EZ SLS Open Classroom

2. Lesson Plan

3. SLS Design Map

4. Post Open Classroom Conversation

5. Reflection

The use of ICT had greatly enhanced the learning experiences of the students in various ways.

Firstly, the instructional videos served as a visually appealing and coherent channel for students to acquire new concepts. The visual illustrations helped to complement the annotations to provide clear explanations. It opened up opportunities for students to engage in independent learning at their own pace, as they can revisit the videos anytime and anywhere, and selectively replay the segment that requires more attention.

Secondly, the instant feedback function on SLS allowed students to check and refine their understanding immediately before proceeding on to the next task. It also promoted opportunities for peer discussion as students shared their learnings with their partners, thus instilling a greater sense of ownership of learning. The heatmap function on SLS also allowed me to monitor students’ progress and gauge understanding as they attempted the tasks. This enabled salient learning gaps to be highlighted and addressed with the class.

The thinking routines function in SLS also served to further enhance learner engagement as they challenged each other in solving number sequences posted by their peers. The online game at the end of the lesson also helped to reinforce practice for mastery in an interactive manner. The game also featured instant feedback function and a heatmap, which aids in monitoring and providing timely feedback to students.

In retrospect, the lesson could have been improved in terms of pacing. During the milestone checks within the lesson, I realised that more time had to be relegated to address common learning difficulties faced and a conscious choice was made to do so. Considering the needs of the learners, I could have planned more ‘white spaces’ during the lesson and shifted the Peer Challenge activity to the next lesson instead. This will allow students more time to digest and learn the new concepts, thereby encouraging more meaningful discussion to take place. The observers of the lesson also provided much valuable and insightful feedback. Some suggestions to enhance this lesson include:

• Elicit students’ prior knowledge and preconceptions (instead of prerequisite knowledge) about the topic using a See-Think-Wonder or K-W-L tool. This helps to activate their learning and allows them to make their thinking visible. The teacher can then build on this knowledge to orientate students’ interest towards the learning objectives.
• Access the SLS heatmap on a tablet (instead of a laptop) to allow teacher to move about freely while monitoring student progress.
• Elicit students’ feedback on their learning difficulties through visible thinking routine structures on SLS
• The learning can be differentiated to cater to the diverse needs of the learners. A dipstick activity can be conducted to assess the levels of readiness of the students. The acquisition activities at the beginning can be differentiated to suit the different pace of learning before the class converges to work on the common activities.

In all, the tasks were enhanced by technology to increase learner engagement while promoting student-content, student-student and student and student-teacher interactions, thus allowing the learning objectives to be achieved.