Greg Wilson/The Third Bit: What’s The Scratch of the Social Sciences? – how to teach the social sciences to programmers like the Scratch language teaches programming to non-programmers (links to an essay on inessential weirdness of open source development from 2016 – fascinating!).
Teaching
There are 4 posts filed in Teaching (this is page 1 of 1).
Using podcasting as a teaching tool
Earlier this month, John Johnston wrote about his experience with student podcasting:
We are trying to give our class motivation to practise their talking, listening, reading and writing. Communication with their peers and an audience. For me simple podcasting provides a great opportunity for that.
via John Johnston
I think this is terrific – more teachers should use podcasting as a technique to increase literacy skills.
If you want to hurry, slow down
The title of this could have been “If you want to go faster, slow down”, but I liked this one better. The reason for this post is a set of events that happened to me recently, where multiple immediate actions fell in my lap. As I tried to take case of these actions, I made mistakes along the way, which slowed me down. As I was trying to solve one of these actions, other things changed which I did not know about until some time later. If I had known, I could have taken other steps to address the action. As it was, those people were hurrying as well.
What is the takeaway here? If someone presents you with a request for immediate action, slow down and think about it. Ask some clarifying questions. See if the deadline is really as dire as the person thinks it is. By taking these actions (slowing down), you have a better chance of finishing faster (the goal of hurrying). I will try to remember this when (not if) this happens to me again!
Read: Teaching habits that support active learning
These ideas could also be applied to corporate training as well as learning in the college environment.