QED522 Lesson 1: 2nd August 2007

K: What I already KNOW about this week’s topic
Before today’s class, I had already knew that many Secondary schools in Singapore were already integrating ICT into the teaching of lessons, such as using PowerPoint slides to replace the use of overhead projectors and interactive learning applets. Moreover, as I was attached to Crescent Girls School (one of the schools which MOE assigned as one of the ‘schools of the future’) for a stint during my ‘varsity holidays, I had some experience with interacting with the students using ICT and designing some applications to facilitate the use of ICT in the classrooms to make it easier for both the teachers and students to benefit from ICT.

W: What I WANT to learn
I wanted to see if I could learn any new applications or use existing applications that I’ve already learnt to make learning more enjoyable for the students and to relieve some of the workload of the teachers.

L: What I LEARNED this week
I’ve learnt this week that this course is not about learning new applications or programming, but about how to make learning more student-centered by the use of ICT. I have also learnt how to use the wiki to upload information and to access other people’s wiki page to see what they have done. I have also learnt that Ashley is a guy’s name. (heh just kidding).

Q: What QUESTIONS I still have

As we know, many older teachers are still not very comfortable with the use of ICT, so are there any programs or courses offered by NIE to target the more senior teachers? I’m sure that by combining their many years of experience with ICT would yield much better results as they would know what the things to incorporate into the applications to make learning more enjoyable. Secondly, although ICT can be a very useful lesson aid, I feel face-to-face interactions between the teachers and their students are still extremely important so we should not have the students stare at the computer screen for the entire lesson and neglect the most important part of teaching – human interaction. (This was more of a comment than a question of course but I thought this was the best place to put it)