Pre ESE Blog 1

Enhanced School Experience: Classroom Observations of ICT Use

School Name: Woodgrove Secondary School

Class: Sec 3T1

Profile of class: Secondary 3 Normal Technical students, boys and girls aged 15 - 16

Subject: Physical Education

What ICT tools are used in the lesson?  
Mobile phones with camera video recording features and computer video clips.

Describe how ICT is used for teaching and learning in the lessons.

Students were practicing on their standing broad jump NAPFA stations.

Students were paired up and they were told to help each other find strengths and weaknesses of their partner’s jumps. In order to allow their partner to know how he/she did their jumps, partners were encouraged to take videos of their jumps and reviewed it after their jumps before they make their subsequent jumps.

These videos were kept and students will take videos of their partner’s jump during the next PE lessons. The students will then be able to compare and see the differences between their first jump and subsequent jumps.

A video of a very good jump made by their fellow classmates were taken and shared among the class. This video will allow the students to make a comparison between their own jump and that of the correct jump.

The video taking allows the students to know what their strengths and weaknesses are and these allowed them to improve on their weaknesses.

On top of the videos that the students have taken, students were also showed videos done by experts (through youtube). Using these youtube videos, students could compare it with those taken by themselves.

How do teachers in the school feel about the use of ICT for teaching and learning? (For this question, you may want to speak to the HOD/ICT and other teachers you know in the school.)

Woodgrove Secondary School makes use of a system called the Learning Management System (LMS), whereby teachers can upload assignments or notes for students and the students can access to these documents from home and at their own time. This system also allows the school to have e-learning day whereby the students need not come to school, but they will have to complete assignments set by their subject teachers for that particular day. This is especially helpful when the school has something important to conduct and is unable to have the students back in school. On top of that, the LMS also allows teachers to share resources with fellow school colleagues. This makes it accessible for teachers to source for information that they might need across different departments.
http://www.woodgrovesec.moe.edu.sg/wbn/slot/u1080/Department/ICT/Briefing_for_Students.ppt#256,1,Home-based Learning 2011

Other than the LMS system, the school also uses the biometric system for attendance taking. In the past, form teachers will have to manually take attendance of the students during flag raising and update the attendance in the cockpit. However, after the introduction of the biometric system, teachers need not update the attendance in the cockpit as attendance will automatically be updated. It ease the administrative work of the teachers and allows teacher to have more time for other stuff.