credit to the winning group members.

The other portion of this activity was to have each of the group members grade each other regrading participation! Each student was given a rating sheet and they wrote their name at the top and then the names of their group members on the sheet and rated them from 5 (Excellent) to 1 (Poor) as far as their participation in the activity. Sadly, one student even wrote Zero (did nothing) in rating a person in their group. Also, they had to write “why” they gave that student that rating, as in “helped with the drawing but didn’t work on the speech,” etc. I counted the students off in numbers because I am trying to have the super studious ones work with the “slackers” and break up the “cliques” in there. Success!

Where online activities go wrong: Last year, a colleague of mine had all of her tests on line and the students would access them from the computers in the lab. When the test was open, they took the test and then filled in a scantron sheet that was handed in to her. Then they would close the window and class would continue. Well, one day, the window behind the test was left open (normally she closed this after the test was accessed when she set up the computers for the tests). When the students closed the test window at their stations, they saw all of the files for all of her tests, including the midterm. Of course there was the handful of students who immediately emailed that to themselves and then got together with their friends and passed out copies of the midterm and it was a BIG scandal, as you can imagine! Be careful with internet use...