Information and communication technologies in schools: a ...

When it comes to evaluate their progress, teachers can hardly summon each
student to the blackboard before the class is over. The rest are inevitably relegated
to the daily homework of copying letters – an assignment requiring
mechanical repetition and devoid of any cognitive effort or emotional reward.
Now assume you are giving the same lesson in an ICT-networked classroom.
Each student’s desktop is supplemented with an enveloping VR-helmet,
gloves and other paraphernalia, which these pre-literate children have already
mastered technically by playing computer games. This time you invite them to
put on the gear for an adventure in The First Grader’s Grammar Cyberspace. In a
moment, students see and hear via their private high-resolution multimedia displays
the image of a teacher sitting or standing in equally close proximity to each
student. There is a live, synchronous, or online digital closed-loop translation of
what you actually do on the black or white (magnetic) board, or upon your desktop
with three dimensional characters as you compose words and read them
aloud during the aforementioned letters and words demonstration.
If students do not comprehend or miss something, they can raise their hand
and ask the teacher to explain or repeat it once more. All the other students can
hear and see the question and the teacher’s response. After the introductory
stage, the teacher can decide whether or not to continue the explanation individually.
When the demonstration is complete and an assignment is understood, all
the students see and hear the teacher offering a set of characters to compose and
copy the exemplars. This time you switch from live online communication to a
prefabricated program. Now the children have the visual, aural and tactile
impressions of dealing with genuine material objects, which are in fact only
interactive virtual realities. Each student starts to work independently offline and
soon discovers that the characters encountered have some intriguing features.
When touched, perhaps they spell their own names; when two or three are
joined together, they pronounce the word (if rightly composed), or emit a
protesting sound (if the combination is wrong). When students place two, three,
or more words in a row, they hear them pronouncing the whole sentence. The
students do not need to ask a teacher whether a word or sentence is right or
wrong, the program makes this clear, and students can move on to the next part
of the assignment – practising writing the words they have formed by manipulating
tangible characters. The students see a virtual sheet of paper and a pen or
pencil-like stylus, which they grasp, and start to write, seeing scribbles appearing
instead of expected letters.
ICT in Learning and Teaching
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