Wilfred Young

I find positive reinforcement to be essential when encouraging students trying a new career in a technical field. Especially being open minded and may not be "technically sound" is always a challenge.

My students seem to view the completion of the on-line assessment as a neccessary evil rather than beneficial. For some reason they value hands-on training more than the on-line assessments.

Creating a new learning environment for students using new tools while developing the skills required can produce the confidence to demonstrate the ability to perform the task correctly.

I’ve had hard times trying to assist some otherwise efficient learners with the course material that struggled with grasping the old mechanical technology necessary to understand the new online learning materials.

I look at my job as that of a facilitator, one that helps my students on the start their journey through whatever life brings their way. My goal is for them to find their own path to achieve their goal. The journey is all about reliable knowledge.

Active learning in the classroom is always a great tool. It allows students to engage themselves critically and analytically. Working all aspects of their brain. It also gives them the oportunity to utilize the various resources available to engage each other, the teacher, and to share in discovering useful information together.

My lectures appear to be more of a class discussion with students getting a chance to give their imput and help facilitate the discussions. Many times I do a mixture of lecture and activities. In most cases I will send my students out to lab as a gruop of three to troubleshoot a product and repair it with a time limit. Trying to simulate what it is like in the field. Then, we will meet back and discuss our experiences.

It's not a good idea to guess if a student has a disability or not. Accommodations, undocumented learning issue, are addressed in career tracked programs that have services to assist students in these areas. As instructors we are not trained to correctly identify the specifics of a disability or acurartely gage the level of the disability or how it should be met.

In my course w design presentations to fit the needs of our customers. I prefer to work on this problem by developing the spreadsheets, presentations and databases with them. They are then given the assingment to create one of the three by themselves.

I find that I have to reinforce information repeatedly to emphasize the importance of the subject. In most cases it's because they just learned the information long enought to take a test but never really learned it. I have had some students that do not care about the subject at hand and they will not remember the information if they do not care about it.