5118AL Teaching Tips

Over the next few Posts I will share with you all my experiences from teaching 5118 using MODL and Livemeeting.
Today I'll start with some general tips on organising the material

1. Add page refrerences to the instructor manual & Slides
   
   The page numbering in the instructor manual does not match the student workbook. That makes it really hard to point things out to students in the book. I found it really useful to create references in my instructor manual and on the slides to the individual pages in the student course book so I could direct them to the correct pages without having both books open all the time. Directing the students is an important task during the session to encourage them to write into the book.
   
   
2. Add Headings to the whiteboard pages
   
   to instruct the students about the task at hand. Using the slide name can be sufficient in most cases. That really helps the student remember what they are supposed to be doing right now.
   
   
3. Create real world demonstrations
   
   Create a copy of one of the vista vpc images and bust it by killing the bcd config or deleting winload. That will show nicely how a startup failure looks like. and allows you to fix it in the demonstration. How to bust it? start the vpc using either a Vista DVD and enter Recovery Environment or make your own WinRE PE iso file. Before busting it, activate System Restore and create a manual restore point. You can use that in one of the demonstrations too! Much bettern than "ahhm, and now you would see XYZ". This image cna now be fixed using the console, the startup-repair or the system restore tool in RE.
   
   
4. Upload flash animations and web pages to web server
   
   Normally I'd upload the flash animations for the course directly to the livemeeting session. But with 5118 the flash files don't work by themselves and only work in a web page. Thus I uploaded them to our webserver and made them available via a Web Page in livemeeting. As each student can control the media individually this way I asked them all to change their colour to green once they had finished viewing the content. That worked like a charm.
   
   
5. Upload flash games to the web server
   
   uploading all flash media to a web server instead of to the livemeeting session directly also allowed each student to try out the sorting game themselves. and that was definately more fun than writing down the answers in the book or aksing them to start the game from the student cd.
   
   
6. Check the assessment forms before you send them out!
   
   Most of them have Polarbear's Logo on the Feedback worksheet and I assume you might want to exchange that with your company logo. Also fix up the references on the feedback sheet. Two cells (E14 anf G17) are not referring to the answer sheet but have fixed values instead.