I just realized that my last post was at the beginning of Spring term and now Spring term has finished and Summer term has begun. I had a really good Spring term with 6 students. I was really impressed by them. I did try to have activities that really involved them and had them share their experiences. It worked really quite well. I had fun with them.
I also started working at the Center for Teaching and Learning here at BYU. I had the opportunity of helping at the ICED Conference (International Consortium for Educational Development). A lot of the conference was about faculty development and training. I did get to go to a couple of sessions, but mostly I was a volunteer so I ran lots of errands, sat at the information table, and that is about all. It turned out really well.
In addition to the Conference, I was assigned to work on a project with the College of Nursing. They are working on their practice labs and want the students to work with real "patients" (mannequins) that have a whole history and story behind them so they can develop better critical thinking. The faculty developed some scripts and then I got to put them in a format where one student would be the assistant and one would be the nurse and then they would switch for a different scenario. With their scenarios, they would practice everything they learned in their classes and the demonstrations.
I spent two days down in the basement of one of the buildings here on campus that is a fully-filled hospital (but no patients). But they have the beds and all of the equipment and materials that you would find in a hospital. I learned so many fun things (i.e. how to give a bed bath and change the sheets with a patient inside the bed, how to wet-dress a wound, how to insert a catheter, how to provide oral care for someone with head trauma). It was really neat to work on the project and now we are almost finished with it.
Yesterday I started taking a class called Applied Creativity. I am really excited about it and am looking forward to unlocking creativity (I just hope there is some inside to unlock). Yesterday we talked about barriers to creativity and now I want to learn how to overcome those barriers.
Anyway, that's the update on me. I love you all!
