You wish the pun-iness would end, but it won't on this blog! stick around and I'll try to make it worth your while.
I was beyond impressed with the ease and attractiveness of Google Sites the other day. In class we walked through setting up our own site and talked about applications to teaching.
Because I'm not sure whether I'll teach another class during my time in graduate school, I decided to set up a personal site highlighting my teaching and research to help me when I'm on the job market (one day, it will happen they say).
Aesthetics are very important to me, so the clean layout and subtle design templates were immediately appealing. Re-arranging the sidebar was the only task that seemed unintuitive to me, so perhaps there are more user-unfriendly flaws to be found. But I plan to finalize this site, and if all goes well, use it for a class!
If I'm still teaching the same class at UGA in the fall, I think it will be a great tool for this class in particular. My students often remark that this is one of the most useful classes they take in their time as education majors This is not a pat on the back, since i am not the designer, just the instructor!
What's funny though, is that we (the 9 TAs teaching the same material) don't actually teach them many classroom strategies at all. Apparently, they're mainly just grateful to have all the theoretical jargon disambiguated for them. But by having a place to aggregate resources, there is real potential for them to compile practical strategies...linked to theory names of course! :)
I'm curious - what class do you teach? And how do you plan to use the page for it? I haven't been able to figure out how to use this stuff for the lab I am teaching. They seemed to be something "extra" for a class, so I am curious how you would integrate it.
ReplyDeleteMatt S.
i teach an introductory educational psychology class. if i use it, i think i will assign different groups students to curate pages with practical classroom management, teaching, and activity ideas based on the major theories we study.
ReplyDeleteI love the pun-iness :)
ReplyDelete