~Week 5-Strategies in Designing Application Tools~

We are now in Week 5. I cannot believed that time passed so fast! This week's lecture is about Strategies in Designing Application Tools. What am I talking about? These strategies can be used to teach Science subject. There are 7 strategies:

1) MBL- Micro Computer based laboratory
2)Drill and practice
3) Tutorials
4) Stimulation
5) Problem-solving
6) Information retreival
7) Education games

Now, we will look into the strategies one by one.

1) MBL-computer-based laboratory – it can utilizes a computer, a data collection interface, electronic probes, and graphing software, allowing students to collect, graph, and analyze data in real-time. This real-time atmosphere allows students to attend to and process important details in each experiment.

2) Drill and Practice - is a structured, repetitive review of previously learned concepts to

a predetermined level of mastery.

3) Tutorials - Interactive class taught by a tutor to students at university or college,

individually or in small groups; Of or pertaining to a tutor; belonging to, or exercised

by a tutor.

4) Simulations - The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain

key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system.

5) Problem-solving - is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that

includes problem finding and problem shaping.

6) Informational retrieval - is a type of question where students solve the problems and

answering the question by retrieved the information that they have learned.

7) Educational Games - are games that have been specifically designed to teach people

about a certain subject, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand an

historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play.

Therefore, all the strategies given can help us to embed and apply them in our lesson plan too. In rural Malaysian schools, we might cannot do the first strategy which is computer based laboratory, however we still can do other strategies such as tutorials, drill and practice, problem solving, simulations and much more.As a result, the students can learn better and it will produce a meaningful learning environment if we use all these strategies.For example, personally I love to have educational games because it will encourage the students to have fun yet learn at the same time.For instance, there are many science educational games available such as arranging the skeletons of a human,puzzles about animals, and much more. Personally, I hope that Malaysian government will take some initiative to arrange all those educational games in school.Other than that, I also believed that drill and practice and simulations can be collaborated together in order to make the students to understand better. For example, the topic is Magnet. The teacher can bring the real magnets and should demonstrate in class so that it will be a good simulation for the students to activate their schemata.Then, the teacher can do drill and practice by teaching the concepts and features of magnet and he or she can asks the students to use the magnets on their own.As a result, the students can practice on what they have learnt previously about the magnets.

In brief, this week make me to realize that there are many strategies can be used to teach Science and definitely it will suits all the learners regardless of their learning styles such as visual, kinesthetic,tactile and much more.Hence, I as a future teacher should try my best to apply all these strategies for the sake of my students.