Reflection on the Teaching of ICT as a Subject

 

In this digital era, ICT use in classroom is important for giving students opportunities to learn and apply the required 21^st century skills. It is an important part of most organizations these days. ICT improves the effectiveness of education as everything we teach using ICT is hands on experience.

When ICT came into existence as a subject, I found students’ interest in learning ICT growing everyday and to everyone’s surprise we found our students rushing towards the IT lab to explore and learn something from the resources available online. ICT is such a subject where students can explore and learn by their own; so it happens in my class too. I just provided them with the clear directions and they learn by their own. Whenever they come across problem they seek my help and I make them understand the concept. The nature of subject itself demands more of practical, so they learn ICT by doing.

Since ICT provides more creative solutions to different types of learning inquiries or the subject demand hands on experience and exploration they keep coming to the lab looking for ways and means to learn by their own. It also improves engagement and knowledge retention and keeps each individual students more engaged in their work, as technology provides different opportunities to make learning more fun and enjoyable in terms of teaching the same thing in different ways. As compared to the teaching of other subjects I found teaching of ICT to be most effective because everything is hands on experience which makes the students to better understand and apply the learnt knowledge in the real scenario.

Code Monkey

With  the introduction of Code Monkey into school curriculum PP to VIII and IX and at least for this year, the number of students visiting ICT lab during recess hour has gradually increased. My grade four student's interest in learning ICT has now become 100 percent with the coming of coding through game. Although they do not have prior knowledge on coding, but they do it so well they already have some basics in coding.

Drawing in MS Paint

In the beginning of ICT session; to make my students better in handling with the mouse and keyboard (mouse and keyboard balancing), I asked them to open MS Paint and told them to draw any image of their interest. And to my surprise I found my class IV students drawing a wonderful image in paint.

Challenges

Overall, the key issues and challenges found to be significant in teaching ICT are; limited accessibility and network connection, limited technical support, and lack of effective training. Moreover the teaching of ICT in a classroom setting is little less effective in terms gaining students attention, since when the lesson (theory) is taking place in the ICT lab, it is found that most of the students attention are grasped by the equipment's as they are sometimes taken away by the mouse and the keyboards. In the same time there are always few students who would go online and watch movies that don’t really match the curriculum despite teacher’s constant reminder. Moreover it is the first phase of introducing ICT into the school curriculum and therefore students are not well skilled in using ICT as planned in the lesson.