:Daniel’s Teaching Blogfolio

I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t remember if my second observation since being hired here took place yesterday or the day before. Either way, I think it went fairly well.

The schedule had the class doing their free-reading (more on that in a moment) but I decided that I wanted to do something to help them prepare for their end of semester project. The guys have to choose a product and explain what contribution each of the big four engineering fields (mechanical, electrical, chemical and computer) makes to the production of it. I prepared a text gleaned from the internet (and used legally as far as I could tell) that explained how CDs are made and then tells which engineering fields contribute to their production. The only criticism I have of the lesson is that I should not have tried to model the pronunciation of the entire vocabulary list. I should have let the students tell me which ones they wanted modeled. I’ll remember that next time.

The students were fine. Whenever they would speak Arabic, I would walk over and in a voice loud enough for Mr. Coordinator to hear and say, “You know that when you speak Arabic in class you make me look bad in front of M.” It was not entirely ineffective.

So now I’m waiting for the official feedback. I popped in Mr. C’s office for some informal feedback and didn’t get any (he’s a busy guy) so I’m just waiting.

…and about the free-reading experiment: I spent part of my morning today putting a questionnaire on Moodle to get the students’ feedback at the end of the semester. I can’t say that I enjoyed my first in depth experience with Moodle. I didn’t find the interface terribly intuitive and probably recreated the questionnaire three times before I got it to the point of being usable. Not sure if it is a “good” questionnaire but then again, if it tells me what I want to know, I guess it’s fine. We’ll find out eventually.