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?