Welcome to The Algebra Hut!
The Professional Website of Dylan Faullin
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Welcome to The Algebra Hut! The Professional Website of Dylan Faullin |
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The Plan
For the Fall2009/Spring2010 school year, I plan on trying the Teaching Naked theory of education, in at least one of my classes. In truth, I experimented with the idea a little bit this past semester (Spring 2009). I put the lecture material for a few sections of the first chapter online and told the students that they were expected to learn that material on their own. I don't know if I would call what happened a success, but it wasn't a complete disaster either. I didn't get any complaints about it. However, I didn't see any great improvement in performance on the material. I attribute this neutral outcome to inconsistency. Half the chapter was online, half was done in traditional lecture format. I wonder what the outcome will be when I make a complete transition to this new style of teaching. Essentially, the idea is to make your traditional, ineffective classroom lecture available outside of class in a digitally-enriched and more engaging, interactive format using widely available technology. Class time is then used for more targeted activities, such as spending additional time on the historically weak areas of the majority of students or spending time helping small groups of students or performing classroom demonstrations or introducing hands-on applications that make the subject more accessible and relevant to the student, etc. Determining what to do with all the extra classroom time is the intimidating part of this model. I personally don't have many classroom demonstrations or hands-on activities up my sleeve. This is why it is called 'teaching naked', because you, the teacher, are now on the hotseat. The teacher is now forced to improvise from week to week, based on indications from the students and the class as a whole. This is not an educational model that you can decide to adopt at the last possible moment. It will take planning. In a totally unrelated project, I had typed up an outline of each of my lectures and made them available to the students. I will use these outlines (which I call 'Digital Notes') along with a powerpoint/html presentation of the material to move my lectures out of the classroom and on to the internet. I have a working prototype here, though it is still incomplete (missing audio and powerpoint slides with better directions). Click here to download the Digital Notes for the relevant material so you can better follow along. I will update this page when I have a better prototype for what I plan to use in the Fall or if my plans change. If you'd like to follow my progress as I attempt this transition, I will refer you to my blog. This blog will contain thoughts on other topics as well, but I will be sure to tag the entries pertaining to this page as 'Teaching Naked'. You may also post comments on my blog, which is a good way to participate in a forum-type discussion. I would also appreciate any feedback and will respond to comments whenever possible. Thanks for reading. ~Dylan Faullin, Algebra Hut |
My Blog on Teaching Naked
Teaching Naked article Prototype of an online lecture Digital Notes for the above prototype |