Me and my Ipad
by Ms. Nina Septina
Today I really made use of my iPad to
teach my EC2 (children class level 2) students. I didn't really have enough
preparation for teaching them. I came to the office at 3 and had to teach them
at 4. Soon after I arrived at the office I quickly opened my locker and took
out the EC2 textbook, we call it "Backpack 2". I went to the page
where I last taught them to know which topic or part of the lesson that I had
to review first at the beginning of the session. Then I looked at the next page
where I found the material that I had to teach that day. It was about 'rooms in
our house'. So I would need to show them some pictures of rooms that we usually
have in our houses as well as to introduce them the target vocabulary of things
which are found in
each room.
To teach this, before I had my iPad,
I used to make some preparation like copying the pictures on the book one by
one on pieces of A4 paper (usually I asked the office boy to go to the photocopying
facility to do this) and then colouring them if I had time so the pictures
would look lively and eye-catchy, as children do love seeing eye-catchy
thing. Next, I showed those pictures one
by one to students while explaining and introducing the vocabulary. But, the
process of colouring them took quite a long time, while actually we could use
our time to make some other necessary preparation for different activities.
When I was busy and got no time to colour the picture myself, I sometimes
brought those pictures to class and asked the students to colour them, and
because the number of the pictures were usually less than the number of the
students so they did that in pairs or in groups. The students were enthusiastic doing this but
the results were not really the ones I expected, they really liked to mix many
colours on their pictures so often the original shapes of the pictures were not
clearly seen, hidden behind those streaks of colours. Moreover, doing this
could take three fourth of the class duration so I did that only when I still had plenty of
sessions to cover the lessons that had to be taught
in that term.
So, go back to what happened today, I
tried to figure out on how I could prepare the pictures of rooms for the students without taking so much time as I
also had to check some students' work before going into the class. Then I
suddenly looked at the iPad and got idea! I grabbed it then I took some
pictures of the rooms from the textbook. I took it one by one so I would be
able to show them to students one by one too. Wow.. It's so simple! I didn't
have to copy them on sheets of paper and I didn't have to colour them as well,
they're automatically saved in this iPad and I could open them whenever I need
to show them, I could make it bigger or smaller just by finger taps! And what
makes it so nice is that I could do all the work in just 5 minutes! And when I
got into the class and showed them the pictures using iPad they looked in
astonishment at first because it's the first time I used it, but then they got
excited, more excited I think, to see how I could move the pictures from one to
another in just a single tap. Besides the lively discussion we had about the
vocabulary of things found in the pictures, I guess they were also enthusiastic
about the technology I brought to class, many of them said they also wanted to
have an iPad.
So, this is my first note on how I
could utilise this iPad to make my work more effective and efficient, I hope to
find many other useful functions of my iPad to help me with my teaching.
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