Weekly report for Week 3_30th January 07

a) Today I learn

On the 3rd week, we are asked to present on how to download a driver from the internet if the CD containing the driver is lost. Basically this presentation is to test our knowledge on presentation skill by integrating the knowledge that we learn on the 1st and 2nd week on the Interactive White Board. Each team was also given a chance to evaluate other group’s presentation and comments on the presentation. This will help the group that doing the evaluation improves their own presentation skill in the future after doing the evaluation. After that, we were being introduced to the Smart School.

Smart School, one of the main focuses in the Pelan Induk Pembangunan Pendidikan (PIPP) for Rancangan Malaysia Ke-9 whereby teachers will need to change their role in the electronic classroom. They are no longer providing information but becoming counsellors in helping the students selecting information sources and make judgements about what the students are downloading. This is because high tech requires high touch as the key to success in the Information Age will be making the right judgements of which information is useful. The new education system will encourage our citizen to learn how to learn.

Today the Smart School will be remodeled in such a way that they will be able to access the SchoolNet. With the ability to connect to the SchoolNet, it is hope that management and administration of smart school is much improved.

The implementation of Smart School is a process to achieve the vision of the country’s education by providing ICT for schools, ability of teachers to integrate ICT in the daily teaching processes and improving the management in school with the use of ICT. Several main Components of Smart Schools were also being highlighted. The objective of the Smart School has a wide scope; to name a few is to produce students with knowledge in technology and improves the skills in all aspects of life.

The Main focus of Smart School is to combine the knowledge of teachers and students in ICT to produce self knowledge in ICT. The 3 main components needed in the smart schools are the Wetware, Courseware and Hardware. During the lecture, we were given the National Blueprint Book regarding the Smart School Implementation. One of the Courseware is the teaching Science and Mathematics in English or PPSMI. Whereby Wetware means, teacher need to have knowledge on the ICT. Hardware are like the computer lab, SchoolNet and so on.

b) Today I question

What is the latest hardware use in Teaching at school nowadays besides interactive white boards?

c) Your initiative to find more information on the topics discussed in the class
I download the “Konsep Pembestarian sekolah” file from the Dip Ed Yahoo Groups and explore more to understand the concept of Smart school. Besides that, I also download the “Pelan Induk Pembangunan Pendidikan” article and access the SchoolNet website.

Weekly report for Week 2_23th January 07

a) Today I learn

On the 2nd week, we learn the topic “Thinking of the Future ICT Scenarios”. This topic was given during the 1st week lecture, but reviewed again on the second week due to few students still couldn’t make it to attend the 1st class. Some agenda highlighted in this topic are
Engaging learners
Personalized learning
New pedagogy – PoEIT and
New Tool - IWB

The ICT scenarios being discuss here is focusing on the people who use the ICT tools, what they do with it and how they do it. It is a matter of how well we facilitated the learning process to “ENGAGE” the student involve in the two way learning process and not “ENRAGE” the students, which means making the students loose concentration on what is being taught. The Pedagogy of Engagement Integrated Techology learning stated the “know IT, PoEIT and SEEIT”.

Then, we were introduce to the “Class Seedwiki” and the term Free Online Group or also known as “Frog”where teachers can share their notes or even conduct a class through online using a website provided for free. The website provides a medium for students to share their knowledge among themselves and teachers can access and assess their assignment online. Clearly, the management is much improves through paperless documents.

On the next section of the class, we introduced to the Interactive White Board or commonly known as the IWB. It was first introduce in 60% of Primary Schools at United Kingdom. Here we will see the role of teachers change from providers to facilitator providing the ways to retrieve information instead of giving information.


There are four confidences to use ICT to support the curriculum:

Subject knowledge – knowing what to teach
The way to teach – knowing how to structure the lessons, and what interactions to build in the lesson, especially when using the IWB.
Attitude - knowing that it is OK to make mistakes – NO FEAR
Fluency in the use of ICT - learning one good skill then moves on and keeps learning new ones. (Kelly, 2005)

5 distinct phases that teachers are adopting the IWB

Familiarization
Utilization
Integration
Reorientation
Evolution

If IWBs is successfully utilize, we will see teachers will
• moving away from the materials provided to them
• developing their own in partnership with other teachers.
• creating resources in the classroom with the pupils
• modeling high quality conversations with the use of IWB.

Whereby students will
• happy to talk about IWB,
• learning is fun and the pace of the lesson is faster.
• like the visibility
• they can see what is going on in the class
• like the fact that they get more time with the teachers.

Therefore, creative teaching requires that teachers have secure subject knowledge and effective pedagogy and ICT can add flexibility, innovation and creativity to teaching and learning.

On the final section of the class, we were being expose to the Digital camera, how to operate the camera and some introduction on its main component. Every one is given a chance to take a picture using the camera. After doe with the camera session, we were being introduced to the Interactive White Board (IWB), how to use it, the general function of the IWB. After that, we were taught on how to set up the presentation equipment, the laptops, projector as well as the printer. We were also given the homework where everyone is assign to download a driver for a printer.

b) Today I question

I ask 2 question today:
What is the latest hardware use in Teaching at school nowadays besides interactive white boards?
How to create a personal Blogging?

c) Your initiative to find more information on the topics discussed in the class
My initiative to find more information on the topics in the class is by going through the articles on The Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Schools. Besides that I also download few articles regarding the use of IWBs and how to fully utilize it.