This week has been (again) pretty interesting. First we enjoyed an in class activity consisting of what I would call “supervised learning”. More precisely the teacher gave a sheet with a couple exercises and then let the students work on it for a while. He then guided the students to the solution and emphasized the important features of the exercises. As soon as the students had finished one sheet, another one was distributed.

One of the goal here was to have a form of teaching where the students are active learners trying to solve exercises. At the same time, the goal was to have a method that would work in a class of 60-70 students (unlike the activity described in this post that seemed to work only for small groups). As a participant I found motivating to work on concrete problems and being active. One difficulty though is to gauge the exercises correctly and in case some students are stuck, to give only only a little bit of help to get them started and not the full solution. Indeed, students who are not able to make progress at all on certain parts could easily feel discouraged (as it happened to the author on one section).

This activity seems to be easily scaled up to a whole class by forming groups. Then, of course, comes the always difficult task of having students actually working together and not just on their own and to help each other in case some are faster than others. To sum up this activity appears to be very attractive as it highly encourages students to be active during the “lecture”.

This week’s online activity revolved around possible alternatives for clickers. Participants were invited to reflect on the different alternative methods that exist to the use of clickers (the basic assumption was that slickers are helpful and that we would like to see what else is out there). Pros and cons of devices as simple as colored cue cards or the many instant polling software (such as Google forms, Socrative, Poll everywhere, or Learning Catalytics) were discussed.