LLA 5/14 Response

LLA 5/14 Response

Even though the title says LLA, today's lesson was different from normal LLA class and took place at macs room! Before I went to the class, I saw some Stream 1 people taking pictures with our Section 1A sweatshirts on! It finally came! It is all thanks to Haruka and Moe. I am so glad that there are people who come up with these fantastic ideas and actively carry them out in my section. Even after we graduate, we won't forget being not only a student at ICU but also a member of Section 1A or "Patterson Children". Moreover, I was even more glad to know that Rab loved our sweatshirts. We will definitely wear them at the section yearbook photo. 

So at macs room, we had a lecture on several topics in addition to technology stuffs. Rab's lesson on the effective method of teaching was intriguing. He introduced "segmentation" which considers the students' concentration levels as the class runs. According to him, students tend to lose their focus after 7-10 min of constant teaching. Basically, when a professor keeps talking and talking forever in front of blackboard, many people start to get sleepy or distracted. Honestly, I experience this almost every time in any other classes I am taking: math, physics and music. Well for music class, the professor Ito plays several pieces composed by famous composers but for the most part he verbally explains the historical background of musical composition. Anyway, from my experience, I agree with what Rab said. In order to deal with this brain mechanism, under segmentation, teachers try to get out of mannerism every 7-10 min to keep grabbing students' attentions. In fact, when Rab does a lecture in ARW class, he constantly changes the teaching methods, such as showing us video clips, making us get into groups and have discussion, teaching us some useful techniques on the computer or telling us an interesting story related to the theme and so on. I finally knew why I never get bored in his class while I often do in other classes. Segmentation is highly effective and grabbing our minds.

Afterward we learned even further techniques on Zotero. One inconvenient fact about citing books using Zotero was that we had to manually type in the place where they were published. But we no longer have to do that by finding ISBN codes from actual books, amazon or Google Books. Zotero has a million of possibilities. Even Microsoft Word has surprised us; by clicking a Zotero button, we can set up the entire paper into any citation format we like and Word automatically does in-text citation. I remember this process was one of the most tedious tasks when writing an academic paper in high school. Now it's all gone!

Tomorrow, we are going to have the class at Bakayama again!

P.S. I have actually bought an iPad mini today, and could download iTunes U so now I can access to your documents all in one place!