Scenario 1, Activity B

Adapting lesson ideas from other teachers
Mrs. Xing should ensure that she modifies the lesson ideas to meet the needs and interests of her own students. She should also take note that not all of her students would be familiar with using the computer and choose an ICT tool that is easy to use or has already been exposed to the students.

Students surfing the Internet without paying attention to the lesson
She should introduce strict guidelines, such as prohibiting students from accessing the Internet without teacher’s permission, before the start of the lesson. Moreover, Mrs. Xing could have made use of management software that enables her to view her students’ screen via the Internet. If students are made aware of this prior to the lesson, they would refrain from surfing the Internet and be more focused on their assigned task.

Students needing help to get started
A big group of students were in need of help from the teacher and time would be wasted if Mrs. Xing had to attend to each student individually. For this, she should have assigned seats in such a way that the more IT-savvy kids were seated beside the less IT-savvy ones to help them. She could also have employed an IT representative in the class to do minor troubleshooting or sought the help of the IT staff in the school to be present during the lesson.

Lab arrangement
Since Mrs. Xing could not see the faces of some students due to the lab arrangement, she could have made use of the forty new tablet PCs acquired by the school to create a one-to-one notebook environment in class or even mobile computing.

Submission of work to teacher
Instead of getting all the students to submit their work to her for checking, she could have employed strategies such as peer-marking for the first round and then check their improvised second draft. In order to keep the students who finish faster than the others occupied, Mrs. Xing should have come prepared with post-assignment activities or could also have paired them up with weaker students to help them. The students’ work did not meet her expectations as she did not inform the students of her expectations. She could have set some guidelines for the writing assignment or given them additional materials such as model essays or links to websites that would help them to improve their writing skills.

Incomplete lesson
Mrs. Xing was also unable to complete the lesson she had planned. She should have set reasonable SIOs during her lesson preparation that takes into account her students’ capabilities, the time they have for the lesson and the time taken to get started.