Hello, welcome to my Constructing courses blog…
I am trying to inspire veterinary terminology joy. A hard task I know, it can seem a pretty dull subject. Some of my plan hinges on finding the funny side of the words. Epiploon and gubernaculum spring to mind as examples that can usually crack a smirk. Other parts of the plan…. Making the connection that many of the terms and parts of words are already known it’s a matter of breaking the words down and working it out. Listening to the language out in practice and finding out the meanings. That’s the hard part I think because it’s about having the confidence to ask…
Thanks for the giggle. epiploon, te he. I do the same breakdown of words in physics and chemistry but not to the same extent as biology I imagine. Maybe we should go back to latin as a compulsory subject.
ReplyDeleteBack to the grindstone after the holidays and after a week of digging in the garden and sitting on the beach and talking to a few folk I have worked through some of the plan in my head, now to write it down.
ReplyDeleteThe main issue I can see with this whole idea is the lack of ‘assessability’ under the current unit standards system. Change is in the wind with the VN qualification nationally it seems the unit standards may well be on the chopping block. So I might be justified to push on here and pull something together ‘for the future’.
I got talking to a lady who is enrolled for next years VN course. There she was, full of enthusiasm for Veterinary Nursing, volunteering to work in a local clinic, highly motivated. It seemed a shame to let her wait four months to start the course, perhaps some of the enthusiasm will wane by then. It seemed to me that she was ideally placed to learn right now.
Then I was thinking how this terminology was not officially part of the course as it stands but super important in terms of understanding what is happening in the workplace and to our patients. I thought it might be a good idea to make a free resource on moodle, a guest sign in course that these enrolled students who are waiting can be made aware of and sign in if they wish. They can get a head start in learning the lingo of their new career. It would also benefit them in terms of finding their way around moodle before the start of the course.
Cat, sorry to take so long to get back to you on this. A guest access Moodle site would be a great idea for many aspects of VN - it would not only give potential students a taste of what to expect, but it could be an excellent marketing tool as well. A taste of how to access material on Moodle would be another useful outcome. The trick is to NOT spend too much of your valuable time developing it (as your manager would agree!) So simply copying parts of already existing resources into a freely available site is good - but don't just link to resources inside existing Moodle sites because they would be asked for a password. The other way to do it would be in a Wikieducator site - fairly easy, and the whole world has access. If you need any help with this let me know.
ReplyDelete