Situating Tool

Situating Tool

Situating tool is another tool which helps both the teacher and the student to learn with the help of integrating ICT in the class room. It provides an environment where the learners can experience the context and happenings. Examples of situating tool are simulation (flight, farming, surgery, environment, driving, History City, SimCity, play station), Virtual Reality (VR), CD-ROM.

 If I cite an example, the use of Google Map in the computer helped me as a learner to see the real 3D image of the places that I haven’t even visited in real. By sitting in a small room of Paro college of education, I could go and visit my village and also see my own house in a 3D form. This increase my interest to learn and it and I am sure the students will also be interested just like me.

Some of the importance of situating tools are, it helps in situating learner in the environment. It also makes it easier for the learner to comprehend and manipulate the variables. Situating tool is also a platform which allows the usher to communicate with another usher by login in to the server. While using situating tool, the learners can foster their creativity and visualize different skills.

Therefore, situating tool is a very important tool which helps the teacher as well as the learner to learn in a better way. Specially when the certain real-life experience is impossible or difficult to attain, here the situating tools are used. Simulations are part of situating tool because it gives the learner to attain a situation as if it’s a real one.

Example of situating tool

Co-constructive Tool

Co-constructive Tool

Co-constructive tool is an application that helps in constructing knowledge through a shared understanding, meaning, a group of people with the same idea comes together, they work together and come up with a collaborative result. This application is very helpful to both the teacher and the student as it brings together different individuals and some of these applications needs each and every individual to participate, which is an easy way for the teacher to keep track of who is working and who is not.

If I cite an example, I used Google docs to plan a lesson plan in groups of four. Here I learned how to create Google docs, how to use different feature of Google docs and I also invited our tutor to assess the work. After creating a Google doc, I first discus on how to go about in a comment section with my group members and then only started the work. It was an ongoing work where everybody added and subtracted the unwanted things.

                                 

Some of other examples are electronic whiteboard, blogs; here we can publish our work and we can get constructive feedback from the readers. The other one is the discussion forum on portals; it is a website or page that acts as an entrance to other websites of pages on the internet.

There are many benefits of co-constructive tool such as, it helps in co-editing the work, it also helps in communicating database, text and graphics. It also enhances collaborative learning environment, just like how Google doc helped us working collaboratively. As it’s a collaborative work, it provides high-level cognitive processing such as, explanation, problem finding and problem solving. Finally, it creates an active and intentional learning environment for both the teacher and the student. 

Example of co-constructive tool

                                                

Constructive Tool

Constructive Tool

Constructive tool is an ICT application which helps learner to learner, to modify information, to put our understanding into a visual form and finally help us construct our own knowledge.

Some of the examples of constructive tool are ‘concept map’, it is a program which helps users to brainstorm and visualize, ‘word, spread sheet and PowerPoint’ helps to organize, manipulate, record and present our work in different forms, and ‘desktop publishing’ is also a program which allows us to organize and present our work in an attractive format.

When we integrate ICT in our classroom, students can construct their own understanding with the help of the tools mentioned above. Learners are considered the maker of meaning and knowledge, it also says that integrating ICT can make learning more effective because learner are actively engaged in the use of ICT and when learner are actively engaged, they think critically and are able to create their own new ideas.

It not only helps students but also teachers in generating new ways of teaching through ICT. It constitutes a shift from teacher to learner centered pedagogy, which is a less work for teachers but a very good platform for students to use their own ideas. Use of ICT decreases learning through memorization and rote learning and focuses more on creative and hands on experience learning. Here learners can learn on their own through exploration and hands on practice even in absence of teacher and that’s called construction of knowledge which ICT can provide in various ways.

Example of simulation

Communication tool

Communication tool

ICT can also be used as communicative tool. Communicative tools are ICT application which allows the teachers and the students with easy communication medium. It is commonly used by the Teachers while giving task through mail, call, video conferencing, wechat and VLE forums. It also provides an easy access for students to summit their task and clarify the doubts. Therefore, ICT as a communicate tool is an easy medium for both the teachers and the students.

As a teacher, using ICT in the classroom as a communicative tool has many benefits. For example, teacher can post the questions on VLE forum and the students can read and respond to it. Then for the follow up, the teacher can give feedback. It helps both the teachers’ and the students to save time and other resources such as pen and papers. It also minimizes the teacher’s workload and for students, it helps in solving urgent issues or problems through call or video conference.

Despite of having so many benefits of using ICT as communicative tool, there are still some drawbacks of it. Some of them are, students playing games instead of communication, chatting with friends on unnecessary things, downloading unwanted videos and wasting parent’s money. This happens many times in school, at home and there needs to be done something about it. We all know that data charges are very high and if students misuse ICT application then parents are going to the victim at the end. 

However, if we make a proper use of it, we can always be one step ahead of those who don’t. There are two types of communication tools, asynchronous tool where people are not required to be logged in at the same time. Example; questions posted on VLE forum, we can take our time to read and answer whenever we want. The other one is synchronous where people need to be online at the same time. Example; video conference, it needs use to be online and the question needs prompt answering.

Informative Tool

ICT as an informative tool

The ICT (information and community technology) itself stands for information. Here I am going to talk about how we integrate ICT in our classroom as an informative tool. There are many informative tools which makes it difficult for students to choose one and because of which we can see youth all over the social media. Some of the ICT based information source are television, radio and the very popular one which is internet. These applications provide vast repositories of information/content to learners’ activity in the form of graphic, sound, text, audio and video.

So, if I talk about how we use ICT as an informative too in our lesson/classroom, it provides an information for both the teacher and the student. For teachers, it gives new ideas on how to go about the lesson and how to make the lesson more interactive. When it comes to students, it provides information in the beginning or during or after the activity. After getting the information, its important that the student analyze, synthesize and manipulate the information instead of copying everything from the source. If we copy everything from the source then it is an act of plagiarism and we won’t be getting new ideas or knowledge. Therefore, it’s important that we construct our own meaning.

If we use these informative tools very wisely then there are many positive points, such as we can learn to integrate our idea with the relevant idea from the source. After getting the relevant ideas, we need to analyze the information to make it more into our context. When we search information online, we are learning new skills and it also improves our critical thinking skills while analyzing the information. Finally, when we sort out information then we are also evaluating resources according to their validity and reliability.



So, unless we don’t miss use it there are unlimited advantages of using ICT as an informative tool. For example, for those visual learner’s ICT provides information in a graphic form, for auditory learner’s, it provides information in a recorded audio form. For kinetics learner, ICT provides videos on different activities to being carried out and they can learn accordingly. Therefore, if used properly ICT can provide us with numerous information which can help us to increase our knowledge.