Minutes of the Meeting of English Teachers of Semester III Held on 11.6.2014

[augusto pinto]

I'm forwarding Minutes of the meeting held yesterday at S.S. Dempo College and I also welcome Sunita Mesquita HOD of St Xavier's College to the Group (for some inexplicable reason she wasn't subscribed hitherto).

Please feel free to comment on what happened during the meeting.

Augusto

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sunita Mesquita <sunitam...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 6:09 AM
Subject: about the meeting held at your college
To: Augusto Pinto <pint...@gmail.com>

College teachers who would be taking up the newly introduced paper titled Modern Communication Skills  Semester III for the SYBCom students met at S. S. Dempo College, Altinho –Panjim on 11^th June 2014 from 9.00 to 11.00.

Those present for the meeting:

Augusto Pinto, Kedar, Salil Konkar, Glenis Mendonca, Dr. Cidalia Bodade, Anita Fernandes,Vividh Pawaskar, Subhash, Sunita Mesquita, M.S. Shanthi

 

Augusto Pinto welcomed all the members and took up the following items on the agenda for discussion:

Agenda

1.       The objectives of the individual units in the paper

2.       Devising a plan/rubrics for evaluation

3.       Inputs on preparation of class exercises and class plans

4.       DST  Festival

 

1.       Objectives: The 5 components namely 1) Digital Storytelling(DST), 2) Impact Oratory, 3) Creating and making presentations, 4) Electronic and Web Communications and 5) Effective meetings require clear guidelines on competency skills to be acquired by the students. Subhash and Sunita would draft the objectives for the same

2.       Rubrics for evaluation: Since the assessment is ‘internal’, teachers could formulate their respective modes of evaluation. However it was felt that a standardized evaluation pattern would help in the evaluation process.

3.       Vividh has agreed to make available resource material and at the same time has suggested a need to ‘pool in’ resources for the common use of all.

4.       Some suggestions that were put forward to tackle individual components

a)      Topic 1: DST (the rubrics for the same with a detailed session wise break up has already been sent(via email) by Dr. Cidalia Bodade

b)      Topic 2: Speeches (could be used to test students for ISA 1. Criteria for assessment could be i) relevance of content, ii) confidence iii) fluency of language/correctness of language and vocabulary and iv) structure and Topic 3 on Presentations could be used for ISA 2)

c)       Topic 3 on Creating and making presentations, Topic  4 on Electronic and Web Communications and Topic 5 on Effective meetings could be fused together as suggested by Subhash (keeping in mind time constraints) for eg. The student will have to think about a business idea (sell an idea/a concept/a product/a service) and present it in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.

 

Create a Facebook group/mailing list or one Facebook page and the ppt that was presented by the student could be uploaded so that the business idea can be discussed by the students while the teacher remains neutral and evaluates the comments made.

 

Salil suggested that the student could also be shown a good ppt and a bad one and asked to apply characteristics of a good ppt while comparing between the two types making the exercise as practical as possible.

 

A similar topic could be used in a group discussion where a batch of 15 -20 students are formed, a chairperson, secretary or member is selected and they play out the duties that their roles demand.

d)      DST Festival: Salil proposed the idea of a festival on DST where every college could participate by sending in a representative DST prepared by students. Since students have social media as a topic, it could be used for the promotion of the festival. A Facebook page/blog/website could be prepared and it would be a practical platform as students could contribute ideas picked up during the course of the paper. At the festival (planning of which is still in its nascent stage) , the participants could discuss the process of making the stories,

Augusto was of the opinion that since the syllabus has been approved by Goa University, attention of the Principals could be drawn towards relaxing the norm of using mobile phones on campus (since Topic 4 sub topic is about using cell phones and etiquette).

The meeting ended at 11.00 with Augusto thanking everyone present for being a part of the ‘change’.

--


Augusto Pinto
40, Novo Portugal
Moira, Bardez
Goa, India
E pint...@gmail.com
P 0832-2470336
M 9881126350

[Salil Konkar]

Thanks for minuting the meeting, Sunita. Very nicely done. Just one small correction: The sentence "every college could participate [in the DST festival] by sending in a representative DST prepared by students" seems to indicate only one DST per college, which is not true. We would like to screen as many DSTs as possible, but we may be restrained by time limits, We'll have devise a way to tackle this situation in a fair and inclusive manner; any suggestions on this are most welcome.

I quite liked the idea of the Fakebook page that Vividh showed, and I feel we should see how best to use it. It won't work as much as a social media platform, since you aren't really 'communicating' as such, but it looks like a useful tool for doing some very creative stuff. We should think of some nice way of using this in the Business Communication course, if not in this semester then the next - have to think it through.

Salil.