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….