Usage of ICT during ESE stint

I had the opportunity to teach in Lianhua Primary School for about 7 months, in which the first 6 months having to take a Primary 3 form class.

This particular class I'll be commenting about are are above average and/or higher in terms of academic abilities. They are in the 2^nd best class for primary 3 level.

They are responsive and most have a listening attention span of at least 10-15minutes, afterwhich the teacher would have to engage them in some form of activity.

For this particular session, the computer was used for showing of powerpoint slides, videos as well as playing background sounds to enhance their experience of their role-play.

This was a picture composition lesson, in which the students are guided on writing well through experiencing the situations depicted in the pictures by getting them to role-play the situations.

There are actually 5 sessions altogether(though only reporting on 1 lesson) Each 1-hr lesson discusses only 1 picture, where it will start with a tuning-in activity, the writing of dialogue for the pictures,  role-playing the picture scenario according to the dialogues written,  guiding the students with vocabulary and phrases that can be added to describe the feelings/happenings surrounding that situation and then the writing activity itself.

The use of ICT is largely in the tuning-in activity and in the role-playing whereby background sounds/music is used to enhance the whole experience of being there (in this example being in the park, with the sound of birds chirping etc.)

Since the composition was about 2 boys cycling in the park/ nature reserve where later they got themselves into an accident after deciding to race downhill, the tuning-in activities consists of a music video with song “I love to go awandering”, a clip on dangerous but practiced bicycle stunts and the last one on a bicycle crash.

The students had fun watching the clips as a tuning-in and later on they had discussions and role-plays which has added variety in their learning. It was found that they wrote better for that composition as compared to other compositions they have written for the semester.

On a wider scale, the school itself does ensure that ICT is used in at least every subject and every level. There is an ICT baseline programme for every level and subject. Some examples are: In primary 3 the students learn 1 lesson of fractions using the computer, the primary 1 learn 1 lesson of structuring sentence in Word Document etc.

The school also subscribes to LEAD portal in which students can do revision on their own at home and teachers can also give students assignments via LEAD.

Since I sit in the English committee, I see that it is being used in quite a few programmes. They use koobits, newsmaker to enhance the experience of using English.

In Science, there are experiments that uses data logger (starting at primary 4) where the students learn to take data from their experiments using the instruments which will automatically chart a graph on the program they use on the computer.

Robotics is also one of the more popular CCA in which the school has always invested their interest in. In robotics, students learn how to assemble and programme robots and the best students in doing these are sent for competitions. In fact, all students are given a taste of robotics and programming when they are in primary 3 through a 4-week workshop.