I am quite excited for the upcoming semester, for many reasons, but one of those reasons is my goal of taking my teaching with the Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) program to the next level. I have a few big things I want to accomplish, and one small thing. The small thing is using Hagoromo Fulltouch© chalk in each of my sessions. The big plans are the following.
This Website
While yes, I do have a large portion of this website dedicated to my own postings and presentations, I do plan on having an entire section dedicated to a full collection of all of my worksheets, presentations, and other materials. I want this site to be a place where any MATH1300 student can come and access any study material they wish, giving them on demand, freely accessible help for their class. Right now, the site needs some upgrading, but I believe that I am already working in the right direction. I am sure as the semester goes on, and students provide feedback, I can continuously make updates and adjustments to suit their needs.
Upgraded Materials
I say upgraded, not updated, as the content itself isn’t drastically changing. I do, however, want to bring big continuity and style changes to how I make my worksheets and presentations. For one, I want to upgrade the style. My worksheets have always looked really boring, and I worry that it made them too hard to read. My pride and joy of last semester, my 66-page final exam review packet, was really not my best work at all, and I really want to make changes to how I design my packets for maximum readability.
The second part to this is continuity. I previously took a white text on black background theme for my presentations to mimic that of a chalkboard, but I can’t avoid the inevitable truth that this simply decreases visibility and doesn’t look good in many cases. I want the presentations to match the style choices of the worksheets, and this starts by making them a more readable and traditional black text on white background. I also want to make the text on presentations as similar as possible to worksheets, in order to make following along during sessions as easy as possible.
Video Making, and Steaming
With my new PC (i7-12700K 3.6ghz 12-core processor and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB graphics card btw), I want to utilize YouTube to bring video tutorials for the big topics throughout the semester, and then advertise them on the website so that students have on demand instruction on how to do certain problems. I also want to experiment (key word experiment) with live steaming my exam reviews. My exam reviews can attract large numbers of students, with my largest audience being over 120! Writing equations efficiently on a whiteboard that hardly anyone can see and doing it fast enough to keep up with the tightly paced review can be really difficult and annoying for me and students. I want to experiment with streaming my exam review, so that I can focus on an increase in quality and pacing. An added benefit is that I can have a live chat that students can use, without needing to show their faces like in a zoom call. This would decrease the stigma of asking “stupid” questions and hopefully lead to increased audience participation. I do understand that this might not be a success, and so I am totally willing to experiment with it for the first exam and drop the idea should it not go well.
I am really looking forward to PAL this semester, as much as I hate the name change (R.I.P. Supplemental Instruction). I can tell you what I will NOT be doing. That is doing all 8 peer observations in a timely manner (I am obligated to say that this is a joke if my boss reads this).