My Year 4/5 Science Lesson - Utilising Power Point and IWB Technology

On Friday 23rd April, I delivered a science lesson to the Year 4/5 I have been placed with for my first EPL. The lesson was designed to introduce a new unit of work called "Inside the Earth" - where the student's will be learning about; the layers of the earth, volcanoes, tectonic plates, rocks and minerals etc. I used this lesson as an opportunity to implement some of the ICTs I have been studying in this course, namely Power Point and IWBs.

As it was the first lesson in a new unit of work, I decided to develop a KWL with the students. A KWL table was drawn onto an IWB flipchart, and when students had an idea to contribute, they raised their hand, told the class ‘what they know’ about the topic (and later) 'what they want to know' about the topic, and then wrote their contribution on the board – the class copied down these contributions into a table in their books as we went along. I used a KWL as a KWL chart is great way for teachers to determine; what their learner already knows (LMQ 1) and where their learner needs/ wants to be (LMQ 2).

In the second part of the lesson I used power point as a teacher-based presentation tool to present information on the various layers of the earth. To finish, we labelled the layers of the earth on a diagram and watched a fun YouTube video - ‘The Layers of the Earth’ rap (which can be viewed at the end of my SlideShare presentation below).

I’m quite familiar with PowerPoint and incorporated various media and visuals to cater to the diverse learning preferences of my class as recommended by Felder (1988). For example, visual learners benefits from the text, text animations and YouTube video, auditory learners benefited from hearing my voice as I read the text and listening to the musical YouTube video and kinaesthetic learners benefited from writing on the IWB and copying the information into their books.

I also included a link to the YouTube video in the presentation which helped the lesson flow and created a seamless learning experience as I didn’t need to switch between programs on my laptop and track down the video on YouTube before playing it. By viewing the power point tutorial on the course site I certainly see that powerpoint can become a multimedia experience for learners – video, audio tracks, animations, tables, graphs and the like can all be incorporated into your presentation which gives teachers a range of ways to present information, cater to diversity in their classroom and accommodate various learning styles.

I did however find it slightly challenging to keep the information presented on the slides to a minimum – I ended up using dot points and key words which became talking points for my lesson. After viewing the YouTube video on our moodle site (re. the dangers of overusing the technology/ common mistakes made in preparing a presentation), I'm happy to report that my presentation was void of clashing colours, information overload, distracting animations and the like.

Engagement theory is a conceptual framework for technology based teaching and learning and aspects of this theory underpinned my lesson. Kearsley and Shneiderman’s (1999) engagement theory holds that “students must be engaged in learning activities through interaction with others in worthwhile tasks.” According to Kearsley and Shneiderman (1999), engaged learning occurs in a group context, is project based and has an authentic focus (outside ‘customer’). Developing the KWL table as a class on the IWB, demonstrates the ‘relate’ component of engagement theory as the class worked as a collaborative team (rather than alone), verbalising their ideas in a process of collaboration. The KWL chart created was a product of everyone’s contributions and the process of creation promoted human interaction, facilitated by the technology and myself as the teacher, and such interaction is a key feature of engagement theory.

I also found that providing the students with the opportunity to interact with the technology (by writing their contributions on the flipchart), really focused their attention on the task at hand and motivated them to participate in the discussion as they were all keen to use the IWB pens. According to Dale’s Cone, learning experiences are most effective when students are directly engaged in ‘hands-on’ experiences (Abilene Christian University Adams Center for Teaching Excellence, 2000). By providing the opportunity for students to write their ideas on the IWB, the learning experience became an active process.

Furthermore, I recognise that students have varied learning styles/ preferences, be it; active/ reflective, visual/ verbal, sensing/ intuitive, sequential/ global (Felder, 1988). The inclusion of visuals on the PowerPoint presentation and YouTube video (for visual learners), my verbalising the information (for verbal learners), the students listening to the YouTube music video (for verbal or auditory learners), the students writing on the IWB (for active or kinaesthetic learners) and the students copying information into their books and reflecting on the ideas of others (for reflective learners) accommodated the varied learning styles in the classroom.

Much to my delight, the entire class was had a positive response to the YouTube video I played at the end of the presentation. In fact, we watched it three times! Perhaps it was the novelty of watching a video and listening to the musical ‘rap.’ Nonetheless, the entire class was enthusiastic about an educational video, were excited about the new unit, and our Friday afternoon lesson ended on a positive note.

Science Presentation - Inside the Earth

View more presentations from Karlee K.

Learner-centric and Teacher-centric Education

What does it mean to be a Teacher in the 21st Century? There has been a paradigm shift within the teaching profession over the past decade. The role of teachers has changed to reflect the current focus on learning management and learner-centric approaches to education. As a pre-service teacher at CQUniversity, my education and professional preparation will be underpinned by the learning design process, the dimensions of learning, as well as other concepts and approaches we now know to be integral to the achievement of learning outcomes in 21st Century classrooms, including; learning engagement and information communication technologies.

Teacher-centred (direct instruction, deductive or expository) learning, dominates the traditional view of what teachers ‘do’ (Killen, 2003). Here, the teacher controls what is taught and how information is presented (personified by a ‘chalk and talk’ approach). There is minimal student interaction or substantive conversation between teachers and students. At this end of the teacher-centred – learner-centred spectrum, it is easy to see, that with such minimal participation, students would find it difficult to engage in learning experiences. From what I recall of my own primary education in the early 1990’s, the teaching of curriculum generally gave way to my individual needs and preferences as a learner. My teachers had the class copy information from a blackboard and their pedagogies tended to concentrate on imparting the knowledge they deemed important. In relation to Dale's Cone, my primary education in particular was quite passive, as verbal and visual symbols dominated. Mind you, I was generally more interested in sport and athletics when I was in Primary school. At the bottom of this post you will find an image of me when I was in Year 5.

In a learner-centered approach to teaching, teachers (or more precisely, ‘learning managers’) act as facilitators of student learning, negotiating with students what path their content learning will take. In devising learning design, teachers take into consideration what their students already know, what their students want to know, and how their student’s best learn and want to learn (Lynch, 2003). Nonetheless, as Scot Alred, pointed out in an ICTs tutorial earlier this month, teacher-centred practices have their place in modern classrooms and can be used alongside more learner-centred approaches.

For example, in a Year 11 IT class, a teacher might ask their students what they would like to know more about and the class responds, basic HTML. The teacher might then proceed to outline how HTML codes are created for websites - writing an example on the whiteboard. Although the explanation of HTML in this lesson was essentially didactic in nature, the teacher was responding to their student’s learning request. Thus, the students were at the centre, and the learning experience can be deemed learner-centric, even though didactic teacher instruction was included.

As learning managers, we must keep in mind that the ultimate goal of education is learning (and indeed, learning for understanding). As Killen (2003, p. 2) puts it, “[our learners] should be at the centre of all teaching.” This learner-centred approach is reflected in the process of learning management, Learning Engagement Theory, Lynch’s 8 Learning Management Questions and Marzano and Pickering’s 5 Dimensions of Learning.

So what is learning management? Over the past decade, learning management has emerged as a dominate approach to teaching. Smith (2000) describes learning management as the capacity to design pedagogic strategies that achieve learning outcomes in students. The Learning Management process involves asking 8 learning management questions (LMQ's), spanning three stages (Profiling, Strategising & Delivery, and Ascertainment). The emphasis of the learning management process is on achieving learning for students, and the teaching strategies we use, are the keys to successfully achieving these learning outcomes. But what teaching strategies should we use to teach the youth of today, and how can we apply them in a motivating and engaging way? Are purely teacher-centric teaching strategies a ‘thing’ of the past?

As teachers of the 21st Century, we are teaching the youth of generation X, the ‘I want everything I want it now’ generation, children and young adults who were born into a digital revolution, people who seemingly can’t live without their mobile phone or the internet and not to mention a multitude of other emerging technologies. To successfully achieve student outcomes, learning managers need to learn how to spark the curiosity of young minds, connect with our students, and cater to their diverse learning needs. This can be achieved through the integration of ICTs. My future blogs will address the issue of learning engagement and ICTs can be applied in the classrooms of today.

Image source: Personal Photo