Presentations and feedback

Salam...

The class for the day was just focusing on the progression of the SMARTBOARD assignment, besides the presentation from the representative of the chosen group. Sincerely, I am very impressed with the guidance and tolerance replicated by the tutors and the lecturer itself when the class just started on the day. Ms. Chin, one of the tutors was busily moving around to solve our problem, besides facilitating us in producing a better presentation in the classroom. In my opinion, she is a very good tutor since she is very open, soft and willing to hear our problem, and we also feel comfortable consulting with her.

The presentation part was very effective for me since I managed to learn lots of things that I may have overlooked before. I now become aware that something that may look good at our eyes may become very irritating for children. Why? This is because the unique characteristics of children and their variability of seeing world is just not the same like us. For example, children are attracted to big, colourful, eye-catching pictures and we as ‘teacher to be’ need to consider this factor in our presentation. Based on the presentation, I noticed that there were many factors that sometimes being overlooked by us. For instance, too many wordings in a presentation for Year 1 pupils may be quite inappropriate for them. As we know, children have short attention span and they are more towards visual learners. Too many wordings will make them boring and confused, which will eventually affect the learning process for the day. Besides that, I noticed that the background that is being used in the presentation also have special effect towards our presentation. Hence, there is a need to be more careful in choosing the background for the presentation; a scenery background may not be quite suitable to teach mathematics for young children. Besides that, some comments were given to the animations used in the presentation. Although it is good to use animations to attract students’ attention, too many animations may distract the real teaching point of the day. Besides that, some comments were given to the fonts and the pictures used in some of the presentations.

From all the comments given, I learnt that producing a good SMARTBOARD presentation is not an easy task as it sounds. The positive feedbacks, the negative feedbacks and the suggestions for improvements from the lecturer, the tutors and my friends help me a lot towards the process of completing this assignment. More effort and critical thinking has to be put on. In addition, the voluntariness of some of my friends displaying their presentation (although it is not yet completed) was really beneficial since it provides rooms for others to improve their presentations.

In short, the class for that day was really useful as it acts like an opening-eye, lead us to be more sensitive with young learners’ needs along the process of completing our assignment.