Ict in Teaching

The ways that ICT was included in the lesson

At my previous placement, I taught a writing lesson on the topic “The pros and cons of wearing school uniforms” to my Year 11 LOTE class. For background information, students struggled with issues such as generating and organising ideas. Often their writing was either very short, or lacked a clear structure by cramming unrelated information into one paragraph, making it a mixture of everything.

The ultimate task set for students was to write an evaluative essay to for the school magazine of their sister school in China. At that point, the sister school was considering adopting a uniform policy, and therefore was in need of advice from our students. The learning goal for the lesson was to improve students’ planning skills, and thereby promoting both content and overall structure in their writing.

To start off, I asked students to brainstorm in small groups the advantages and disadvantages of students wearing uniforms, and then produced a mind map using Inspiration 9 based on their discussions. After group leaders shared their discussion results with the whole class, students, under my guidance, refined their mind maps by grouping the bits and pieces of arguments into categories to be positioned under “pros” and “cons”.

Sample of a refined mind map: as I had no access to Inspiration 9 at home, this mind map was created with Edraw Max released by Microsoft.

Then students were asked to choose two non-overlapping bubbles from each side, i.e., the pros and cons, to focus on in their writing. They were also told that in every body paragraph, they should only focus on one bubble / main idea.

When the first draft of the evaluative writing was done, students continued by conducting group conferencing using Google document. They read and checked each other’s work, leaving comments in different colours and fonts for the writer to refer to when working on their final draft.

With all editing done, students emailed the...