Things that make your day!

I started a Web 2.0 project with Marine Technology students last week and had only spent 1 hour with the students explaining why we were doing things the new way. Got the students setup on Blogger, Gmail and gave them a quick overview of GDocs and Youtube.

 Picture: Student's in the Marine Technology course doing a presentation this morning.

After the session last week and few days later, a student commented:

ILearning???

I've just started the 2011 semester 1 studies and something very diferrent is changing the "old fashion way" of teaching students at Unitec, I am saying that because I already been at Unitec on semester 2 2010, and we were tired of listening to our tutor talking for two hours every day doing the theory side, seeing my colleagues falling asleep, anyway to my and the others surprise Unitec had implemented a new tool called "ILearning" I have to admit I was a bit worried how would it end up, but now I really like the idea and I need to say since wed 16/03 when we had our first day of "ILearning" I am really impressed how the theory side became much more interesting, and we(students) are more involved as a team, I hope my classmates are enjoying as much as I am and together we will learn how to build our blogs. (Marine Technology Student, 2011)

What more can I say! They are willing to make the change, but it is how we take it to the student's that makes a difference (no digital native assumptions!!). Also the acceptance of the teacher, he/she plays a huge role. I have to admit the staff I am working with is a STAR!

this blog post by Vickel Narayan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand License.