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| Topic of the day |
The morning session began with a presentation by Mr. Andrew on ‘Methods to help learners develop learning strategies and Independent learning through technology.’ He started the session by giving us a phrase ‘One thing I learned recently was…’ and we were required to complete the phrase with not more than 10 words. We were given a number and when he read the number, we had to read our sentences out loud. This was a fun activity as all of us came up with a variety of sentences.
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| Mr Andrew |
Then, Mr. Andrew asked us to think of any strategies that we used in the process of accomplishing the task. We came up with memorizing, repeating, seeing, hearing, reading a model, experiencing, discussing, etc. as a form of learning strategies. From the activity we were told that it is important to expose students to a wide range of learning strategies so that they have a list of strategies to adopt for their learning purposes. Then we were asked to scrutinise the language learning strategy survey developed by Andrew D. Cohen, Rebecca L. Oxford and Julie C. Chi. The survey can be used to identify our students’ preferred learning strategies and it also serves beneficial for the teachers to research on the suitable materials for different learning strategies.
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| Group Discussion |
The session ended with a group discussion where we talked about the use of new media to support learning and teaching. Some resources of new media are blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Social bookmarking, Facebook and Twitter.
Impact / Reflections
There are many types of learning strategies that students can apply while learning. We need to identify which are the most preferred learning strategies by students so that they are not imposed with strategies which are not suitable for them. Asking them what they prefer or otherwise could help us to support the students to try new learning strategies so that they may select the most effective ones from a wide range and option.
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| Group Discussion |
While the use of new media technology like blogs, Wikis, Facebook, etc will be able to bridge the communication gap between teachers, students and virtually everyone in the world, a careful selection on which type of media to be used is important as it will help us to achieve our objectives. A lot of activities can be carried out by using the new media such as giving feedback, peer evaluation as well as to support personalised learning agendas. In general, we strongly believe that the new media is a tool that teachers / lecturers should utilise not only for students’ material purposes but also it is a way of gathering and sharing teaching and learning resources or research data with other lecturers/teachers globally.
Recommendation
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| Group Discussion |
With a wide selection of learning strategies that can encourage learner autonomy and independent learning, we feel that polytechnics, community colleges and vocational schools’ lecturers/teachers should consider looking at the students’ learning strategies especially in dealing with differentiated classroom. By knowing the students’ preferred learning strategies we believe that lecturers/teachers would be able to think of the ways to support the students and when it is appropriate or inappropriate to do so. It will help the lecturers/teachers in the long run as students become more autonomous and thus, require less and less support from the teachers.
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| Group Discussions |
As much as we agree on embracing new technology as one of the many tools in our teaching practice, we realise that with no or limited access to the internet, the vast selections of new media is just something that you can see but cannot do much about. The Ministry of Education could look into this matter as the global trend of utilising the new media is on the rise. We hope easy access to the internet will soon be available to all the lecturers/teachers in polytechnics, community colleges and vocational schools all over Malaysia.
Written by:
Ann and Rosidah Ab Rashid
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