Assignment One: Section Two - Face to Face Experiences

Next some experiences of face to face teaching will be analysed. The experiences will be explored and analysed in the same way as in the last section.

Creating Web Sites with Dreamweaver Software Sessions

The first experience analysed will be a three-part teaching session for geography students using Macromedia’s Dreamweaver web development software to complete an assignment. I developed and delivered this teaching alongside my colleague Mark Roche, after being asked by a geography lecturer. We were given a list of objectives that the students’ assignments had to meet, and were asked to teach a group of about 10 students how to use the software to complete an assignment meeting those objectives. I consider this a critical incident because this has been the only time that I have been so involved in helping the students learn something they directly need to do properly to pass an assignment.

Mark and I met to create a lesson plan, identifying what we would have to make sure the students knew, including using the software and other basic IT literacy skills such as file management. This was split into three two-hour sections to be delivered over three weeks, which allowed time to make sure the students could approach us with any questions and problems at the end of the last session. The main sections of the sessions were to be:
Introduce ourselves to the students.
Find out about the students and their previous experience of web site design.
Introduce the aims of the session.
Show examples of previous work that met and exceeded the pass mark.
Described the process that is required to create a web site.
Ask the student to design a site layout, a supporting file structure and basic page templates.
Show the student how to take the first steps using the Dreamweaver software.
Support the students on a more individual basis as they develop their projects and need support and guidance.

Before the training I was concerned that the students would not respond well to being asked to plan before they got on with creating their web sites. In reality, the students accepted this and I felt that they took the need for planning seriously enough for it to have been a useful foundation to their projects.

I think that doing the teaching the way we did worked well from the perspective of getting the students through the assignment. Because they knew that they would see us over a few weeks, they could bring any issues and ideas knowing that we would be there to advise and help.

From a classroom management point of view, completing all the front of class instruction that everyone needed to follow at first made things simpler and easier because we didn’t need to ask for everyone’s attention as had occurred in other classes that I have taught.

Finally and most importantly, from a student’s learning perspective, it seemed to me that we could see some students understanding important concepts to do with creating Web Sites. One time for example, a student was stuck trying to add links and had to ask for help more than once. The final time they asked for help they said that they understood what we meant and were able to add the rest of the links themselves. From what I could see, many of the students’ problems were solved by fellow students sitting near them, before the students had to ask us for help. This fits in with ideas of social learning and the social constructivist ideas about learning, and is an example of students who are able to communicate, in this case because they are in the same room, supporting each others’ learning.
Things in the training that might not have helped student learning as well as we would have liked, were the reliance of some students on our help. I have referred to this with a positive spin, and I believe that knowing that a session with ourselves, who the students see as experts, encouraged some of the students to keep working on what they could do outside the lesson, knowing that their problems would be solvable in the next lesson. What I’m referring to here is the fact that in the lesson, a certain student asked for help more regularly than others. Perhaps this was an over reliance on the teachers meaning the student was not being forced to fully engage with learning the software.

We will use Doolittle’s eight design principles again to analyse the learning in detail and decide what could have been done differently to improve learning.

The first principle asks for real world environments and sitting at computers using the software to create real Web Sites on topics is as real as could be hoped for. It was a very similar process to the process they would go through to create any web site in any situation. In the future they may have web site creation software tools that work slightly differently, but the design process that they went through will be the same.

The social negotiation asked for by the second principle may be in evidence although there are certain sections of the teaching that do not require social negotiation and mediation, such as how to add a link to the web page, because you must do it a certain way. There are other things that can and should be, such as how you allow your site’s users to navigate the site. Because students were spending the six hours in the classroom together, they had chance to talk to each other and discuss possibilities with each other and the teachers. We as teachers moved round the room talking to students who we thought required assistance but apart from that, discussion over different possibilities was not actively encouraged as part of the learning experience.,

The third principle focuses on relevance and this learning experience makes the creation of web sites relevant to the students by asking them to complete a geography assignment and present the information in the non-linear form that a web site encourages. There is no discussion in the training though about how this is relevant to the students’ interests and future needs, so the relevance is not explicit.

The fourth principle was met to an extent by asking the group as a whole who had experience of creating web sites. One student said that he had which meant we could tell him what he needed to go through with the group and where he could work independently. Of course this question does not retrieve much detailed information from the students, but I think that it is enough for our purposes in these sessions because we are only using and teaching basic web design knowledge and skills, so students either know it through previous learning or they don’t.

Regarding principle five, in the case of these sessions, I was not involved in the formal assessment at all, and it could be said that we do not need consider this. However it is worth looking at if formative assessment could be built in between the sessions. For example if we have covered how to do certain things in a session we could create online resources such as a quiz to see if the students can remember certain things. If they haven’t they can be linked to online resources that go over things again for them.

Relating this experience to principle six, in this experience the students had to create something themselves, which means that they must make sure that they are doing the work over a period of time, and must be engaged with what they are doing. Could we as teachers encourage this any more? Perhaps by encouraging those who are struggling to get their assignment finished to create a plan of what they need to do and when they will do it. Not all students might want to or need to do this, but we could offer it as an option.

Because of the short term nature and the majority of the learning outcomes being technical, like the screencasting teaching mentioned above there can be an assumption on our part that we need to instruct, as is argued against by principle seven. We can move away from that by perhaps giving basic information on how to use the Dreamweaver software and encouraging students to use the software’s help files rather than us telling them the answers.

Regarding principle eight, as teachers in this context we are standing at the front of a class and then talking to the students one-to-one later, which allows us to discuss what was said at the front in different ways until we feel that the student has understood. This occurs very naturally, and we could say to the students that if they do not understand fully what we are saying at the front, they should ask us to explain again one-to-one.