Hi Barbara,
Great instructional strategies. You are offering your students a variety of ways to get the information and you are doing it in a manner that is not high pressure. This is so important to get the students settled into the course and feeling that they can be successful.
Gary
I love using Power Point to convey drier or "less fun" material! It's a great resource. Something else I enjoy doing is tying the material into some sort of current trend or event if I can, i.e. discussion about the most recent hominid skeleton that was found in Eithiopia while teaching about the skeletal system. It helps to dispel a lot of the "why do we have to learn this?" attitude.
I like to use kinesthetic learning for present dry or difficult material. When teaching muscles for my massage students, I use a variety of materials to help the students really see where these muscles are and how they work. Putting clay on skeletons, using rubber bands to mimic muscle actions, and having the students palpate muscles on a partner allow the students to learn the muscles without me just standing in front of the class reciting where they are.
