Month: March 2019

It was interesting to document our own teaching facilities and reflect about how the layout and the furnishing of a room can influence the way we interact. This was not entirely new to me but it is always valuable to be reminded that the physical environment is a factor that can have an impact on students’ learning.  When choosing and studying a traditional classroom, as I did, it becomes apparent how its design and layout creates a certain atmosphere among its users. Immediately as you enter the room, it indirectly sends signals as what to expected from teachers and students. Humans are creatures of habit and a majority of our students and teachers are well familiar with the traditional style of lectures, a one-way communication, where the teacher is doing the talking and the rests sits quiet and listens. Leijon (2006) emphasize this and mean that both students and teachers have agency and use these affordances during their meaning making processes.

Sometimes this style of teaching is suitable and also necessary. At such occasions a traditional setup could work just fine. However, in the future I will be more careful with the choice of setting when I make plans for upcoming courses, depending on teaching activity. Classrooms with moveable chairs and tables becomes versatile in that respect, but also demands that you as a teacher actively rearrange the room depending on the character of the activity. It is essential to realise that the actual environment is an important factor to consider when planning for an activity, both for face to face teaching as well as for online teaching.

Our workshop in and about Zoom was mostly focusing on the technical part, how to set up breakout rooms and how to use other tools within the program. I would have liked to have more discussions concerning students learning in these different environments.

When it comes to implementing and using new technology in our courses it is clear that we must overcome several hurdles. First of all, we must know what different types of digital resources that exits. Secondly, we then need to learn how to use the tools we consider implementing in our courses. Finally, we must reflect upon how such digital tools can contribute to and improve students’ learning. I agree with Laurillard (2013) who mean that the purpose of education must lead the way and that we have to consider how we can use new digital technology as a support.

I use Zoom and a flipped classroom approach in my physics course for distant teacher students. Students own questions are supposed to be in focus during our digital meetings. My experience is that some students are well prepared for these meetings, while others are not. I have noticed that I get fewer spontaneous questions, where students make links between their everyday life experience and the physics content, compared to campus students, who I teach the same course but in a more traditional way. In that respect I concur with Jensen, Kummer and Godoy (2015) who’s study resulted in no higher learning gains for the flipped classroom approach compared to the nonflipped. Perhaps the pre-recorded lectures become too dominant in my distant course. One solution could be to give the distant students new content rich problems to discuss during our digital meetings and take advantage of the breakout room function to encourage students to interact more.

References

Jensen, J. L., Kummer, T. A., & Godoy, P. D. M. (2015). Article improvements from a flipped classroom may simply be the fruits of active learning. CBE-L fe Sciences Education, 14, 1–12.

Laurillard, D. (2013) Teaching as a Design Science. Routledge.

Leijon, M. (2016). Space as designs for and in learning: investigating the interplay between space, interaction and learning sequences in higher education. Visual Communication, vol. 15(1), s. 93-124.

 

 

 

Classroom

I teach both campus students and distant students in my course. I use several different types of learning environments depending on the character of the activity. For lectures I often use a traditional classroom, with tables and chairs arranged in rows facing a whiteboard and a smartboard. This creates an active space in front of the participating students, as mentioned by Leijon (2016). The active space gives me the possibility to show experiments, write on the whiteboard, and use digital resources as a complement to the lecture. The classroom is though not ideal for large groups of students, as only students sitting on the first rows, fully can see presented experiments. It is clear that this type of setup directs all attention towards me as a teacher and indirectly limits students’ possibilities to interact with each other’s. When I took a photo from the back of the classroom I saw all the rows of chairs facing the whiteboard and the podium, it became apparent that the arrangement of the furniture’s says something of what to expect from those who enters the room. Students instantly become audiences who implicitly are expected to follow a certain speech pattern. How formal or informal such a speech pattern becomes, is mostly decided by the teacher. Based on my own experience I believe it is important to choose a suitable environment for each occasion, depending on what we as teachers want to accomplish, and what type of interaction we strive for. I also use the same type of classroom for more student-centered activities, like seminars and practical work. The tables and chairs are at such occasions rearranged, so that the students can interact and work together face to face.

Zoom

I have recently started to use the digital tool Zoom more frequently, together with my distant students. I think it is very user friendly and also stable compared to the previous platform Adobe Connect. I usually use two different cameras, the ordinary web camera and an additional camera that I use for writing and showing how to solve physics problems. Zoom, for me, build upon interaction. I have started to use a flipped classroom approach with these distant students, where I use prerecorded lectures that I expect students to watch before our meetings. I believe that this approach makes the students interact more, as they can ask questions based on the recorded lectures. The challenge for me as a teacher here becomes to see and interact with all students.