Transcriber: Brand Secretarial (JB)

Resource making and sharing with wikis

Glen Campbell

Handing over to the students

I am a Refrigeration teacher at Newcastle TAFE. I teach the Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Trade Course Certificate 3. My mode of teaching is face-to-face. Basically we’ve got students that range from 16 years of age through to 60 years of age. It is a wide variety but generally they are the younger trade apprentices but there is a lot of journeymen and older apprentices are joining the course because of the trade skill shortage these days.

The apprentices attend TAFE one day a week and their work-based training is on the other four days. Variety is what I was after – a group activity that involves all the learners. There was a need for the learners to interact with the content, to get involved and to work and to think about possible solutions or procedures, with the learning outcomes in mind.

Myself and the Head Teacher went down to Wollongong and we attended an E-learning course and they showed us about PDAs and the different tools that are available to upload and how to use them and create a video or even create sound recordings and post them all up on blogs and wikis and other publishing tools that are up on the Net. Some of the students were very eager to embrace the technology – for a start, they have already been making movies at home. I found a lot of them were very familiar with the technology. They’ve got their own blogs, they’ve got their own wikis. They basically taught me a lot about the producing and doing a lot of the stuff that we get in class.

Practical activities involve a procedure – that’s where I started. I got the students to do a safe-work procedure for aligning a V-belt. They had to come up with an instruction list to teach a novice how to align a V-belt and from there they produced a video. Normally it would be a case of me showing them how to fit the V-belt and then they would actually replicate what I had done and I’d tell them exactly what the safe-word procedure was and how to do it. Invariably a lot of the students would half-heartedly attempt it and a lot of them would talk and not really get much involved, whereas when you hand the ownership over to them...I got them to look at a video to start with on aligning a V-belt, and then I said ‘I want you to come up with the procedure, a safe-work procedure, and away they went. They really took hold of the project and produced wonderful videos. They were very entertaining you might say. I split them into groups so they could ... of course you need a cameraman, you need a script-writer and you need the actors involved in the educational video. Basically they all got involved and they all learned as a group and afterwards we basically produced the video, put it up on the Net and we all sat back and looked at all the other groups’ videos and we discussed certain elements towards their videos and what was right, what was not so good and we basically came up with a great learning tool where we evaluated and critically assessed all of the videos.

I uploaded all the information in the educational videos to a wiki space. I found the wiki space a lot easier to handle and use. You’ve got separate pages and you can flick back and forwards with links. The wiki was a great educational tool and format to view the videos from, so when we were evaluating and the students were getting feedback, we were using the wiki, replaying them up on their SMART boards. It is a great activity to get them involved and they really look forward to doing it because students from last year have told the students from this year that I’m currently teaching – and they were asking me to do it. That’s how much it was appreciated last year.

Managing the activity and keeping the students on track

Motivation is a big point. I did do some DFilm films and that was there to give them some guidelines and some encouragement to get involved and get started. There was other work that I have to do: upload the films and everything which isn’t that hard or doesn’t take them much time – but it is something else that you have to do – also create guidelines and a marking matrix and you can channel them in the direction you want them to go, not to get off-task and not to muck around too much. You need guidelines and a structure which they can follow and they know that this is going to be marked and it is going to add towards their passing of that subject.

I get them to do their videos and I take them to the library if we’ve got to use the computers. The students make up any class time of course. Some of them work on their videos there and a lot of them take them home because they really want to put a good effort in and get quality marks so they will take them home and work on them extensively to get a good finished product. It’s amazing – they all want to take them home and they all want to put extra effort in. It’s something which is not sort of hit off when you’re teaching – is that they want to take our stuff home and do it at home as well as in the class. So they really get motivated. It’s quite a pleasant surprise. It’s all tied in to the learning outcome so it was quite pleasing that they actually did research and came up with quite good information and got involved. They enjoyed themselves. Half the battle is to get them to interact – if you are having fun you are going to put some more effort in and really remember what you are actually there to learn.

Setting up peer assessment and feedback

With evaluation and the feedback - at the end of last year I did an activity with domesticrefrigeration and freezers. I actually had a marking matrix and I actually got the students to mark the other groups’ efforts and in that way they all reviewed and critically thought about all the information that was there. So I basically get them to have a look at all the other groups’ work and then they’ve got to write comments – and I actually mark them on their comments as well, and its part of the marks – it actually gives them motivation to put in some decent comments and review and feed-back for all the students. I then with the other classes, give them that feedback and let them know how they actually went and where they might have improved. All the groups learned. Every class I’d have three groups in every class and the groups would get together and critically evaluate the other groups from the other classes.