After reading Dan’s observation, I felt as if he could read my mind while I was teaching.  Dan was able to focus in on the presentation of three activities that I was most disappointed with in my lesson (brain teasers, self-evaluation and teacher-evaluation) offer constructive feedback on how to improve them. 

I am definitely going to follow his suggestion on creating a premade PowerPoint of the brain teasers so the activity will flow more smoothly.  During the lesson, I felt as if I was racing against a clock trying to find another brain teaser and write it on the board before my students could solve the previous one.  His suggestion will definitely help me maintain my sanity.

His second suggestion on putting the self-reflection questions into a PowerPoint is helpful, but I think doing what I originally planned to do in class may be more successful.  The night before he observed my class, the ISU Moodle Site had been hacked into and thousands of files were deleted.  The file I tried to open during class for my student’s to look at while doing their self evaluation was one of those files.  As a result, I was forced to resort to Plan B.  I copied the self-reflection questions out of my lesson plan onto the board since I did not have a copy of them on my hard drive.  I think having the self-reflection questions in a Word Document on display would be more effective then having each question on separate PowerPoint slides because students answer questions at different paces.  One way I plan to avoid having a similar technological problem in the future is by keeping back-ups of all my Moodle uploads on my laptop instead of just on my home computer.

His third suggestion on having a PowerPoint for teacher evaluations was also constructive; however, after going through all the evaluations one-by-one I think I have thought of an even better way to handle the evaluation.  Next time, I plan to have the evaluation on a day when my class is in the computer lab so I can use Moodle’s Survey application.  This will make it easier for me calculate the quantitative feedback and organize it into charts.  Also, within the survey, I will have boxes where the students can insert quantitative comments as well.  I am excited to try this idea out in the future and see how the students respond to it.

One aspect Dan pointed out about this lesson that was problematic that I did not realize while I was teaching was my lack of movement around the room.  In hindsight, I completely agree with this observation.  I could have move around the room and interacted with my students more on an individual basis if I had thought through the presentation of my activities.