Every week in your class you should post weekly announcements to keep students up-to-date on the latest assignments, forum discussions topics, quizzes, readings, and tests.
To make announcements interesting, you can post graphics in which you create text in boxes colored text boxes to make the announcement stand out or you can screen cast your announcements and then post it to YouTube. You can then embed the video into your announcements. In this way, your announcements have an audio component for audio learners.
To break down the components of an announcement you can have the following;
1. State when assignments are due. State what those assignments are on a weekly basis so students know what to do from week to week.
2. State forum questions that need to be answered in the forums or you can add extra forum questions in the announcements for students to prepare before they post to the forums..
3. Do a lesson wrap up of the past week. And create a preview for the next week.
4. Provide websites or other resources and other readings for students related to this week's topic.
5. Provide fun discussion questions students can ask each other in the forms.
If you are teaching in a standardize classroom, your announcements may already have been created by the course by the Course Lead so that the announcements are probably automated to appear every week. Even if you have automated announcements created by somebody else, you should still make the effort to personalize your announcements so that students get to know you as a professor. This is why screen casting is so important and I will discuss the importance of screen casting in your classroom in another post. So have fun personalizing your announcements to show the students your winning personality!
No comments:
Post a Comment