Week 6: Teaching Large Classes and Interactive PowerPoint

  Having large classes are basic educational structure of Korea. Even while a decreased birth-rate becomes a big issue and few children enter the school, the government has decided to reduce the number of classes instead of holding fewer students at one class. This could be efficient in terms of financial condition; however, it burdens teachers who try to engage students in the class. In the large class, it is difficult to motivate students, induce interaction and discussion from students, and give a feedback or assessment accordingly.

  To overcome these difficulties, the technology offers viable alternatives to engage students in the large class. On this week, I learned how to utilize the technology for efficiently managing the large class. There are tremendous ways, and the most notable things are online assessments and an interactive PowerPoint. Blackboard’s assessment provides two options, tests and surveys, and they are useful to give immediate feedback to learners. Since it is difficult to interact with students one by one in the large class, Blackboard will help with this problem as it shows how learners are doing in the class. As another way, the interactive PowerPoint is also practical to let students concentrate on the lesson. The hardest part of creating PowerPoint show is how to make it ‘interactive’ with several elements including a Concept test, Quick Write and links. In fact, if a teacher fails to make PowerPoint interactive, it would lead students to just watch what the teacher is doing in front of the class.