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Showing posts with label 10. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 10. Show all posts

Thursday, February 26, 2015

10 Qualities That Make A Good Teacher Richard M Reis

  • Article - What Makes a Good Teacher

GOOD TEACHERS?

  1. Really Want to Be Good Teachers.
  2. Take Risks.
  3. Have a Positive Attitude.
  4. Never Have Enough Time.
  5. Think of Teaching as a Form of Parenting.
  6. Try to Give Students Confidence.
  7. Try to Keep Students-And Themselves-Off Balance.
  8. Try to Motivate Students by Working Within Their Incentive System.
  9. Do Not Trust Student Evaluations, Neither do bad teachers.
  10. Listen to Their Students.
"The trouble with good teachers is that, finally, they wont be contained in a corral labeled "good teachers." The trouble with exciting teachers is that they are almost always mavericks, trotting blithely off into some distant sunset where no one can brand them. The trouble with inspiring teachers is that they wont stay put long enough to be measured, perhaps because they know that if they did they would be expiring teachers."

What a great article! Thanks Richard M. Reis (PhD, Stanford University) for sharing your experiences and thoughts about some of the qualities that make a good teacher. I suppose we will not understand how good this reflective article is before we read and reflect the full story. Otherwise, it will be like memorizing PowerPoints without understanding the underlying stories (substance) supporting them. Yeah, we are kind of genetically and mentally engineered to digest stories. Stories that are memorable often hang around us for life. Please click here (or the above link) and reflect.

Yeah, it is easy to read about it. What about applying some of these qualities, or characteristics to our own teaching/coaching/facilitating/training/mentoring/nurturing/guiding... :)

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Wednesday, February 25, 2015

10 Secrets to Great Teaching Part 2

  • 10 Secrets to Great Teaching (Part 1)
  • Google Video version (Part 2)
  • Presentation Slides (SlideShare)

PART 2
In part 2, I explore the remaining six (6) secrets (of the 10 discussed) to teaching, or ingredients to become a great teacher. The 10 keywords associated with the 10 secrets are highlighted in the graphic above. I will let the narrated presentation (below) do all the talking for now. Perhaps I will write a paper about the 10 secrets to great teaching in month or two, after more discussions and reflections with great people like you. In the meantime, have fun watching me babble and mumble about great teaching (Not sure about that!):


I tried to upload the video to TeacherTube, but without success until now (size issue?).
Anyway, as long as we have Google Video, why worry!

Hopefully, more people will join this discussion and scrutinize their own teaching to become better teachers. Teaching is a life time journey, but it would be nice to discover a bit of wisdom as early as possible. I suppose if we put our reflective minds together, we can do great things about our own teaching, and help for example others to facilitate more efficient and effective AHA moments (Synthesize and simplify content or learning so that students understand).

If you are looking for the slidecast version (2 parts-in-one) and presentation slides, you can find it right here:

view presentation (tags: learning teaching education creativity)

SELF-EVALUATION
In part 2, I actually wrote a script before recording (for testing purposes). For learning purposes, I found that writing a script got me to focus and think clearer about what I wanted to say. Writing a script is like rehearsing your presentation again and again. However, I am not sure if my arguments are more solid this time around. Anyway, I am not exactly defending a scientific paper, but instead I am having a conversation about great teaching with myself (You got to start somewhere!).

Did this narrated presentation take longer time to develop? Yes, a bit only! Actually, if you are producing a long video or cant type fast, I would recommend that you record on-the-fly without a script. However, if you have sufficient time allocated to create a script, it is actually not a bad idea. Perhaps a compromise would do, meaning you dont necessarily create a full-script, but a sufficient one to assist you to say what you want to say, the way you want it to be said. As for recording the audio, I used Audacity, which is simply a sensational free audio recording tool.

Overall, I am reasonable comfortable with writing and mashing-up slides, but I probably need a few more narrated videos under my belt, before I can feel good about my own voice. Though, hopefully the next learning videos I develop are shorter learning nuggets, which are less than 5 minutes a piece.

Oops, I forgot to mention the importance of having fun and a sense of humor while inspiring your students to learn. Yes, it is going to be a long learning process, and I AM STILL LEARNING :)
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Sunday, February 15, 2015

Ubuntu 10 04 Released

by Thom Holwerda

IconIts that time of year again: a new Ubuntu release (or Kubuntu, if thats your thing). Canonical has just released Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx. This is a long term support release, meaning its supported period is far longer than that of normal releases. It comes with the latest and greatest the Free software world has to offer, while also adding some Ubuntu-specific features, of course.

"Ubuntu 10.04 LTS challenges the perceptions of the Linux desktop, bringing a whole new category of users to the world of Ubuntu," said Jane Silber, Canonicals CEO, "Changes like the new look and feel and the addition of a music store, layered on top of our relentless focus on delivering an intuitive and attractive user experience for new and existing Ubuntu users - these are the bridging elements to the mainstream market that our community, our partners and our users really want. Long-term support makes Ubuntu 10.04 LTS very attractive to corporate IT as well."

Starting at the beginning (literally): boot time has been improved considerably. I personally switched to the Luid Lynx branch a few days ago, and noticed the improved boot speed right away on my machine. Applications seem to start faster too, and Compiz performance has been jacked up too - although it could also be they tweaked the default duration times for the effects.

Another major focus is this whole "Social from the start" business. Theyve inlcuded something called the "Me menu" from which you can administer al your social networking and IM stuff. "The new Me Menu in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS consolidates the process of accessing and updating social networks including Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Identi.ca," the release notes detail, "The Me Menu also integrates chat channels so users can talk with friends or colleagues on Google Talk, MSN, IRC and nearly every network."

Sadly, the Me menu breaks as soon as you switch to anything but the default icon theme - even if the icon theme you switched to is in the repositories.

The same applies to the fancy new tray icons they designed and added to this release. Instead of making this pervasive (i.e., part of the panel) these icons are just a theme, and as soon as you switch themes, the beautiful icons disappear. It would be nice if they were available no matter the theme you chose, as a unified look for tray icons is a very welcome addition.

All the artwork has been updated in this release - from the mentioned tray icons all the way to the boot screen. Personally, I detest the graphical theme with a passion, but the new boot screen is really nice. Luckily, this is Linux, so a new theme is just a few clicks or commands away (sudo apt-get install gnome-colors shiki-colors).

It comes with version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel, and GNOME 2.30 for Ubuntu, and KDE SC 4.4 for Kubuntu.

http://www.osnews.com/story/23225/Ubuntu_10_04_Released

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