As you know I've been talking about process in my practice a lot. I'm very interested in how kids learn, and I've noticed something that my students are doing. I wonder if other teachers see this, or how it plays out.
You see, since I've begun using tutorials in my classroom to guide teaching (just about on any software), the success of computers skills and project completion has gone up meteorically. And I mean through the roof. I've started training my kids how to use tutorials to complete tasks, and it has done wonders for my classes and practice.
I started an account on youtube (youtube.com/misterrezac) strictly for my tutorials, and also created a site where my students can see them by class.
Why was today different?
Now, this new trimester, all but three weeks long, I've used tutorials almost every day for just about every skill imaginable. Things have been going superbly. Sometimes I model the small skill then tell students to watch the tutorial anyway, but today I had a quite long modeling session, and some of the students decided that they didn't want to watch all of the tutorials that went with into the task of the lesson.
And, you can guess what happened. Many of them had questions, were confused, but they didn't want to spend the five minutes to go back and watch the tutorials. So they were frustrated that they had to go back.
Just go to the tutorials. But what form of teaching is that?
I've found lately that instead of modeling, I might show the students a very brief model or just the final product, and just have them go right to the tutorials. Over and over again, I find that with computer skills, the tutorials just work. It's dramatic. I was being observed on my first week by my AP, and almost every student in my class, all brand new to Google Apps created a new Google Site from a template that I created without fail. Even I was astonished. This was the first time they were using Google Apps.
Do any other teachers find this is true, and if it is, couldn't the same be true with math tutorials and writing tutorials as well?
What do you think?
