On 04/02/14 15:02, Russell Coker wrote:
On Sat, 1 Feb 2014 22:04:32 Daniel Jitnah wrote:
What it meant was that 1 teacher could focus on delivering the curriculum material to the class as a whole, while the other would focus on the classroom management stuff and also could provide 1-1 interaction to some extent. It meant that the curriculum delivery was less interrupted by other classroom activities, And the teachers would swap over the roles. I think you could probably increase the student-teacher ratio at the same time. 2 teachers in the same room with twice the number of students are more effective that 2 teachers in 2 separate classrooms with 1/2 the number of students each!
One option that is being tried by some universities is to use video lectures to cover the material and then have the staff just do the 1:1 stuff.
The comment I'd make here is that this will work well in University-lecture situation. But in a school/classroom environment, teachers are not "Lecturers" - the classroom dynamics is vastly different to a lecture theatre one. Although in later yrs (12) this may work. I however acknowledge that the scenario described below can be very valuable. As a matter of fact I have myself experimented with that in schools previously. I had setup web material in various forms on my laptop (*) and had students sit in computer labs or library and go through them, while I was able to walk around and interact on a 1-1 or small group basis (3 or 4). That worked well, and I used that fairly regularly on late Thursday and late Friday classes when possible. However I think that if it was used too often it could lose its appeal. Cheers Daniel. (*)For info: I could do that easily because I have the IT skills to do it. I had everything on my laptop and included online quiz which they could do immediately and I could mark and grade these on the fly literally - I literally plugged in my laptop to the school ethernet (disconnected the teachers workstation) and had students http to the IP address of my laptop. Trying to get this setup using the school IT infrastructure was ... too difficult administratively! (Had to get Principal's approval, and I was told he would never approve it even though I'd never mention the word "Linux".) Your average teacher could not do that without a lot of (IT) support and thats not available as far as I know. I used my own personal laptop and never had a EDU Dept issued one, which I refused to have. ... and when I left the school they chased me for a laptop I never had, and needed some convincing that I never had one!!
There's no point in trying to get every teacher to give a great lecture on the topic while being interrupted when you can just get one of the best teachers the country to give a lecture in studio conditions and have the kids watch it on a tablet with headphones. Then the kids can pause and rewind as necessary and ask questions of the teacher in the room. Also if most of the class are watching the video then when one student asks questions it doesn't take time away from others' learning, this saves time and also encourages students who are less confident about asking questions.
The first thing that we should do is reject all the ideas that are based on 1900's technology and look for ways of doing things better with modern technology.