Implementation of advanced educational tools in my teaching

Background:

I’m a researcher at department of Medicine-Huddinge at Karolinska Institutet. My main task is doing research on Hematological patients but I have been involved in teaching activities for Master and PhD students as well. Epigenetics is the main topic I’m teaching and I’m trying to develop my teaching skills and my presentation.

The educational problem I want to solve using the IT tools I have chosen:

At the beginning of the course I had one problem in my mind and it was about teaching activity from long distance to Iran. I’ve gotten several invitations to teach in Iranian universities but couldn’t go there to teach.
But now I have got two more interesting ideas to work on using the tools presented during our course on Using Educational Technologies to Enhance Learning.
First idea is to have a distance course on Epigenetics for PhD students, having international PhD students in mind as the target group and not only PhD students at KI
Second idea is to have an educational course for newly students arriving at our lab. As we are hosting several short time master student who join our lab for 10-20 weeks and they need to learn basic techniques. It is a repetitive teaching and we have to repeat and repeat for each student and it will be boring to say the same sentences all over and over again. So I believe the technologies presented in this course would be helpful to teach students basic lab techniques, specially the theoretical part of each technique.

What I plan to do - what ideas do you have?

Long distance teaching:

I will produce 12 presentations 15 Min. each, using Screen cast and voicethread. Each presentation would be followed by a questionnaire with 5 questions related to the topic which is discussed. Access to presentations would be restricted and each student will have access to the next presentation only after answering all the questions correctly. All the presentations would have commenting options where students can have questions and comments which will help me to improve the presentations.

 Online course on epigenetics:
 I have a one week course in my mind in the same format as a 5 days active learning. We will design lectures, literatures, Articles, power point presentations and video clips either by me and my colleagues or by international well-known scientists. We can also use some of video clips available on line. Here we will have defined learning objectives for each day which will be evaluated at the end of the day by a test. Students would be divided in groups and each group would have a specific assignment to discuss and prepare a presentation using advanced educational techniques so they will learn how to use these technologies as well. These assignments can be used for future courses so the course will be improved by the students.

 Master student education:
I will simply use my blog, I will gather a bunch of useful links and clips to teach students basic and practical aspects of each techniques. When a new students joins the group I will send them the links before they join the group as they can start reading about the techniques before starting practical work in the lab. So they will learn what we do in the lab and how we do it. Here we don’t need to test students in their learning process as we can just have a short discussion.

What results you hope to achieve by using the tool

I would like to achieve all these 3 goals within one year and have the programs ready to be used by students, I’m sure I will learn a lot during these process which will help me to be a better teacher.
I hope there will be students who are interested in this way of learning and they will help me to start up this plans as soon as possible.

Using collaborative tools in my teaching

Collaborative writing is a very useful technique in teaching. It was nice that every body could type at the same time and still it is possible to track each individual contribution. I think this is a very good way to get students involved in the discussion while they are relaxed at home and have time to think and take part in the group assignments. 
One useful way is also to have it as questions and hide each students answer, so we can have all students answer without being biassed by the others responses, we can compare the answers and check if there is a common misunderstanding and we can plan one session to discuss this common mistakes. Also the other use of this tool is to ask student to write an article on specific subject all together and then they can edit each other's text and add more at this way the  speed of making a report for the course would be very high and all students.
I would say that the time for written exams is over and we should think more on how to use this tools as course exams and evaluations.
It's time to open new doors :)

Experiences of searching for learning objects

Hi,
It seems I have started a journey to a new world :)
As a simple learning object, I decided to prepare a lecture on "Chromatin".
I didn't expect to get so much information directly on line.
So many movies, animations, lectures, slides images, book chapters and wikipedia articles was available just by searching simply for one word. I had problem to choose which one is the best, as most of them was really good. Although I was supposed to prepare a lecture but I just felt more like a student who has found new information to learn. None of the university lecturers would be able to provide so much information in a two hours lecture.
If I'm going to teach in any courses in future, I will just send some links to students to watch and then I will pass all of them :). They don't need to see me any more!
Another interesting experience today, I sow one of my colleagues at work who was watching youtube in office and has a headphone over her head. I thought she is enjoying herself during working hours :)!! But then I noticed that she is stopping in between and doing something in her computer and then she goes back to youtube again. I asked her what is she doing and she told me,, she is learning how to do statistical calculations using SAS program :). So new students has already started using new technologies much faster than we expect them, no need for boring statistical courses any more...
Welcome to wonderland!!!!!

Hi,
Welcome to Wonderland of Epigenetics.
This weblog is for those who would like to discuss about different aspects of Epigenetics.
You are welcome to share your ideas.
Hope to hear from you.
:)