Pre-session Blog Entry 1 (Enhanced School Experience)

During the JC1 history lecture that I observed at Pioneer Junior College (PJC), ICT was used by the teacher to facilitate the teaching process and also enhance the students’ learning experience. In choosing a prezi presentation over the more commonly used Microsoft powerpoint slides, the teacher was clearly doing her best to capture the students’ attention using prezi’s flash presentation. The students certainly responded positively to the teacher’s use of prezi and demonstrated more interest as compared to previous lessons in which Microsoft powerpoint presentations were used.

The use of short historical video clips in the lesson was another noteworthy observation. While the insertion of pictures in the prezi presentation helped made the lesson more interesting, it was the video clips which really eased the students into the learning process. Watching and hearing the various historical events and actors in action was a far more effective way for the students to understand their lecture notes instead of the teacher explaining without the assistance of such visual aids.

In this respect, the visualiser was also a key ICT tool in that it enabled the teacher to ascertain that the whole class was “on the same page” literally (referring to their lecture notes), thereby controlling the lesson pace. For instance, the teacher could accurately and instantaneously pinpoint the specific sentences/terms to be highlighted by the students in the lecture notes using the visualiser.     

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On the use of ICT for teaching and learning in Pioneer Junior College, the teachers on the whole appreciate its usefulness and make a conscious effort to employ ICT tools in their lessons. The most common reason for their ready acceptance of ICT is their recognition that students nowadays are IT-savvy, which probably makes the use of ICT in school an inevitable trend. Unless they are able to demonstrate a similar familiarity with ICT, such a technological disconnect may hamper the teachers’ interactions with the students.

In addition, ICT allows the teachers more flexibility and creativity in planning their lecture and tutorial lessons. Admittedly the teachers have to spend more time and effort to create prezi presentations and search for relevant and easily digestible video clips, to cite a few examples, which may be one drawback in contrast to the traditional classroom teaching. Even so, the teachers generally acknowledge that the successful integration of the use of ICT into their lessons has done much to enrich the learning environment for both teachers and students in the classroom.      

Finally, the teachers find a great degree of convenience in using such ICT tools. This is particularly the case for more senior teachers who still recall the days when the use of ICT was associated with negative words like “troublesome” and “technical problems” (e.g. the old cumbersome video cassette tapes). The subsequent technological achievements achieved since then mean that the opposite is true today, constituting an important “pull” factor for the use of ICT for teaching purposes.