Monica Kochar
Grade – 8
Total students – 19
Topic of study – Geometrical Transformation
Curriculum – GCSE (Middle years curriculum of IGCSE)
Material required – Computers and Internet functional
Set up – Group – Each group of 3 or 4 in size
The idea
There is so much self-study material available on the Internet that each time I view it, I wonder why I need to reinvent the wheel to teach the same topic! I feel I can grow to be an instructional designer, a facilitator, instead of the being the anchor person for the content.
I have also found that the students are most disciplined and focussed in today’s generation when the class involves ICT. This is their zone – they are the bosses!
Hence was born this idea of integrating ICT in the math lesson.
I chose this class and section for I have the best rapport with them and they go along with all my innovative ideas happily so long as they learn maths well through them!
The strategy
For any self-learning exercise, it is very important to have a clear set of instructions for the students. They (or rather anyone) operate best when the guidelines are clear:
a. Organization of groups and material
The students made their own groups, based on who they work best with. Since the class size was 19, having groups of exactly three students each was not possible. So I said each group could have three or four students.
The students were asked to bring their laptops (allowed in our school from Grade 7 up) with Internet fully functional and configured to the school network and battery backup of 1 hour (to avoid fights over sockets or multi plugs!)
The author is a math teacher in Pathways World School, Noida. She can be reached at reachmonica@gmail.com.