In my past experience teaching English to learners in primary school, I found that the use of IT in my lesson linked my teaching and learning to real life as well as the virtual world.
As English is a second language being used outside school for most students in Hong Kong, the aim of using IT in my lessons is to help my students get access to English World online as well as using the tools for developing students self-learning skills.
The students nowadays are well equipped with the IT competence as early as kindergarteners. Thus, my primary 3 students can now using Facebook to set up groups to invite friends to see their photos of travelling, artworks and videos of performances.
Last Christmas, I got my students crazy in taking part in a Christmas carol performance. A week before the performance, I showed them the video clip of "When Christmas comes to town" (a theme song from the Movie:Polar Express) from Youtube,the students loved the song and video so much and asked me to sing the song with them every English lesson for a whole week.
As I know, my students visited Facebooks website very often. To help them making good use of the web for learning I put the links of the songs, speech, and their performances in English lesson. Later, I will try to ask students to give comments in English, so that they can use English in their daily life.
A speech of Little Eco heroin: Severn Suzuki
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPx5r35Aymc
Polar Express - When Christmas Comes to Town
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqLvNrnTA5s
Facebook.com
Your P.3 students are very smart!
回覆刪除I also teach P.3. Your experience encourages me to conduct some IT learning activities to my students too!
Yes, I think children love the way to communicate with others on the internet, especially on Facebook. This makes them feel they are a part of the community. However, teachers need to monitor their ethical manners on using the communication tools, and make sure their parents are informed before using Facebook. ( since I have just settled a case of using Facebook for asking
回覆刪除pronographic stuffs in lower primary class...my GOD!)
It's quite a different case in primary school in mainland china. Students will not be encouraged to use this online websites to improve their English. It may be a little hard for them to use facebook to learn English.
回覆刪除Thanks for sharing these experiences. Some would argue that as educators, we have a responsibility to teach children how to behave in such online environments, including discussing potential problems and pitfalls, appropriate and inappropriate behaviour and so on. If you are using such social networking sites then this is a very important step in my view, as is involving parents. How did you settle the pornography case?
回覆刪除I have a discussion with my student. When internet helps us to get closer to each other and learn more about the world, we should have the responsibility to keep it a tool for making a better world. I teach them to be a "doctor", to stop spreading 'disease', when they watched something inappopriate. Not to make the disease spread over to the others. They learnt it after this lesson. And of course I report this to the Head of Discipline in my school.
回覆刪除It sounds like you are taking a very balanced and professional approach. I like the 'doctor' metaphor and I imagine that it is something that students can easily relate to. It applies in a wide range of situations, including cases of cyberbullying, when bullies circulate misinformation about their victims. In that case, people also need to take responsibility to 'stop the disease' as you say.
回覆刪除Yes, I think,in particular, primary school pupils love listening to stories especially in class with IT elements implemented. It will boost up the classroom atmosphere with excitment and fun. I could imagine how much they were enjoying your lesson! Indeed, we, as teachers, should pay tribute to the new technologies in teaching!
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