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.