Recent releases

Monday January 30, 2012 Elizabeth Cowan (Collège de Valleyfield) Julie Hamel (Collège de Valleyfield) Sara Fernandez (Collège de Valleyfield) Teaching Without Books in 101 The authors decided to replace the traditional student books and grammar books used in their classes with material from the Net. All in all it was a wonderful experience in creativity, but because they ended up doing both the teaching and writing, time became an issue. Whether they repeat the experience depends on the publication du jour.
Monday January 16, 2012 Suzanne Roy (Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf) Marie-Stéfanie Taschereau (Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf) An Easy Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Weebly Site Suzanne Roy and Marie-Stéfanie Taschereau, teachers at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, suggest creating a pedagogical website to colleagues. They explain its advantages as well its value for students using the example of their experiences with the Weebly web editor.
Monday December 19, 2011 Karen Tee (Vanier College) PowerPoint Redux
PowerPoint allows Karen Tee to do some things that help students learn, and it’s so much more interesting, for both her and the students! Although doing PowerPoint slides right requires a lot of preparation, the results make all the work worthwhile.

Stories

Monday October 19, 2009 | French (Second Language) 602

A Problem-based Learning Approach in a Virtual Environment

Philippe Gagné Teacher, Vanier College

In 2006, Vanier College in Montreal launched a pilot project to create a hybrid course for students in technical programs. These professional programs, which lead directly to the workforce, often attracted students who found work before graduation and did not complete their required core studies. The school’s graduation statistics suffered, and the students were left with an incomplete academic record because of one or two missing courses.

The Pilot Project’s Basic Principles

We therefore began preparing a course in Intermediate French as a Second Language for students whom we assumed would not be very motivated. This was why, whenever possible, we used problem-based learning (Pérez, 2006). One of the strengths of this approach is to engage the student with well-structured pedagogical situations where the emphasis is on motivating active participation. The student learns by actively analyzing, creating and comparing.

Course Composition

The course is 70% on-line, principally in real time through a virtual class using the Via teleconferencing platform, but also in asynchronous mode for team or individual activities such as group discussions and on-line exercises. Thirty percent of the course is classroom based for summative evaluations.

Types of Activities

• Pre-reading Activities

We created pre-reading activities to stimulate the student’s interest and awareness of the topic of study. A first reading for students to summarize was on the pollution of the Great Lakes. We began by asking students whether they felt that the pollution of these bodies of water could be blamed on Canada or on the United States. Students were always convinced that the blame lied with the Americans whereas it is principally the fault of the Canadians. We didn’t give this response during the course, but during the VIA sessions, we brought our students to question their prejudices by asking them to complete information tables and to generate realistic hypotheses based on the geographic sources of pollution. In the on-line class, students wrote, and their responses appeared on screen. Students were also called upon to speak, and their involvement in the issue was unmistakably genuine. In the following video, you can better grasp how the activity worked.

Video in French Only

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After the course finished, students could find out which country was at fault. Furthermore, they were required to answer general and detailed comprehension questions using Netquiz.

• Writing a Summary

To follow up reading the text, we prepared an activity based on creating a summary of the same article by presenting students a purposely ill-defined problem. The only instruction was to summarize the article in ten sentences and to transform the information presented in tables using a spreadsheet such as Excel into another form of graphic presentation without giving any examples.

Students were then asked to use a site designed with Netquiz to look at three of the summaries as images that were too small to read, but large enough to analyze (click on the image; Nom : test; Prénom : test). Students discovered information in discussion that was never presented as a lecture. They were asked to compare several summary beginnings and three complete summaries in the same manner. Students were then asked to make a synthesis of all of the elements, which had been pre-selected for their pedagogical value during the last semester. Therefore student production was at the center of learning acquisition.

Questions

Has someone developed similar activities? What were the results for student motivation and success? What IT activities have been put in place to help students who are several courses short of obtaining a diploma?