teach

I tought my second contract class today. None of the people came in having the slightest clue what to expect, but they all seemed to go away excited about the technology and planning out applications to use it. We’ll just have to see how many actually follow through…

Our division is holding it’s big instructional technology conference. I taught Wiki’s for an hour this morning to a group of about 10 college faculty. I’m not sure they were really into it, but each conference session has a formal review process so I suppose I’ll find out soon enough. I know I had at least one convert; she’s already put in a request with IT to have a wiki built for her English class.

Tomorrow is my big podcasting class. I’ve taught various pieces of this class to different groups before, but this will be the first time I’ve put it together for a group of faculty. It should be fun.

I taught Podcasting to an in house group yesterday and I sucked. The class seemed to get it, but I just wasn’t feeling it; it was sort of the bare minimum of energy required to get the message across, which sucks, because it’s actually a topic and a technology that I’m excited about. I don’t think it’s a cure all, but it has some definate educational possabilities that I think need exploring. Not sure what my malfunction was. Maybe 8:30 on a Monday morning is the wrong time to teach anything new.

At any rate, I’m doing my CSS roadshow for my New Developer class in the morning though and that should be fun. They’re an energetic bunch. Hopefully I’ll do better.

I taught my Copyright for New Developers class again yesterday and was amazed at how much different my performance was when the audience is more energetic. When I perform as a musician, I don’t notice it so much… maybe because I’m a better musician than I am a public speaker; I don’t know. I just know that for the first time in a long time I really enjoyed teaching the subject again. The last few times it’d been a bit of a chore, but it was mostly because half of my audience was asleep. These people were engaged and interested and I really feel like that made me a better teacher.