Reflections on the Communication Skills for Teachers’ course

From this course, I learnt the skills of effective presentation and writing. It is important to have the correct target audiences in mind before we make any presentation or write any emails.

I realised that I’m more effective in my writing than my oral communications. Writing allows wait time for me to organise my thoughts through numerous drafting whereas in oral presentation, one has to be flexible and react accordingly to different situations or reactions from the audiences. For example, when questions are posted during an oral presentation, I have to derive with a good solution or comment and yet take note of the grammar and body language. This can be pretty stressful for me.

From the self taken video, I recognised that I am able to capture the attention of my audiences easily. This could be due to the tone of my voice which I feel is pretty smoothing to the ears. I was able to make proper eye contacts with my audiences so that they will not feel left out. However, I think that I should improve on my body language as I tend to repeat the hand actions.

I feel that I am more comfortable with writing tasks as I can convey my messages better. I am able to craft my writings tactfully in all situations, putting myself in the shoes of the receiver. I can write persuasive emails and complain letters without going out of the context and yet sounded cordial and polite at all times. However, I tend to be long winded at times.

From this course, I hope to improve on my oral communication because as teachers, I think that this is a very important skill. As such, before any oral presentation, I will take a video of myself so that I can evaluate myself before the actual presentation and practise on my weaknesses.

Making Connections Between My ESE and MP For ICT In Education

Beacon Primary School is a future school piloted for the purpose of R&D for ICT. The school serves as a platform for other schools to adopt best practices practiced within. As such, the school has ready infrastructures to conduct lessons using ICT easily.

The school practices 1-1 computing from Primary 2 onwards. In each class, there were laptops provided for each child. In Primary 1, the ratio of the laptops to the children is 1:2. As such, teachers were able to give class works using the laptops and children would be able to response immediately. Many times, alternative assessments were also conducted via the E-portal.

The school also disseminate home works via the portal and E-learning takes place frequently in Beacon. The children would have to download slides taught in class as revisions and attempt review questions thereafter. During the June holidays, many interesting educational sites and slides were uploaded for the children to access during their free time. In order to track if the children indeed access the sites during the school holidays, the portal captured all the information instantly. As such, we knew exactly who were the ones who did not attempt the revisions and do their home works online. This platform allows the children to take responsibility of their own learning and become self-directed learners.

Blogging is also another popular web tool used by the school. Accounts were created for the children in each class and they were encouraged to blog frequently to express themselves and to do reflection on a regular basis. Thus far, the school has been very successful in implementing blogging because children want to be heard and they feel proud when their posts have been published. They not only like others to comment of their posts but they are very active in commenting about what the teachers and classmates have written. This not only allows the class to understand more about each other, it allows quieter ones to voice out their opinions online too. Many times, the children blogged about topics or events which were not discussed in the classroom and this creates new awareness and knowledge for others.

ICT lessons are not limited to laptops, computers nor IWB boards only. During excursions, the school would provide cameras for the children to share and capture pictures that were useful for their projects. Children were trained since Primary 1 on the usage and functions of cameras.

Teachers in Beacon are expected to take on reseach as part of their professional development. They constantly explore new web tools to share among each other.

I am fortunate to be attached to Beacon Primary School for my contract teaching. As this is not a mainstream school, I'm able to have many first hand experiences on how ICT can enhance learning and understand the future directions of education. With this, I'm sure I will be able to bring forth some ideas to the next school that I will be attached to in time to come

As a beginning teacher, I see many possibilities in harnessing the use of ICT. For example, I would like to explore the usage of blogs. I would use blog as a for of communications to parents. Parents these days are more educated and most would take on an active role in their child's education journey. Thus, it is important to keep them informed about what have been taught and the activities that were conducted through the use of blogging. Besides, I believed that children should learn how to express and communicate their feelings and thoughts so I would want them to start doing so by blogging. In this way, parents and teachers will be able to understand what the child is going through especially if the child is facing difficult issues. Blogging will help the child to cultivate the love for wriiting and to express themselves.

Masterplans for ICT in Education

Unlike a decade ago, the globalised world today is very much connected. Information can be easily obtained with a click on the mouse and it is important for both educators and learners to acquire knowledge from these information that are so readily available. It is important for us to tap on these information for engaged learning.

With the launch of the three Masterplans, MOE recognises the importance of ICT in today's education. In my opinion, the launch of these plans were essential and indispensable for ICT has becae pervasive in everyone's life. Unlike the past, the world today has many digital distractions and it is prudent to integrate such digital hardwares and softwares into the student's learning process in order to keep their interest and prepare them for the demands of tomorrow. Students these days are very tech savvy and they need hands-on experiments to understand how ICT can impact and assist their learnings. ICT is also a great tool to encourage students to be active and self-directed learners, taking ownership of their own learning. ICT also allows collaborative learning to take place and all these are part of 21st century life skills needed in one's career.

During my time as a student, MOE was at the initial stage of launching Masterplan one. Computer lab was made available in school for students to share. Although lessons conducted were still pretty much traditional, teachers did encouraged the use of Microsoft Words and Powerpoint as end products for our projects. Robotics and Computer Club CCAs were novelty and became popular thereafter. All these were baby steps taken towards what the education scene has become today.

My ESE was with Beacon Primary School, a future school piloted in 2008. Being a future school, it has all the necessary facilities and resources needed for teachers to use ICT in their teaching. It is very important for teachers to be confident in the usage of ICT to conduct lessons. As such, teachers were strongly encouraged to go for professional developments and share good, useful practices in order to constantly improve the learning experience of the students. As a teacher in the school, I learnt that children are easily amazed and excited about what ICT can do in their studies. Many times, lessons were incorporated with YouTube resources, useful web links and children participate actively in lessons. Many times after the lessons, the students would request teachers to upload useful links for their usage. This is definitely in line with the Masterplans as students are indeed becoming active self-directed learners. I am totally bought over and strongly believe in the power of how ICT can make lessons more engaging and interesting.

Classroom Observations of ICT Use

I was attached to Beacon Primary School for my Enhanced School Experience. Prior to this, I was already a contract teacher with the school for almost 1.5 years. A little background about the school - Beacon Primary School is a newly set up institution which is part of the future school programme. This program is collaboration between MOE and IDA which aims to harness technology for learning. The school was established in 2008 in a neighbourhood area at Bukit Panjang. To date, there are four levels in the school and the school practices one-to-one computing for all their students.

I was fortunate to be the form teacher of a Primary 1 class for the past seven months. The class consists of fourteen boys and sixteen girls of mixed abilities and came in with minimum ICT knowledge. Simple ICT skills such has starting, shutting down of laptops and logging into the network have to be taught from scratch. Today, all the students in the class are able to create digital stories using Photostory and Powerpoint as part of their alternative assessments. As Beacon believes that ICT enhances learning and I have to agree that it can be a powerful tool, I made used of a portal created by the school to give home works to the children. In additional, it is also a mean for me to interact with the parents.

The portal is mainly used for practices and revisions. I would create multiple choices questions in the portal for the children to do as homework after teaching certain topics. Instead of using the traditional pen and paper method, the children are very excited to be doing their works online. Let me share with you the advantages of doing their works online via the portal.

This is the link to the portal - www.beaconpsp.com . Please consult me for the passwords and ID to view the interface.

Besides using this as a tool for learning, it is also a tool for me to update parents on the activities in class. The “Photos of our class” section allows me to upload pictures for the viewing pleasure of the parents. In addition, I will upload websites that are useful and beneficial to the children unto the portal for easy access.

Personally, the power of this portal is maximised especially when quizzes and practice questions were created. Using this portal, it allows me to track my students’ attempts. I will able to know information like who has not attempted the practices and how many times have they tried doing this piece of work. It even helps me to analyse on questions which most students were unable to do, thus allowing me to focus straight into weaker topics for revisions. Of course, since no markings were needed, the portal is well received by teachers.

As for the children, the portal has an instant feedback mechanism in which after answers were chosen, they will know if they got them right or wrong. This is very important because as human, it is our nature to want to excel and score well so many times, my students would attempt the questions all over again just to get it right. They strive to do better and there is a sense of achievement seeing their names being displayed on the ‘board of honour’ section. Of course, the main objective is not about getting full marks without understanding but by doing it repetitively, the children has unknowingly attempted corrections and triggered their thinking process on why is that the correct answer. This promotes self-directed learning which is one of the important 21st century skills.

Lastly, the portal is conducive for E-learning as lesson slides can be uploaded for revisions and learning. This is especially useful during the school holidays where teachers can upload activities for them to do on a weekly basis.

As mentioned, being in a future school, most of the teachers here are very receptive to using ICT for conducting lessons. Many often experiment with new, interesting tools to conduct their lessons. The teachers believed that ICT is engaging and children these days are unlike the past. There are too many distractions in the society and we have to come out with interesting tools to engage them. ICT is definitely one of the tools that we can’t go without. Teaching with ICT is also a great learning curve to most teachers as many were from mainstream schools beforehand. They also believe that if the children are enjoying and having fun while learning, they will be happier to seek more new knowledge.

With ICT, fun and play can now be integrated with learning.