4th Week Reflections (Soo Hoon)

During my contract teaching, I have heard many practicum students talking about lesson plan, the amount of time they spent on it and etc. During my ESE, I managed to have a chance to plan out a lesson plan on Angle of Elevation (Sec 3 Express class). Seriously speaking, I did not focus much on the SIO. For the part on SIO, I remembered that I finish within 10mins? The parts which got me great headache were the Introduction, Development and etc.

However, after the previous ICT lesson on lesson planning, I realized my SIO was terribly done! During the lesson, we learnt that a good SIOs must follow the 4 letters ABCD. A stands for audience, B stands for Behaviour, C stands for Conditions, D stands for degree. I realized that I did not pay attention to the components on Behaviour, Conditions and Degree. That's practically everything!

The following were what I planned previously:

LESSON PLAN

Subject: Mathematics
Chapter: Chapter 8 Application of Trigonometry
Topic: Angles of Elevation and Depression
Class: Secondary 3 Achieve (42 students)
Duration: Two periods (90mins)
Date: 16 July 2009 (Thursday) Time: 1300-1430 Venue: C3-03

Pre-requisites

Pupils should be able to:
-state the definitions of trigonometric ratios (sine, cosine and tangent)
-use the trigonometric ratios to calculate unknown sides and angles in a right-angles triangle
apply the sine rule and cosine rule to solve problems involving the sides and the angles of the triangle

Specific Instructional Objectives:

By the end of the lesson, students should be able to:
-understand the idea of angles of elevation and depression
-solve problems involving angles of elevation and depression

The word "solve" I used is a lower order verb based on Bloom's Taxonomy. However, this lesson does not integrate ICT, so is the SIO ok?

Planning the SIO was really a tough job for my group. Firstly, we really have to figure out how to implement our ICT tool into the lesson. I know it is not right to choose the ICT tool then decide on the flow of the lesson. However, I believe most have actually did the same as us. We also do not know what exactly to put up on our Powerpoint as E-learning and what to discuss in lesson. Groupwork or individual work? Use of concept map or worksheets? CL or SDL? There are so many things to consider for a lesson.

Similar to other groups, we faced the problem of our SIO being too brief. We need to be more concise and come up with activities which match our objectives. Critiques on one another groups are quite useful as we can see own mistakes clearer. However, as we are not very experienced in developing SIOs yet, limited advices could be given. Later on, I believe we will face more problem on developing our lesson plan. How should we incorporate what we have learnt and apply in our lesson such that students undergo meaningful learning? How much time should we allocate to certain activities? These are skills which I believe we will bound to pick up as we go along either in ICT lesson or in other modules.

In real-life situation, teachers have no time to do lesson planning. However, I still believed the need for learning this skill now. Even though we may not do out a detailed lesson plan in future, I believe we will apply the skills we learnt in planning out a lesson (though not in black and white).
A proper lesson planning will then benefit the students. Imagine a teacher come into a lesson without adequate preparations, kept changing his mind on what activities to carry out, lessons sequenced in a chaotic manner! Hence, I want to learn the planning of a good lesson plan.

I have briefly went through the stuff for our E-learning week though I have not started on doing them. Haha. Those are case study illustrating on the various scenarios which will arise when we apply ICT in our lessons. Well, I think it will be very useful as ICT should be quite a new thing to most of us. By exposing us to the case study, we should be better prepared for our lesson in future. Let us work together and pull through this ICT journey!