Hey classmates,

This will be a short blog post but I feel like it’s on a very important topic active learning.  As some of you know, I start PT school 3 weeks ago and we hit the ground running.  There has been a decent amount of totally new information (for me at least) thus far and I have found it fairly manageable and enjoyable.  I just wanted to touch on a few thoughts and give you guys some resources.

The first and biggest thought is Active Learning.  I think that now-a-days we have huge technological advances that can be leveraged to help us learn better but we also have the same age-old problems facing our education system, even in a doctoral level graduate program.  That is the tendency to learn passively, or just hear and receive information, usually in the form of power point presentations.  I’m not bashing slide show presentations for a mechanism to teach but I do think that it pushes most of us into this passive, “write things down because I’m hearing them” learning mode and that is really dangerous.  I said this was going to be short so I’ll hold to that promise.

While we can’t change the way we are taught at, we can change the way we learn.

I wanted to push/encourage all of you (myself included) to actively seek out knowledge in class and after class.  I have been using a resource for the last couple of years now that has been priceless (and free :P) called Khanacademy.org.  This website is a great tool for active learning–which to me, basically means learning information by challenging what you are hearing and being able to apply that information.  Khan academy allows you to stop, pause, think, rewind, fast forward through content at your own pace, which I think its huge.

Khan Academy is an online teaching system that has thousands of free videos that are taught by really smart people in a really simple and clean way.  The content ranges from general chemistry to art history and everything in between.  I have found it helpful to refresh myself on basic Biology principles and Chemistry already in PT school, as we learn Pharmacology and some intro Pathology.

 

I just wanted to push that resource across the table to you all.  I hope you check it out, it has been helpful for me and I hope its helpful for you.