Shopping online for clothes, sometimes certain chemistry questions, writing down my height does get me irritated and anxious simply because the units of measurements are not the ones I'm usually familiar with. I end up googling "convert cm to inches" etc and each time randomly clicked on some site I vaguely remember using before.
Thinking in the light of enhancing learning, this metric conversion, besides serving the abovementioned purpose - day to day purchases and routines - it has the added advantage of allowing students to clear their doubts about units and its conversion. Units and its conversion such as length and weight would be taught in primary school and sometimes, proceeding on to secondary school, students do once in awhile get confused about which way to proceed, especially when it is in the area and volume dimension e.g. from centimetre square to metre square
With this widget attached to the teacher's blog, they are free to clear their doubts without any embarrassment from teachers or fellow classmates and can 'click click' however they want and play with the different units while seeing the quick change in the decimal places.
They can possibly work out on their own mathematically to derive the conversion (in the area and volume dimension) with the answers from the widget to serve as a form of checking, either by working backwards or forward.
source of widget: blogger :)
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009
usefulness of blog for enhancing learning? :)
Affordances
Outside of a classroom setting, this virtual space allows one to create and voice out one's opinion, argubly without constraints such as in the absence of classmates and teacher's physical presence which might poise alittle overbearing if one is shy or afraid to have someone rebut one's opinion at once.
In the perspective of a student, the blog provides the sense of ownership that allows for greater responsibility to share relevantly about the topic set out by teacher, as it can be viewed by the rest such as classmates or even netizens that stumble upon the blog.
Constraints
In the perspective of a teacher, the blog can be a platform where learning materials such as articles, documentary (in the form of a video clip) or interactive educational software could be posted up for students to access in real time. However, there might be too much activities or content uploaded on the home page of the blog that might be overbearing for students to decide or participate in. Ultimately, whether students do participate in the blog's content is still questionable thus the effectiveness of blog for engaged learning is hard to decide.
Outside of a classroom setting, this virtual space allows one to create and voice out one's opinion, argubly without constraints such as in the absence of classmates and teacher's physical presence which might poise alittle overbearing if one is shy or afraid to have someone rebut one's opinion at once.
In the perspective of a student, the blog provides the sense of ownership that allows for greater responsibility to share relevantly about the topic set out by teacher, as it can be viewed by the rest such as classmates or even netizens that stumble upon the blog.
Constraints
In the perspective of a teacher, the blog can be a platform where learning materials such as articles, documentary (in the form of a video clip) or interactive educational software could be posted up for students to access in real time. However, there might be too much activities or content uploaded on the home page of the blog that might be overbearing for students to decide or participate in. Ultimately, whether students do participate in the blog's content is still questionable thus the effectiveness of blog for engaged learning is hard to decide.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
