When an old horse needs to learn new tricks 😊
This year, at VUC Storstrøm in Vordingborg, we have worked especially with didactics in connection to online and LMS supported teaching. As a new approach we set up a study group to read and discuss Gilly Salmon´s book “E-tivities – the key to active online learning”. This is a book with numerous hands-on activities and really simple but well-explained and well-documented theory. This gave us a common background information on the subject and gave each teacher a good starting point. We enrolled that to the entire staff of teachers at a workshop trying out one of the tools: Reversal thinking: How can we make sure that the students will be even more bored with our online teaching. In the task, there were 16 statements which were to be discussed and prioritized. By defining what we didn’t want, it came clear what was important to all of us.
Especially these points from “E-vitities – a key to online learning” have made an impression on me and an impact on my teaching:
- Write invitations to your subject as motivation – make it fun to participate.
- When planning start with the end in mind – and be organized
- Summarizing as a great collaborative exercise for students and as sparks for next e-tivity
- And best of all: Remember overfilling an e-tivity is the enemy of active engagement!
With all this inspiration in mind, I had to start this year in a completely different way – I invited the students to the subject before class one week prior to class. You can see the result here:
https://screenrec.com/share/8gi9FjCAyH
And on the morning before first lesson, they got this invitation:
Each day a new invitation is published, and the students respond with a like, a smiley, a gif or a comment! It works 😊
Maybe I didn’t learn new tricks, but it definitely gave me inspiration to reorganize my teaching and make online learning fun. And mostly, it was of great value to discuss didactics with colleagues and inspire each other. I can highly recommend Gilly Salmon and the book on E-tivities.
Susanne Djurhuus, teacher
