Thursday 12 March 2009

Self Determination Theory

Question 1 - How can you initiate, sustain and direct activities in an ICT lesson to motivate students?



As a whole, one evaluation stated that teachers had found that having a laptop with multimedia capability allowed them to make more use of visual
materials. The laptop connected to the Internet allowed teachers to respond quickly and in-depth to student questions. Students were reported to gain
understanding and interest consequent upon teacher use of multi-modal lesson materials.



In order to keep students actively involved in learning and to promote a high level of engagement, the learning environment must offer complexity and variety, a blend of safety and stimulation. (Kritchevsky, et al, 1986) The classroom must offer the children many stimulating choices if we expect them to remain involved and engaged.



An example is a word processing lesson titled "Getting Started With Ms Word" for Year 3



Initiate (Set Induction):

(1) Teacher show on the whiteboard a finished product of several picturesque article e.g. a flyer and a card created with Ms Word.

(2) Teacher then proceed to explain to the pupils how they can create such an article.

(3) Teacher explain what tools available in Ms Word pupils may use to create and further enhance their work.



Sustain & Direct (Class Activity):

(1) Instruct the pupils to form groups and proceed to individual computers.

(2) With the article still showing on the whiteboard, teacher instruct pupils to create a file.

(3) Teacher give pupils several topics of interest for the pupils to create e.g. an invitation to a birthday party, a "Keep Our School Clean" flyer, a "Happy
Teacher's Day" card and a "No Smoking" flyer.

(4) While pupils discuss among themselves what they want to do, teacher further explain where pupils are able to copy cliparts and images for their article. e.g clipart/images folder or googling images from the internet.

(5) Once pupils are engrossed in creating their article, teacher remind pupils of their choice of colours. i.e. blending of colours and making their font and image size moderate so as not to overcrowd their article.

(6) Teacher go round the class and give comments about pupils work, recommend and show other tools that might be of interest to the pupils e.g. borders and shapes

(7) Five minutes to end of class, teacher remind pupils to save their work and that teacher will print out their work for their next class.




Question 2 - How can you help students plan, monitor and modify their cognition to develop self-regulated learning of students in ICT.



Self-Regulated Learning(SRL) consists of a set of cross-curricular abilities which allow people to make the most of their learning activity by controlling all variables that have some influence on it.It is not surprising, hence, that teaching self-regulatory skills in addition to subject-matter knowledge is currently a main goal of education. Although some research studies show that SRL abilities usually increase with age, there is evidence that it does not increase naturally butrather because of suitable training. Research also indicates that students who lack skills inself-regulation tend not only to achieve poor academic results, but also to have behaviour problems and difficulties in their social relations, both in expressing their thoughts and feelings and in attempting to understand others.



An example is a month blog project for Year 6 students titled "Our last year as primary students"



Set induction:

(1) Teacher present a blog to the students on the IWB.

(2) Teacher further explain what a blog is.(3) Teacher further show what is contained in a blog.



Main activity:

(1) Teacher gives the students the title of the project.

(2) Teacher explain to the students they are to work in groups and firstly create their group blog in class.

(3) Teacher further suggest to students to allocate tasks for individual members of the group e.g. picture taking, note taking and structuring of how the
blog should look like.

(4) Teacher may suggest to post in their blog every 2 days or 3 days.(4) Teacher then suggest students to make use of what they learn in previous lessons. e.g. using digital camera and uploading in their blogs and embedding
videos and slideshows in their blog.

(5) Teacher may suggest to students link their blog with the other groups' blogs.

(6) Teacher then will inform the students that the assessment will be ongoing throughout the time span of the project.

(7) At the end of the project, each group will present their blogs during class.

Wednesday 25 February 2009

Lesson Plan (Proposed for Week 9 - TP)

Integrated Curriculum – Multidisciplinary Curriculum Design

Year 4 or 5
Subject: Science
Topic: Life Cycle of a Frog

Questions:

1. Find the pictures of the life cycle and save them to the desktop.
2. List the steps in a frog life cycle.
3. Produce a report in MS_Word, including pictures that have been saved. 

Lesson Objectives:

As a whole: Using the Internet as a tool for pupils to produce a report.

1. Pupils to be able to use and utilize search engines.
2. Pupils to be able to save images from websites.
3. Pupils to be able to insert images in MS_Word.



Year 3
Subject: ICT
Topic: Getting Started with MS_Word.
Description: Pupils learn or review how to open and create file, format text, change font and point size.

Lesson Objectives:

1. Pupils to be familiarized with a word processing package.
2. Pupils to learn basic features of MS_Word (Typing and Formatting)
3. Pupils learn how to italize, bold, underline and change the point size.
4. Pupils to learn letter and punctuation placement on the keyboard.
5. Pupils to learn that only one space is needed between each word and two spaces needed between each sentence.
5. Review and learn how to start and quit the application.

Frances Fuller three stages of model of concerns

The concerns stated below refers to my Week 6 lesson with Year 3A of Sekolah Rendah Mabohai, which was learning about storage devices.

Stage 1 - Self concerns

- The introduction was simple enough for the pupils to understand but my concern was whether they understood the ICT terms that I introduced to them i.e. storage, devices, pen drives, compact disk and diskette.
- Explaining about the function of the storage devices took a short time and I wonder if the pupils could comprehend to what extent the functionality of each stated device was.
- During the practical of the usage of the pen drive, I was concern about the fact while one group was working the other group was just loitering around doing nothing.. I did not prevision that would occur.

Stage 2 - Task concerns

- The class was a big class (about 33 pupils) and I was not well-prepared in handling the flow of the lesson.
- Task given were not enough to cater all the pupils.
- Grouping into two to carry out one task was inadequate. There should have been about 5 groups to minimize wastage of time.
- Because of the concerns above, I am concerned about not being creative enough planning a well-prepared lesson.
- I am concerned about conflict between my studies (theory) and my teaching practise (practical).
- I am concerned about my inability to manage all the ICT usage requirement (fully utilizing the available resources) - that time I wanted to use the Macbooks but I didn't have the passwords and my CT was not around, hence used my own laptop to do the practical.
- I am concerned about the time spent working with non-academic problems related to teaching with ICT (managing the class to settle down and pay attention within the period)
- I am VERY MUCH concern with the fact that each class is only allocated 1 period each week to learn ICT.
- The fact that the ICT lab in the school has no wireless network is of dire concern.

Stage 3 - Learning concerns

- I am concerned about how the use of IT affects pupils who do not have a computer or a notebook at home.
- I would like to revise the ICT scheme of work so that it would work hand in hand with the other subjects.
- I am concerned that some pupils with low command of English would instead be overwhelmed by the ICT terms used and be demotivated instead to learn ICT.

Wednesday 11 February 2009

Proposed Lesson Plan (ICT)

Subject: ICT
Topic: Instant Messaging using I-Chat on Macbook
Year: 3
Week: 7
Day: Monday
Date: 16th February 2009
Period: 1 (30 minutes)


Lesson Objectives:

1. For pupils to learn about e-communication.
2. For pupils to be able to analyse or deduce identities.



1. Teacher prepares Macbook and group pupils in pairs or threes.

2. Pupils log in to the student account.

3. Pupils point to the dock and click on I-Chat.

4. Teacher gives pupils a set of introductory questions for the pupils to ask one another via I-Chat. Answers to the questions are to be written down on a piece of paper each pupil. Pupils are to investigate whom they are chatting with.


Questions:

1. Hello, how are you today?
2. Are you a boy or a girl?
3. What colour is your pencil case?
4. What is your favourite food?
5. What is your father's name?


Plan B (Should there be problems with the Macbooks and Wireless Connection)
1. Number the diskettes backwards from the pupils' registration.
2. Distribute the diskettes.
3. Pupils retrieve the file with questions for them to answer and save the file.
4. Give the pupils time to answer the questions and ask them to save the files.
5. Collect diskettes and jumble them up.
6. Teacher distributes the diskettes randomly.
7. Pupils retrieve the files and try to guess the diskette that they have belongs to who.

Tuesday 18 November 2008

Ms Excel


We were asked to draw using excel during lab class with Dr Leong (PS0270). This was what I ended up with.


Science and ICT

Class: Primary 1


Topic of lesson: Looking at parts of a plant


Objectives:

At the end of the lesson pupils:

(1) should be able to describe a plant

(2) should be able to distinguish the various parts of a plant

(3) should be able to relate plants with food


Contents:


Vocabulary : leaf, root, stem, fruit, flower

A potted flowering plant and a fruit-bearing plant

Computers with internet connection

Website: http://www.hhmi.org/coolscience/forkids/vegquiz/plantparts.html



Introduction -


Teacher shows the class two large pot plants with an obvious stem and many green leaves bearing flower and fuit. This is used as a focus to ask the class about plants.

Q What is this? Can you describe it?(pointing to the whole plant )- Establish that it is a plant as a whole and not a flower, which is a part of a plant

Q What is this part? Can you describe it? (pointing to a leaf )

Q What is this part? Can you describe it? (pointing to the stem )

Q What else can you see? - The plant may have flowers or fruits

Q Does the plant have any parts that you cannot see ? - Pupils may know that

plants have other structures at other times that are not present on the specimen

shown as well as knowing that plants have roots in the soil.Teacher should now remove the plant from the pot to reveal the roots.

Q What is this part? Can you describe it? (pointing to the roots)

Q Can you use the words stem, leaf, root, flower and fruit to describe this plant? - Teacher solicit several descriptions and encourage pupils to incorporate quantitative and qualitative factors, such as estimates of number and size of leaves, flowers and fruits, height of stem, colour of stem, leaves, flowers and fruits and shape of leaves


Keys words such as stem, leaf, root, fruit and flower should be repeated, as should important aspects of pupils' descriptions. This could be supported by a simple diagram.


Main Activity -


Understanding plants


Pupils should work in groups of about two or three per computer.


  • Teacher will explain how some part of a plant can be eaten, depending on the plant itself.

  • Teacher will further explain that vegetables are plants and the various types of vegetables are one part of a plant.

  • Teacher will briefly give one example of a vegetable for each part of a plant.

  • Teacher will then show the exercise that the pupils will carry out by themselves on the Activboard or Smartboard.

  • Teacher will then ask pupils to carry out the exercise shown by themselves. (The website will be pre-opened by the teacher so that pupils can straight away do the exercise given)

  • Teacher will go round the class to supervise the pupils' ability to navigate around the exercise.


Teacher bring the activity to an end by asking pupils to differentiate the differences of the part of the plant that they encountered in the exercise with the plant that the teacher showed earlier.


Assessment:


Students will be mainly assessed based on the exercise given under closure I.e. homework and revision. Extra marks will be given if pupils show team work in completing the on-line exercise provided.

Closure:


In the final section of the lesson teacher give each student a handout notes and labelling parts of a plant exercise which they will do as homework.


As revision, pupils will be asked to do a drawing or painting based on a plant and to give the name of the plant that they have drawn or painted. They could also do tracings of leaves or make leaf prints and also to give the name from which plant the leaf or leaves came from . Pupils will be given a week to complete their revision exercise.


Consolidation

Other tasks