Why the sign you may ask. Well its a bit like my working life at the moment. One way to this blog the other way to another blog and don't forget the wiki. At least I have a reasonable excuse for appearing confused and behind it all I have this aussie accented voice buzzing around in my head saying "update the blog, update the blog".
Actually its not that bad at all - as you will read. I will start at the end of my story and finish at the start - told you I was confused.
The Diploma in Applied Travel and Tourism has its own tourguiding wiki and course blog. The link to which you will find on the right.
Leigh, Nicky (who I will explain about soon) and I have been working intensley to have the blog up and running for students who started the new semester yesterday. They the students seem to really like it which is great and seem to be working from it easily. Just how common our students were with blogs however was suprising with 1 out of 20 saying they knew what one was.
Now its about upkeep, update and building on the resources and activities we have put together on the wiki. I got to utalise the advantages of a wiki when creating resources and activites for our one by downloading resources we can easily use from another. I have also created a generic "leadership styles" slideshow for general upload by other users of slideshare. I then used this as a basis for a tourism orientated one.
Nicky Snoyink is our new tour guiding lecturer and I am sure she must have wondered what she was getting into when she started teaching yesterday. Nicky comes from a background in tourism - as an operating tour guide (Managing Director) of her own company which runs guided walking tours in the lower south island for USA clients. This is the down season for such activities so the teaching position just worked out nicely.
We are running the specialty course four days a week - classroom sessions 8.30am - 10.30am and computing facilitation sessions 11am - 1pm. This is intermingled with activities of an applied nature eg. guided walk through university today - observing Kevin's (our other tour guiding lecturer) leadership skills and a one hour city sights bus tour tomorrow. All things which are vital to the practical understanding of the theory students learn.
Off to do some more development work but will be checking in before the end of the week again.
1 comment:
Thanks Hillary, that'll be a useful reference.
Regarding 1 in 20.. I wonder if you asked, "how many know what Beebo is?" if it would have been 1 in 20? When I observed Nicky's first facilitation I saw at least 5 out of 15 cheeking Beebo accounts regularly... Beebo, blog same thing really. Beebo's a brand name, blog is a more generic.. bit like photocopying or xeroxing..
From that one class I observed, it did look like the blog worked well as a simple to locate and use reference for their learning activities. I think it wa s agood move to have it all come through the blog.
Now, after this first run (well after every run I would think) we can update the wiki resources relatively easily.. If the resources get to what you could call a finished and stable state, I think we should get them designed nicely...
We'd better check over the budget this Thursday
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