ICT - personal experience

Q. Reflect about how ICT was used by your former teachers. Highlight only one particular lesson conducted.

I studied at Raffles Girls School, and the particular lesson I remember is a geography lesson. The pupils in that class were about 15 years of age, and of varying levels of competency and interest: some were keen learners while others tended to be less engaged by the subject. On the whole, furthermore, it was a class that was often described by teachers to be bright but very talkative, and it could at times be difficult to get all of our attention at once.

My geography teacher at the time was relatively fond of using Microsoft Powerpoint to conduct her lessons. However, in that particular lesson, she incorporated other ICT elements into her Powerpoint presentation, such as video clips embedded into the slides and Flash animation clips. The videos and Flash clips were particularly helpful in allowing us to visualize physical processes in the natural world, as they translated the flat 2D images we had in our notes into a continuous stream of animation. This greatly facilitated our understanding of the subject content, and furthermore stimulated our interest in the lesson as the visual components were very effective in capturing our attention. It was also very useful in enabling us to remember keywords and key phrases in our textual notes.

Generally, most teachers in my school make use of ICT to make lessons more visually stimulating and interactive in nature. Apart from that, they also encourage the integration of ICT into our learning by setting ICT-related assignments for us to complete, or setting research tasks which require us to gather information online. Last but not least, there are also e-learning weeks during which, instead of going to school, we are made to complete tutorials and worksheets online.