Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Content, Form and Structure of my teaching

Form and content in my context are dialectically related, and one determines the other. The social realities of our society and the students’ diverse interests/abilities are blended when deciding on the contents of our learning materials.

The teaching/learning process is based the cooperative learning style and so we maintain a very flexible system in which, though the ICT topics are clearly defined, the sample learning materials used in classes are always designed with students and our current social realities in mind.

Computer Application packages are the core subjects taught in my school. The curriculum is based on the ECDL/ICDL (http://www.ecdl.com/) curriculum, but the learning activities and materials are designed with our local realities in mind so as to enable the students make a personal connection with what is being learnt.

In designing the contents of the various sample practice materials, my main considerations are: the abilities/interests of the students, the ICT skills to be learnt and our local realities.

It is the perceived interests/abilities of the students and the local realities that provide the message that is embedded in the learning materials that are used to learn the ICT skills.

For example, when teaching students how to prepare a formal letter during Word-processing classes, our sample learning material could be a letter addressed to a government official appealing for more government funding for health in our local community. The students will be able to relate to the issue and contribute to what the letter should contain. The structural format of the letter is provided, but it is the students who brainstorm and provide the contents of the letter. With this information, we can now go ahead and start learning how to format the letter using Word-processing techniques.

2 comments:

  1. Ibrahim,

    As far as I'm concerned the more we can make educational materials relate to students' lives the better it is for the students. It is a way to keep them engaged and feel that their learning has meaning. So much of education, I feel, is seen as useless to students and as a consequence them become bored with school.

    Gwen

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  2. I quite agree with you. If we don't make learning activities relevant to their interests Learners will always see school as a boring place they are being forced to attend. It is only when they are able to relate to what it is being done that we can be assured of engagement. It may require us sometimes leaving out the technical terms in favour of general words they can understand, even turning to plays and jokes if thats what it takes to get them involved. arning activities relevant to their interests Learners will always see school as a boring place they are being forced to attend. It is only when they are able to relate to what it is being done that we can be assured of engagement. It may require us sometimes leaving out the technical terms in favour of general words they can understand, even turning to plays and jokes if thats what it takes to get them involved.

    ReplyDelete

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This work by Ibrahim K. Oyekanmi (mallamibro@gmail.com) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.