Enhanced School Experience: ICT Task 1

ENHANCED SCHOOL EXPERIENCE: PREPARATORY TASK FOR ICT FOR MEANINGFUL LEARNING

Enhanced School Experience: Classroom Observations of ICT Use

(I)          Specific Observations

School Name: Nan Chiau High School

Class: 1B

Profile of the class: (For e.g., the students’ academic abilities, stream and other characteristics) The class is in the Express stream, and is considered one of the better classes in secondary one, academic-wise. Most of the students are active and interact readily with the teacher.

Subject: English

What ICT tools are used in the lesson? Hardware: Desktop Computers Projectors Visualisers Software: Google Documents (Group collaborative writing) Asknlearn (school learning portal)   Junglebyte (Classroom Management Software)

Describe how ICT is used for teaching and learning in the lesson. This lesson was held in a computer lab. Before the lesson proper, the teacher began her preparations by keying into Junglebyte the websites she wished to block the students from accessing, which included facebook, twitter and youtube. The lesson is in preparation for an upcoming mock debate. The students were split into groups of 4 and told to access Asknlearn and read through several articles on the issue that the teacher had collated. They were also free to do their own research on the web. By the end of the lesson, they had to submit a précis on the issue, and list their stand with supporting reasons and arguments. To facilitate their work, the students employed Google Documents to work on their points in via collaborative writing. What was impressive was that the teacher did not specifically mention Google Docs; the students just naturally utilised a tool that they felt was most appropriate for their work. This, I feel, is how ICT should end up – when use of technology is not lauded per se, but becomes a “natural” extension of learning.

(II)    General Observation: How do teachers in the school feel about the use of ICT for teaching and learning? (For this question, you may want to speak to the HOD/ICT and other teachers you know in the school.) It is impossible to interview every teacher in the school, but the School ICT HOD/Committee has come up with a rubric that tracks teachers’ satisfaction and utilisation level for each aspect of ICT, and from that it can be seen that generally, the teachers in the school are quite supportive of ICT. Personally, almost every lesson that I observed incorporates some aspect of ICT. The school has also done a good job in implementing ICT, from the hardware such as visualisers and projectors in every classrooms, Wireless network, upgrading to fibre broadband next year; to software such as Ask n Learn, Junglebytes and the school bortal; to “humanware” such as conducting regular training sessions for both students and teachers. The culture of of using ICT is also quite strong among the staff - some teachers are quite advanced in their ICT usage, such as controlling Powerpoint slides on their smartphones via a Bluetooth connection. The school is also trying out lessons with tablets on a select group of teachers and students. However, not all technologies are equally utilised – the lower secondary classrooms are fitted with an Interactive White Board (IWB) but it does not seem to be very much utilised. For the Social Studies and English classes, all it seems to do is take up space on the main white board and it cannot even be written on with a regular whiteboard marker. The HOD (ICT) did mention, though, that different subjects utilise the IWB at a different rate, and I can foresee that it can be useful in certain subjects such as Mathematics.