Classroom Observation

Enhanced School Experience

Preparatory task for ICT for Meaningful Learning

Specific Observations

School name: Townsville Primary School

Class: 3 Hope

Profile of the class: The students are of mixed ability. There is one girl though, Lwin, who is new to school and is not familiar with the use of English as spoken language. Thus her teacher, Mrs Khoo, told me that Lwin seldom participates in class discussions and interacts very little with her classmates.

Subject: Science – Plants (mobile learning)

For the usual science lessons, Townsville follows the framework of Ideas First where children are encouraged to work as a community of scientists and leverage on each other’s knowledge of the topic. As such, sharing of ideas is a common practice in Science curriculum and the role of the teacher is usually to facilitate and correct the students when the need arises.

The ICT tools used for the lesson are netbook, a webcam, as well as a program called Quickmark.

The students are divided into groups of 5 and brought to the science garden within the school compound. There are various parts to the science garden, namely the butterfly enclosure, the pond, the organic farm and also a section dedicated to carnivorous plants.

As this is the children’s’ first time participating in the mobile learning trail for science, Mrs Khoo had to spend a fraction of the time briefing the students on how to take good care of the equipment and also to look out for certain clues to the questions. Students basically have no problems logging onto the computer and the Quickmark program itself as they were already exposed to the technology before hand.

For this lesson, the students were not issued any handouts at all and they are to bring the netbooks around the garden in their groups to look up information and subsequently answer the questions.

At each of the various sections, there is a barcode where the students have to snap a picture of with the webcam. The Quickmark program will then analyse the barcode and direct them to a website where information about the particular section can be found.

Students then learn to process the information and use the information on the website to answer a few questions that follow the passage. Instead of frontal teaching by the teacher, the website has served as an alternative platform whereby the children can learn. It provides the opportunity for students to be self directed learners where they get to decide for themselves what is needed to complete the quiz or task at hand.

General Observations

I feel that the students get very excited when they are allowed to use ICT tools in their learning and it increases their attention span on that particular lesson. Using ICT tools in lessons changes the role of the teacher to that of a facilitator where students can become self-directed learners.

Lwin was also seen participating in the activity actively. When I approached the group, I can see her trying to read out the passages on screen to comprehend and matching it the pictures to the real life example. When questioned, she can correctly point out and tell me in simple terms the plants and its functions.

Mrs Khoo feels that the children gain a greater sense of achievement when they can handle the equipments well and make use of the information to complete the task at hand without much handholding from the teacher. She observed that the retention span of the knowledge gained is also longer this way.