Student-Centered Learning

This our third week lesson, it's about the Student-Centered Learning (SCL) and I can emphasize that SCL is more effective in many areas compared with the other paradigm, Teacher-Centered Learning (TCL).

Personally, I applied it partially in my lessons before and realized how it's effective and motivating to the students.

a gradient
rectangle
in
MS Words

As an example, I showed the students a gradient rectangle in word and asked them to try to discover the way of how I did it in MS Word. The students take not-a-short time to find how to do this exercise, but they learn more than one thing on their way which are:

• How to draw a rectangle in MS Word.
• How to remove the border of the shape.
• How to fill the shape with a color.
• How to set gradient colors.

I could show how to achieve those points to the students then ask them to do the exercise which may needs an equal or shorter time.

But what about the level of understanding of all students in this case? I think the SCL is better for the students and for the teachers. It's clear to be better for the student as I stated before, and the teacher will get no hassle of explaining and will concentrate on how to make sure every student gets what he needs to be able to understand the lesson and do the task correctly.

I know SCL faces some critiques, and I think, as a part to resolve them, we need to apply a mixture between SCL and TCL and the ratio of them depends on the age of the students. So the instructor may use TCL as the first part of the lecture and SCL in the other part.

tutor, tools, and tutee in Learning

Before about six years, a colleague brought his students to my computer lab and gave them an E-Lesson. He created the lesson with Macromedia (Adobe) Director. He was a Science teacher and lesson was meant to be as a substitute of a lesson in the Science lab and showing them an experiment there.

The lesson was merely a show with some interactivity but without any questions/answers nor different levels. The students impression? they liked it so much and they understood the lesson.

I know this is not an ideal tutor in ICT, but it gives a glimpse on how using computing can turn learning to an attractive and effective way.
While there are so many obstacles in front of applying tutor-tools-tutee in learning, but with the right resources and time they can be applied differently depending on the level of the student.

One of the big problems is the needed flexibility of the tutor mode where the human teacher can beat it. Although I think with the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, we may have some adaptive tutors which teach the students depending on their level of the understanding.

About the tutee mode, I think it can be deployed to some extent on children since we must bear in mind this mod needs high level of understanding in children to deal with programming skills needed here which seems to be time consuming. And to solve this, I think the focus can be on building programming skills in the first levels in the school to use them effectively in the advanced and next levels.

Last one in these modes is the tools. It's used widely between teachers and students in the form of word processors and spreadsheets to get statistics and writing assignments and reports. This mode is less time and consuming in opinion as the tools a ready to use and need not to be programmed in most cases.

Who and Why

I'm S.Jaafar Neama Khalil, a father of two children. I was an IT teacher in Duraz Intermediate Boy's School in Bahrain.

After being a teacher for nine years in the school, I'm now a student as a candidate teacher (TC) in Bahrain Teacher's College (BTC) in Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) program funded by Ministry of Education in Bahrain. This program must last for a whole academic year.
In this blog, I'll write my reflections about the course Teaching and Learning Information and Communication Technology 2.

I like reading news on internet like mobile and IT and policy news, watching TV, and solving Maths problem. I'm a twitter addict :-).