Making orientation fun
I found that making orientation fun turning all your potential students feel more at ease but what do you do when you have one potential student at a time for your orientation.
Orientations can be fun, especially when the students can meet their faculty up front at the beginning. All faculty should attend orientation.
It is important that Orientation is a not a very serious or boring thing. It should be fun and more interactive. Things should be doen make the students attending Orientation ant ease.
Something we always do during orientation is demo's. For my department we always demo a blood draw and injection so students will see what eventually they will be doing. This gets them excited to start.
Maria Rosario,
I agree!~ Do you use any particularly effective activities?
Susan Backofen
Interaction is very important. This is the time for students to make new friends and a good way to start building relationships for group studies, planning to go to volunteer events, etc.
Making orientation fun and getting the students involved is a great start. But it is just as important to set expectations so the students have the information they need to be successful with each class.
Edwin,
I agree. Interactive is important, but the content needs to be meaningful. Hands-on activities are always the best.
Susan Backofen
Interactive orientations are paramount. They do though, have to be meaningful and pertaining to the subject matter of the course. Interactivity for interactivity sake is useless. To this end get the students to touch and feel the lab equiptment, ask them about their back grounds with respect to the types of projects they have attempted. You can gain a great deal of information about the students that you will be teaching by use of this method.
Then allow that student to share coffee/tea/soda/snack that will ease the tensions or anxities that student has, thus breaking the Ice. This isa fun way to deal with one student at a time.
