Reflections(Week 3)

Lesson 3 of ICT was held at the MxL lab... basically a place set up with the aim of facilitating resource-based learning where students can be divided into several groups and make use of the partitions equipped with computers and computer linkpoints to start discussions, view videos etc. With a centre floor filled with rows of chairs for about 25 and a large screen, a tutorial space of instruction is available, useful for teachers to teach and students to do presentations.

So the lesson was kick-started with the first group presentation on interesting ICT tools that will be helpful in our lessons. And this pioneering group did a wonderful job in teaching us how to download Youtube videos onto our computer for use in lessons without the need of going online and waiting for it to load during lesson. The extraction can be done via a net based webpage at http://www.keepvid.com/. Instructions can be found on http://ict-course.pbwiki.com/Group23A for those who are interested to find out more. One interesting SCLA suggested by this impressive group was to give the students a specific topic to go Youtube to search for a representative video that best illustrates this topic, download it via keepvid and hand it up to the teacher, with justifications why this video is chosen. This provides the students an opportunity to source out suitable videos, analyse their relevance, justify their stance and thus in the process, the responsibility to learn about this topic is placed on the students. Resource-based learning.

Which leads me to the next portion of the lesson, in fact the bulk of it. We were introduced to five learning approaches utilized in SCLA and divided into groups to research on a specific one.
These learning approaches are:

1) Problem-based learning
2) Case-based learning
3) Project-based learning
4) Resource-based learning
5) Game-based learning
(with the exclusion on inquiry learning which Dr Tan supposed we are rather strong at being Chemistry and Math Teachers-to-be.)

And Dr Tan did was really to model for us how to be a facilitator of resource-based learning, incidentally what my group is doing. He gave a starting point of research by providing a website link for each group, went about reminding each team the time given and ensured each team is researching along the right track. And then he got us to critique his lesson... wow... great training for us whom as teachers ourselves, we gotta learn to reflect and critique our own lessons as well. Come next lesson, there will be more on these areas as we round up the research and present suggested lesson plans using these learning approaches.

Credit to Dr Tan for giving us the opportunity to learn from him as he modelled for us one way to introduce SCLA in lessons.

By the way, Dr Tan also introduced the Youtube for Teachers worldwide ---> Teachertube!! There might just be some interesting resources here to spice up your lessons and demonstrate some interesting effects/reactions/issues to your students. I've signed up for it... have you??