During my ESE at Yusof Ishak Secondary School , I had often observed classes where the teachers made extensive use of ICT tools to have an effective session with the students. Majority of the classes, that I followed, were conducted using ICT tools viz Power Point, Videos and other audio-visual gadgets. The process definitely yielded results and much in the line of the achievements laid down in the masterplan.
1) The students acquired the basic knowledge regarding MS Office and also Internet. Often I have seen they handed over projects that were thoroughly researched and presented with aplomb. The Holiday Home works regarding poems were so beautiful as the students actually read and researched about various genres of poetry and selected their favourite and along with the poet’s background and the theme, that they searched out from the net, the presented soft copies of them to the teachers. That was quite an effective learning in an interesting way, I believe.
2) The above achievement tallies with one of the MP3 outcomes that states that the students ought to learn “beyond the curriculum”. So for doing their projects they had to go through a lot more things that have ultimately enriched their knowledge. In no way onle the narrow scope of a text book could have served the purpose.
3) The Facebbok community method adopted by the mathematics teacher was quite popular and fruitful, I found. The teachers used videos to solve problems and uploaded them in the community for the students to see. Also the community gave the students a clear platform for group activities. Many students logging in at the same time could talk and discuss a problem and consequently arrive at the solution. The best part was, it was happening under the surveillance of the teacher who can guide the kids at any point, if needed. That in a way opened up the class from the four walls and definitely that’s a fantastic way to engage students into studies, much in line with the concept of ‘self-directed learning’ . It also blended the desired outcome of ‘collaborative learning’.
4) The Oral prelims and practice sessions were also very useful for the students. The teachers role in the collaborative study was evident here as the students had to record their reading aloud sections and also picture reading sections and those were mailed to their respective tutors. The teacher then guided them through so that they can achieve better in their national examinations.
There are indeed many different activities specially catered to students in your school that can help them academically.
ReplyDeleteBasic skills such as typing and microsoft has long been taken for granted and as a proper necessity. It really calls back to the time when most students did not have a computer, so now with all these facilities and services readily available in the schools, there is alot more room for strategies such as collaborative learning and the likes!
I agree that there is much more learning 'outside the curriculum' nowadays compared to the past. It's actually a bit of a chicken and egg story to me: did we start to explore further outside the curriculum because of the increase in ICT use, or did we turn to ICT because of the demand to 'think out of the box'? I'm not really sure if it's even logical to try to think of these developments chronologically, but ultimately, as Carol also mentions, upping the ICT usage is timely if we are looking to explore more strategies of teaching and learning and go beyond what is fixed and prescribed.
ReplyDeleteIndeed learning beyond the curriculum seems to be something that is much emphasized today. But I wonder if this also means that we need to expand our curriculum to include and test skills (some of which would inevitably involve ICT) that are more situated in real-world context? Perhaps in future examinations will be conducted on the computer as well instead of with pen and paper. MasterPlan 4 perhaps?
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