Sunday, January 15, 2006

Second Semester

Well, it seems like it has been some time since I last posted.....

This week, I took my classes to the computer labs and had them send me an e-mail. This seems to work better than when I assigned it as homework. After they sent the e-mail, I had an online assignment for them to complete. This was helpful since some of the mail came fast and others took a little while. (They had to set-up an account.)

I have not given them a blog assignment yet. I am waiting a little bit so we can have some discussions in class first. When I asked the students about blogs, only a handful of them said that they used them before so I wanted to wait.

There seem to be a lot of topics that I could choose from this semester to blog about. Maybe my brain is now thinking about them.

I tried Amanda's idea of introducing the semester as a key concept and then having the students attempt to tie everything to that concept. I am overly excited about trying this and I think it will help the students see the big picture.

4 comments:

Karl Fisch said...

I'd be curious what the key concept was for each of your courses - and how you are trying to tie everything to it. Would you be willing to share?

Hatak said...

For second semster I picked "Nature prefers low energy" for chemistry. Since all of the material (or most of it) deals with lowest energy arrangment in molecules and atoms and why reactions occur, I thought over break if the students could tie things to that then they might be able to make connections.

Karl Fisch said...

Let us know if at the end of the semester if you think it helped them get the big picture.

Hatak said...

End of the semseter? I just want it to help with a chapter and then I will see.