Blog post 1 - Enhanced School Experience: Classroom Observations of ICT Use

I was at North Vista Secondary School for my ESE programme and the class I observed for this particular ICT lesson was 2T2 which is a normal technical class comprising of students generally weak in studies.

The subject that was taught in this lesson was E. Mathematics. The students were instructed and brought to the learning lab for a double period lesson and the topic taught for the day was Linear Graph plotting. Since this particular topic can be especially hard for students who just cannot visualize how the graphs drawn would look like, it would be really useful to allow them to do independent learning from learning websites. In this instance, a learning website known as asknlearn was used to facilitate students’ learning.

Generally, the students in this class have a limited attention span. Hence, in effort to enhance the benefits through the usage of asknlearn, the students were taught the basics of the topic of Graph plotting in a normal classroom prior to the computer lab lesson.  In this classroom teaching session, the lessons were delivered in a powerpoint format.

After ensuring that most (if not all) students were able to grasp the foundation, the students were then allowed to be exposed to the e-learning programme on asknlearn.

The usage of asknlearn first leads students to sit through a short animation to reinforce the knowledge they have previously learnt in class. After which, the students were then prompted to attempt a few questions which were stepwise guided. This component was crucial as it enabled the students to see the purpose and reason behind each step of the solution. Towards the end of the elearning lesson, the students were then asked to attempt a few questions on their own on the site.

At the end of the elearning lesson, the students were asked to provide and raise some summary points verbally when prompted by the teacher. This will enable reinforcement of new knowledge and will also allows the teacher to know how well and how much the students have grasped for the topic.

Upon interacting with the respective teachers for their views on the effectiveness of ICT in classroom teaching, there was a common consensus that the usage of ICT is crucial and necessary to teach the students in today’s society. This is because students nowadays are greatly exposed to multimedia and teaching with multimedia resources has aided in reducing the difficulties of introducing a brand new chapter/topic.

In addition, students with shorter attention span in a typical classroom setting would be able to focus more during an e-learning lesson. Furthermore, in a classroom of 40 students, it is almost impossible to expect all students to learn and grasp new concepts at the same pace. Hence, through the usage of multimedia, students who absorb concepts slower will be able to learn at their own comfortable pace. On the other hand, students who have already successfully grasped the concept, may now make full use of the e-learning program to further reinforce their learning by trying out new questions available online.