K1DMJ
| Joined: | Wed, Sep 18th 2002, 00:00 | Total Topics: | 0 | Roles: | Super Moderator |
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Latest Topics
| Topic | Created | Posts | Views | Last Activity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Please Note! | Feb 9th, 22:07 | 1 | 173 | on 9/2/12 |
| Teaching amateur radio to elementary school students | Feb 9th, 22:01 | 1 | 302 | on 9/2/12 |
Latest Posts
| Topic | Author | Posted On |
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| Please Note! | K1DMJ | on 9/2/12 |
| Please note: ARRL does not tacitly or explicitly endorse all of the content posted or referenced in this forum. | ||
| Teaching amateur radio to elementary school students | K1DMJ | on 9/2/12 |
| In response to an inquiry about teaching amateur radio to 3rd-5th grade students, the following response was given in an email from Nathan McCray K9CPO, ARRL ETP instructor, and is posted for discussion here. I am a fellow educator and your name was directed to me about how I teach 3rd - 5th grade students amateur radio and getting them licensed. I have been very successful in licensing students at the grade level. I have licensed a few dozen students over the past 10 years. My approach is pretty simple. I do the following: 1. I use the instructor guide for whatever license we are pursuing 2. I put together a PowerPoint for each lesson (I teach one lesson per week) that brings some of the material down to their level (See attachment). Note, I tweak my lessons based on the knowledge level of my students. It is very different from year to year so personalizing the lesson is very important. 3. The students read a section of the technician book each week and they are encouraged to take practice tests and to study all week long. I ask them to give me at least 30 minutes a day outside of school to do this. 4. I give them a quiz on things I cover that day and for previous material covered 5. Whenever I am teaching I use a ton of hands on activities 6. When they start getting 90% of the practice tests correct I schedule a test with our local VE's. 7. I have learned not to underestimate how much the students can learn! 8. I stay positive all the time!!! |
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| Where are the online courses? I expected more. | KC0SNU | on 16/9/11 |
| You make a lot of good points about online learning. And you are correct that being an online learning resource is not a primary focus at ARRL. As ARRL's Education Services Manager, I can tell you that our current focus for our online learning program is to deliver basic emcomm training as economically as possible and to make it as accessible as possible. Currently, we offer two recently revised emcomm courses, providing some basic content to a wider audience than it would be available to if we had to rely on volunteers to deliver classroom instruction. We offer these courses at a very low cost to members and try to cover our costs of development, administration and investment in platform and infrastructure integration. We offer as many seats in each session of the introductory course (EC-001) as we can support with the pool of volunteer mentors we have available. Note that the advanced course designed for leaders and managers (EC-016) is not mentored and is totally open to members at any time. We also encourage classroom instruction of the introductory course delivered by instructors who can add their experience and knowledge of the local environment to make the course even more relevant. Some ARES groups are able to provide this; others as you have noted in your experience, are not. The online emcomm courses we offer are not considered a complete "course of study," though you will note that the prerequisites required for the courses do imply some integration of training and a sequence. Practical experience and hands-on training is important, as is active participation as part of a local ARES or other amateur radio emergency response group. We defer to our local Section Managers and Section Emergency Coordinators to decide the course of study/training they require for participation locally. We did previously offer some other mentored courses online on topics other than emcomm on an earlier online platform. Though some who enrolled found these courses valuable, these courses were not heavily subscribed and we have not re-invested in updating them for the new platform. You might argue that if we made a more substantial investment in online learning, investing in keeping courses fresh, introducing new topics, enhancing them with the latest capabilities in online media, etc. we might attract more interest. The bottom line is that we're not convinced that our audience is willing to bear the true cost of delivering robust online learning and scarce resources are not likely to be risked for such an investment. Perhaps this is short-sighted. |
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