Session 10 of ICT

Session 10 of ICT saw us further developing and elaborating on our group assignment. My group touched up on our lesson plan, added the lesson assessment tools and drafted out our PowerPoint slides. Dr. Quek came over to each group to offer her suggestions and advice on how we could further improve our lesson plans and ideas. We also posted our critique of one other group's work and went over and took a look at the others' projects. It was interesting seeing so many different styles of presentation using such a wide array of ICT tools such as podcasts, blogs, wikis, videos and so on. Indeed all these has broadened my mind and exposed me to how multimedia and interactive digital technologies can help us teach and convey our message to our students far more effectively than traditional teaching methods. For example, our group filmed a video of ourselves showing how idioms can be applied and related to everyday life. Imagine if teachers showed a video of themselves to their own students to demonstate the use of idioms or other teaching concepts. That would immediately capture the students' attention and elicit a great deal more interest and excitement than a mere oral presentation of lesson content. Students, seeing how idioms are put into practice in real life, as shown in a full colour, three-dimensional environment like a video clip will have a far deeper and long-lasting impression of the whole lesson compared to just a dry and routine writing and explaining of the idioms on the whiteboard. Naturally all this requires intensive work and preparation on the part of the teacher but in the end, if the students benefit, we should definitely consider it all worthwhile, right?

Session 9 of ICT

Last Wednesday's session brought us one week closer to our group ICT presentation which we would have to showcase on the week of 19 Ocober. Dr. Quek further elaborated on what we needed to incorporate in our lesson plan and classroom presentation, as well as touching briefly on each group's chosen mode of teaching - varying from podcasts to blogs and wikis. My group is including a video in our PowerPoint presentation so we headed to the next door laboratory to download the video from the camera to our thumbdrive. We also discussed and made significant progress on the completion of our lesson plan, which is to teach students the meanings and uses of different Chinese idioms. It's great to see that everyone in the group is cooperating so well with one another and that our group assignment is coming on so nicely... indeed five heads are better than one when it comes to many things, not least of them being educational pedagogy!

Session 8 of ICT

In this week, Dr. Quek brought us to the Media and Experiential Lab to learn more about how game-based technology can be incorporated into our teaching. We watched the IT technican give us a very good and fluid demonstration on how the interactive 3D game Second Life is played and how we can use it to demonstate and explain to students concepts and ideas related to our curriculum subjects. Although I'm an avid fan of computer games, I have never ventured into games like Second Life, which has gained a welcome reputation as an educational platform that many universities and other institutions of higher learning are increasingly turning to as a complement to traditional classroom teaching. There are even specialised regions in Second Life used for educational purposes covering subjects as diverse as chemistry, English, geography etc.

However, I have to admit that I found the game to be a bit boring when I watched the demonstration. There was basically this one avatar moving around by himself in the virtual environment, interacting with the objects around him and only occasionally coming into contact with other people. I haven't really delved into the game that much though so there are definitely a lot of areas which I haven't explored. And the demonstration of how a tsunami occurs was definitely interesting...

On whether I would really use Second Life or similar games in my future teaching career, I think the jury is still out on the question. No doubt it is useful in some ways, as evidenced by the fact that many institutions use it, however I would have to do a practical and thorough comparison of its effectiveness compared to F2F teaching before drawing any definitive conclusions. There is something to be said about face to face interaction with the teacher, that personal touch, the warm smile and the immediate presence of another person that is impossible to replicate in a virtual machine. Second Life as a form of e-learning though - I think its usefulness would definitely be manifest there.