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.
