Week 8: Upgrading skill and managing time

The eight class was rather unexpected for me as due to the kind consideration of Prof. Maznah, the whole three hour period was allocated as our assignment-doing time. I believe this is so due to the fact that Prof. Maznah wanted us to progress at least 90% by next week for our SMART board assignment. Due to the hectic situation and time restriction, we had no choice but to limit leisurely moments and divided the task among the five of us as soon as possible, and also strive to imbue more effort into it. From our observation, some of us have yet struggled to even start the assignment, while others are at the edge of finishing it. I guess it is nobody’s fault since not all of us have completely synchronized ourselves with the ‘chaotic’ university life, but one thing for sure is that it is up to us to change and not the other way around.

Unlike the common MS Powerpoint, the SMART board is a completely different working station. Though some of the interface has familiar features available in most applications like the ‘Open file’ and ‘Insert’, the rest of it remains a mystery not only to me but to my friends as well. Luckily, the assignment was set as a group work which is a necessity because it opens a channel for effective discussion and critical brainstorming for ideas and sort. My group came to a conclusion that the activity we have to produce should contain ‘mobile’ objects, or in other words, visual aids that possess moving actions when played. This was due to the understanding of cognitive theories we learnt from IPIK and also our personal experience in teaching young learners. GIF animations and colourful pictures seem to be effective in attracting interest to learning and also reduce disciplinary problem because children tend to pay more attention to the classroom experience.

Beside that, I believe the integration of catchy songs and music is essential material to further boost the attention span of children as according to current research, the attention span of Malaysian young learners are about 5 minutes only. Thus, it is important to seek out other materials that possess the potential to diminish their feeling of boringness and to direct learners to spend their time in the classroom efficiently and beneficially. Working together towards that aim has made us one step closer to acquiring the characteristics of a good teacher; learning to understand the needs of one’s pupils. It has also taught us to tolerate other’s difficulties like not being able to attend a group discussion due to clashing of elective subject classes. This provided a good way for us to mature and become better human beings as well, and in the future, I hope we can cope with the more challenging task of being a teacher. :D