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Dozens of tourists at one of the Cristo Redentor balconies. Many of them will open their arms as the Christ on the top of the mountain does, but this guy took a bit more risk standing on top of the handrail of the balcony. The Sugar Loaf and the Guanabara bay are in the background. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. "Developing new programmes can at times be like this.
The last two weeks have been busy ones not just for me but for the teaching team of Nicky and Kevin. This has included videoing some roleplays, carrying out some great map referencing work. Taking students on a guided tour of the university and getting students to comment on Kevin's leadership and guiding skills. They also went on a city tour (bus trip) much to the delight of the tour operator as according to him things have been pretty slow during the cold weather.
Activities using the internet have been placed on the course blog http://www.blogger.com/www.tourism1.wordpress.com and in an effort not to confuse students Nicky and Leigh made a democratic decision to post activities daily rather than weekly. A good decision (just as well I am not an autocratic leader) and not as time consuming as it sounds because you can post activities to the blog and let them sit there as drafts (unpublished) than its just a matter of publishing them. What is time consuming and I still don't think I have got it right, is putting the url address with the photo in the correct format. Will go back and look how its done in other activities.
The blog seems to have been a success with students and something they have had not problem in using. It has been useful for students who may have missed a session - they can catch up from home. We will have to remind students about referencing and there is of course the possibility that someone else could be doing the work.
Nicky has been doing a great job and has fitted into the team wonderfully. Kevin has been assisting Nicky with some of the equipment we use in the classroom eg. projector and overhead transperences and I think Nicky has been recipricating by explaining what is going on in the blog to Kevin. We will at some stage soon have a team session looking at the wiki and the blog. All of us had a look at the ICT activity Leigh designed and explained (at a very fast rate) in class. We got to have a look at google maps, and community work. Most students caught on really quickly, lecturers a little slower but I am mindful that there may be students who will be finding this quite challenging. Each activitity however has support material which often includes tutorials to assist with this.
The students at present are working at the Mellor Restaurant completing two unit standards. It may be good to change this for next year so that they are looking at doing food safety and first aid rather than the present units.
This coming week Nicky, Kevin and I will finish the development of the course and have designed a new assessment ready to go to ATTTO for premoderation. Lynn (another team member) has began an audit of the travel material for EIT. I have been in contact with TANZ to see what is required if we would like to put some of this material on the wiki. We really have enough of own material in travel to redevelop and use so this may not be an issue. We will also be using a newly designed electronic version of all the booking forms used by travel agents which is great, this has come from our association with TANZ.
