Tenth. At Last, Try Honesty

TEST…Perhaps, this is the most challenging task that we need to do in Technology in Primary Education course. At least, for me.. . I always dislike test or exam. Why? Not much. Because of my selfish attitude? I would say, yes. I always afraid being assessed, because in the end, there are only two results; whether you did well or you screwed up.

Maybe, this is worrying. I always love to do what I always love to do. I love listening to music that I like, I love driving my car, I enjoy watching good movies, I love spend my time at home, I feel great having long hair,I love ‘lepak’ at Mamak stall watching football, I enjoy talking to my friends and make joke with them, I love all the person that I love.. but I simply do not enjoy having a test. Or exam. Or anything related to it. I think this is the biggest challenge for me. My attitude. How am I going to be a good teacher, who is going to assess the students and teach them about what makes a good student? Sometimes, I always wondering, why am I here in the first place? Am I good enough to be a teacher? With my current attitude… I doubt it.

However, this is the path that I chose. I know I’m making the right decision. I know what kind of teacher I want to be. I want to teach the students. Well, not simply teaching, I want them to like me. I want them to always listen to me. I want them to follow and practice the good values that I want them to practice. I want them to be successful. I want them to enjoy their life, make them realize that this life is not all about making good grades. I want them to be jovial, yet at the same time always know their limit and respect others. For me, that’s what good teachers meant; they can influence their students towards the positive norms and values.

After all these years, I have gained a lot of knowledge. My attitude somehow has changed, though not the kind that makes me a good teacher, but I’m working on it. I am in the process of learning. Eventually, when the time has come for me to start teaching, I know I’m not going to be the same as I am now. When given a responsibility, I will make sure that I work hard on it and not let others down. That’s my belief.

I enjoyed this course and I have learnt a lot from Prof. Maznah, Ms. Ng and Ms. Chin and also my friends. This course really broadens my view about education. Teaching is not all about chalk and blackboard. There are so many approach that we can use in teaching. This course really gives me knowledge on how to integrate technology into the classroom. Indeed, using ICTs in teaching and learning have a lot of advantages. This course introduced to me on how to apply the knowledge and skills that I have learnt throughout this course inside the classroom. I also realized now that teachers have big responsibility in ensuring that the students acquire the appropriate knowledge. Using ICT can somehow assist the teachers in teaching and learning, and with good preparation and planning and attitude towards teaching, ICT can be a powerful medium in delivering the effective lesson to the students. ICT can be interactive and creative teachers can make the lesson using ICT become interesting, and even make the students feel that learning is fun. Without a doubt, this course gave me in-depth view about how ICT can help both teachers and students in teaching and learning process. From this course, I gained valuable knowledge and preparing me to become a teacher in the future.

To Prof. Maznah, Ms. Chin and Ms. Ng…thank you for your kind and generous guidance..

To UNDECIDED… I have great time working with you guys. Thank you.

To Som… tell Mommy I love her.

To Pantai 13 resident… exam dah dekat oi!

To ALL my fellow coursemate… you all are great. Good luck in everything.

~Choi kin-~~

Ninth. Part 3: The Pursuit of SMARTness - Their SMART Knowledge (End)

It’s Presentation day for the IWB assignments. Here, I will conclude what I have learned from my friends’ presentation. The presentation took us two weeks to complete. Overall, I’m impressed with my friends’ creativity in designing lesson using IWB. As I was listened and observed, I began to feel that I still need a lot of improvement in using the software. Like I have mentioned in my previous entry, I decided to design simple English lesson activities. When I looked at the others’ presentation, I realized that they put a lot of efforts in producing such quality materials. I thought most of the activities presented by them are simple, yet they able to design activities that, from my point of view, interesting and engaging. There are groups who decided to integrate games into their lesson, and there is also one group integrated movies into the lesson. I think it was a brilliant idea to integrate those elements because they can motivate the pupils, attract them to participate in the activities and assist the teachers to deliver their lesson in an interesting and interactive way.

The good thing about IWB is that we can download flash files from the Internet and use them in the lesson. The flash files could be games, movies, animation and so on. At first I was thinking of using flash files to enhance my lesson. However, I did not manage to do it. Why? Later on I will talk about that. Ok. So, in my opinion, games, movies and animations are good to be use in the lesson. When the teachers have found the appropriate materials, they can include them into their lesson as I am sure the children will love it. I believe that those elements can easily attract the students’ attention towards learning and encourage them to participate in the activities. They are fun to have, and children always love to have fun. Those elements can lower the students’ affective filter. According to Krashen, when their needs, motives and emotional state is affected, their affective filter will up and block the input. When they are having fun, it is eventually will lower their affective filter thus enabling them to acquire the necessary input given to them. It’s good to see that some of my friends came up with the idea of using those elements to include in their lesson by using the software. Even I was attracted to their lesson.

As for my group presentation, we chose Soddiq’s work to be presented as we think that his lesson is interactive and interesting. He presented the Science lesson and the topic is ‘Phases of the Moon’. Soddiq manage to create interesting activities about moon phases and he did get credit from the lecturers for his hard work. Two thumbs up for ya, Soddiq! I’m sure he already discussed about his activities in his blog. So kindly visit his blog.

As for me, I did English lesson and I chose to introduce Prepositions. Look at the sample below:

This is one of the examples of my activities. Basically, the students need to click on the black circle, drag and place it according to the preposition given. I think this is a good way to introduce preposition. I wish I could create a more interesting activity. However, 4 days before the presentation, my laptop had the problem with its motherboard. I need to send it to the service centre and unfortunately, all my saved works were gone as the disc need to be formatted. I am very frustrated with that. Though I got my laptop back after 3 days with brand new motherboard, but I simply did not have enough time to create an interesting activity. This incident made me thinking.. We all said that ICT is good, ICT can assist the teacher, ICT enhance teaching and learning, but we need to remember that technology always has its defect. There is nothing perfect in this world. We admire the technology, but I believe that it is not worth to always be dependent on the technology. I’m not saying that when I become a teacher, I will not use ICT. The idea of integrating ICT in teaching and learning is good and has many advantages. However, in my point of view, if teachers want to use ICT, they must ensure that the tools are in good condition. They also need to always have a back-up plan, in case some unpredictable incident occurs that unable teachers to use the tools. In this case, teachers must be creative and always know how to handle those situations without interrupting their lesson. Therefore, ICT has advantages in teaching and learning, but it can also be very frustrating. Well, at least I’ve learnt my lesson….

Eighth. Part 2: The Pursuit Of SMARTness - Simplicity Or Complexity?

There’s still a week before we need to do presentation on the assignment. Nothing much going on in the class. We were required to discuss in group and work on our IWB task. Undecided – still have not come up with any plan regarding our assignment. Ummm.. When I mentioned undecided, I’m referring to the name of my group, UNDECIDED. Please do not get the wrong idea. It was not like we were completely clueless about the task. Khairi, Soddiq and I pretty much have gather some thoughts about what we are going to do, except we did not really start working on it. As expected, Caroline was the only dedicated person in our group. She already did her part. Though it was not yet a complete work, but we were glad that at least somebody from our group took the initiative to do the task. Literally, she had urged our adrenaline to start working in completing the assignment.

And so, Caroline chose the topic ‘Occupation’ as her lesson. We looked through her work, and we thought that the activities were simple; which is OK. Personally, I don’t mind simple activities, as long as the activities are interactive and suit the learning objectives. I do not fancy complicated activities, where you put lots of pictures, multimedia, animation and so on. Although it is also good to include those elements into the lesson as they can be interactive and attractive, but for me, I would rather choose to create a simple activity, yet has the ability to achieve the intended learning outcomes. Besides, to create a lesson that is simple yet profound and significant to the students takes great skill to know what is absolutely essential to them. In my own opinion, when we are creating a simple lesson, we tend to keep focus on what is important. Sometimes we pay more attention in beautifying the activity where in the end we are neglecting the practicality of those elements and whether they are significant to be included or not. UNDECIDED totally agree with me about simplicity. We think that there’s no need to bother about making complicated activities that would probably give us advantages in getting high marks in this assignment. More importantly, we need to ensure that our lessons must be based on Curriculum Specifications and appropriate for the upper primary students.

My group members spend most of the time in front of the computers, trying to figure out what we are going to do for our assignment. There is no problem working in this group as everyone willing to share their opinion and ideas and helpful enough to show how to use the certain features of SMART Notebook software. Sharing is caring? Sounds like UNDECIDED is adorable, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, yes we are. LOL.

In the end, I decided to choose a one hour lesson based on prepositions and the target group is Year 4. Although at that time I haven’t think of what kind of activities I will include but I think we can create interesting activities to introduce prepositions using the IWB. The features such as click, drag and clone can be useful in introducing prepositions. At that time, I was thinking, perhaps I could create an activity where students can drag ‘something’ and put that ‘something’ according to the correct position. For example, student will drag ‘something’ and put it under another ‘something’. Then I was thinking, OK it is interesting and it shows preposition. So, that’s it. I will design preposition activities.

Seventh. Part 1:The Pursuit of SMARTness - Lost in confusion

And so it’s been seven weeks and after all the lectures on ICT, we were supposed to work on our assignment. Well, our assignment is, we need to work in group to create lessons by using IWB. Surely time passes by really fast that I just realized that I have a lot of work to do. The assignment is due in two weeks time, and I have not prepared any lesson, nor put any effort to create one. Until Prof mentioned about our assignment that I became conscious about all the hard work that we need to put in.

Once again, Prof reminded us on what we need to do. For the assignment, we need to create lessons of different subjects; English, Science and Mathematics. To make sure that all of us are participating in developing the lessons, each of the members of the group are required to create their own lesson and at least come up with five slides that include instructions and activities.

Later, Prof showed us some samples of lesson using IWB done by her former students. The lessons, for example, filling in the blanks, matching, grouping and many more. Those samples, for which I regard as creative and interesting; something that made me amazed with the functions of IWB and the creativity of the users who developed the lessons. Also, it made me realized how well this tool can help to enhance the teaching and learning. Luckily Prof showed us some of the ways to use the features of the IWB and SMART notebook software. If not, I would probably hate to work with this software. At least now I got some knowledge on how to use the software and ideas on what I can do with the software. And also thanks to Sze Mei for her spontaneous demonstration in conducting a digital storytelling of Little Red Riding Hood by using IWB. I still remember that she did well in demonstrating the lesson, although she has not seen the lesson before. What a talent. Nicely done, Sze Mei. By her presentation, now I am aware of how we can make use of IWB to deliver our lesson.

Ok. At that time, my group still has not decided on who should do English lesson and so on. Caroline has good command in English. So, it's reasonable to have her do English lesson. Since Khairi took Mathematics as elective subject, he voluntarily himself to create a Math lesson. That’s left me and Soddiq being undecided of which subject we should take. English or Science? As a solution, we decided to do ‘Scissor, paper and rock’ to determine who should do which subject. The winner will do Science, and the loser will do English. So, I lost the game… Fair enough. I’ll come out with the idea to create English lesson. Final decision: Khairi (Mathematics), Soddiq (Science), Me (English) and Caroline (English).

Still, at that time, I lost in my own little planet of thoughts.. the thoughts that have nothing to do with IWB. Oh well, it makes sense since I have not yet explore the software. Need to do some experiments with the software so that I can acquire the skills in using IWB. We learn more by ‘try and error’, am I right?

Sixth.. IWB What?

Special day. We were introduce to another tool in learning. I’ve seen it for weeks, though I’m also curios how that thing function. There came Ms. Fenny; an expert in SMART Board (yes I would call her an expert because she sure knew a lot on how to use that thing). SMART Board a.k.a Interactive White Board (IWB) is something new for me, something you would not see in IPIK. Ok, so basically Ms. Fenny showed us how to integrate IWB into the lesson, how to operate it, what are the basic features in SMART notebook software, how to use the software and so on.

What is Interactive White Board? The most interesting part about IWB is that we can operate it like computer, but more interactive as this device projected the display from computer on a large display. It is a presentation device that interfaces with a computer. The computer images are displayed on the board by a digital projector, where they can be seen and manipulated. Users can control software both from the computer and from the board. Also, we can write and erase our writing, just like when using white board and marker-pen, by using a pen and highlighter tool. Of course it is not an ordinary pen and highlighter, it is specially provided to interact with the IWB. Well, to know further, you can always Google it, mate! There are a lot of information about IWB available on the Net.

Alright, so Ms. Fenny taught us what the basic things we need to know about IWB. Her presentation was about how to use it; how to click and drag the picture by using a finger, how to clone a text and picture, how we can use the SMART notebook software and many more. To make it simpler, she taught us how to use IWB. Later, we were required to create a simple lesson for kids using IWB. In group, we need to come with our own idea on how we are going to design an English lesson based on what we have learned on this day. In my opinion, my group did well. Only that it was the first time for us to know about the software and time given wouldn’t allowing us to further explore the software. However, we came up with the idea of conducting a lesson under the topic ‘Parts of the body’ and used the main functions of the software that have been showed by Ms. Fenny previously.

As I mentioned above, we chose ‘Parts of the body – Human face’ as our lesson. We designed the lesson for Year 3 pupils. At the first stage of our lesson, we chose a human face from the SMART notebook gallery. We labeled the parts of the human face; by using highlighter and in different colours. The idea was that the teacher are going to introduce the parts of human face to the pupils, such as eyes, ears, mouth, nose and so on (see Figure 1). At the second stage of the lesson, we decided to make something unusual. With the interesting functions of the software, we chose another human face picture from the gallery, separate the parts of the human face and scrambled the parts (see Figure 2). The idea was that the pupils need to click and drag the parts of the human face and put them together to form a ‘complete’ face (see Figure 3). In order to complete this task, the pupils of course need to know the position of each parts. Although we only used the basic features of the software, however we realized that with the interesting features of the IWB, we can create a more interactive lesson. That’s is what I like about IWB the most. I think that young learners would be more interested to engage in the lesson as the lesson provides them tasks that are different and for me, it’s fun and interesting enough for the pupils. Then, Soddiq did a job well done to explain our activities to the rest of the class.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Lastly, we need to make reflections about our activities. Here’s what we need to reflect:

Do you understand the basic knowledge of using Note book function in SMART board? If yes which part that you understand most? If not why you did not understand?

So far, I understand. After all, Ms. Fenny explained well about how to use the software. And also thanks to Ms. Fenny for assisting my group to complete the task. As it was the first time we were being introduced to the software, I know how to do clone, click and drag, cut the picture and the function of group and ungroup. I need some time to explore the software though, to improve the knowledge of using the software.

Do you understand the basic knowledge to use gallery feature and attachment picture in SMART board incorporate for teaching English vocabulary for standard 4 students?

Yes. Easy. Not too different with other software that I know. The gallery provided various pictures and well-organized in their own topics. So, there should be know problem for teachers to teach vocabulary as the pictures in the gallery are sort by their topics. Furthermore, we still can attach other pictures from the computer into the software.

Do you find that SMART board a useful tool to support in teaching and learning? If yes, why it is useful? If not, what is the problem?

Certainly yes. I think that using IWB is good for demonstrations. The software enable us to use finger like a mouse to point out some important features of the lesson. Besides, the colourful features can definitely attract the young learners; we can customize the presentation of our lesson by using both the pen and highlighter features to display a number of different colours. And its usefulness would enable teachers to design various lesson activities. For English teachers, they can maximize the use of the tools to create lessons that based on various language skills; listening, writing, reading and also speaking. It’s good for teachers to gain the skills in using this tool as it would give more variety for teachers to practice in teaching approaches. Though the availability of this tool, perhaps, is limited in most of the schools, however to acquire the skills and knowledge to use it is appropriate. I believe there are pros and cons in everything. There’s still practicality and reliability issue in integrating IWB in the lesson, but with proper preparation and planning, IWB can be an effective instructional tool to adapt. To use or not to use IWB is all on teachers. After all, it is a tool that would assist the teachers in delivering their lesson.