Games from the Lessons

I have been delivering Human Factors training for a while and now after attending the DACE program, suddenly I felt that I have been stagnant for some time. As in have been doing the same presentation for so many time that I am getting bored.

Looks like its time to up the game level and go for something that it totally different.

I have been getting some inspirations while attending my part-time course. The games the trainers used in class is a good reference point for us to use in our class. So in the few blogs, I will try to record down some of these game sand see how I can use them in my class.

I am not an inventor, I just know how to adapt real well, real fast.

Anyway, here are some the games I can recall:

1. Inner and Outer Circle

• The class forms 2 circles (inner and outer) when every one in the inner circle will have one from the outer circle facing him. The trainer starts by asking a question about what happened in the last lesson and we will have to talk it out to each other. Once done, we will rotate and the questions will comes again.
• This kind of peer learning is very good especially in the start or end of the session. Cause that is the time where we can retain more.

2. Game show

• Each team is given papers to write down a respond. The trainer will ask questions and we will raise the corresponding respond for our team's ans. The trainer will subsequently records the points on the chart.
• What I like about this is when the train ask us to explain our ans. Why this respond ? This makes us think and talk it out.

A Prezi on using Web 2.0 in classroom

Web 2.0 in the classroom on Prezi

Keeping a Journal

I can still remember my school days where my friends likes to keep diaries. I kind of picked up the habit from them. But After I started working, the habit kind of died somewhere in the middle. Over the years, I did try to keep one again, on-line even, but yet I still could not keep it up.

Looking for a reason to keep a journal may sound very stupid. You just have to do it, right ? Sometimes we just don't know why we are keeping a diary, may be its just fun. No reason is required for you to start. But when you cannot find the reason to do it, the energy to keep it going will die sooner or later.

Reflective practice is very interesting, as it brings me back to my school days again. By keeping a journal, I can see how my thoughts grow over time. And with a systematic way to record, follow-thru and follow-up, we can see ourselves and direct our path of thought to learn and develop into a better learner, a better trainer, a better person.

Reflective Practice

I have never been so conscious of my thoughts until now. Reflective practice is something we all do and yet taken for granted sometimes.

Now I know that I am not the only one that talks to myself. Cause there are so many of them who are doing it, and people even wrote books on it and even got a Phd too.

While going thru the different approach of Reflective Practice, it reminds me of the time when I was teaching my students how to come out with a Powerpoint slide for presentation. I taught them to have at most 6 points in each slide and 6 words for each point.(/PowerPointTips) Each group were asked to give a presentation at the end of the course.

How to get your slides noticed

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One group did exceptionally well and they did not stick to the rule of 6 I taught. Instead, they presented their slides with one picture one slide, or one point one slide. (death-by-powerpoint) This is a total different way of crafting slides for presentation and I adopted it and started to teach them to the next class.

Death by PowerPoint

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Later, I happen to chance upon Prezi (http://prezi.com/), where presentation is done on one canvas and everything is in a continuous flow.

Till date, I have yet to move on to teaching students on how to use Prezi as it is only available on the web (its FREE online, but you will need to pay to use the Desktop version) and its not easy to craft one.

Why should you move beyond slides? on Prezi