First of all I would like to congratulate Zulfadli for his interesting article. Second, zul if you are reading this blog, I will reference your blog for my project paper.

The reason I took his articles because its relevance to my research. I am not only  developing design tool kit  for teachers to teach students but also I will develop strategy how to conduct the workshop using the design tool kit. This study uses computers and PowerPoint presentation as a tool in delivering the knowledge to students.
    In his article zulfadli had mentioned two theories that able to assist educator in technology in education, one of it is PLEaSE - Personalized Learning Environment and Student's Engagement...

School

• First, students’ engagement in learning process. Students come to school to learn, not to be tortured. They want activities that they can interact with themselves. They want to be active in class, not passive.
• Second, students’ engagement with the object of study. When students are learning, they want to experience everything. In a Science lesson, students want to hold conduct the experiments. They certainly do not want to be bordered by rules that will restrict them from learning.
• Thirdly, students’ engagement with the context of the subject of study. Students want to learn what they should learn. They want to learn things that are practical, useful for their lives.
• Finally, students’ engagements with the human condition. Students want to learn things that are related to their lives. In an English classroom, they tend to listen to stories about people surrounding them, rather than stories about two African boys living in a rural area in Sudan.

Engagement itself is not enough. A good teacher needs to know whether the teaching and learning session is facilitated. There are 5 essential situations that signal learning session is facilitated.

• Learners are engaged in solving real world problems – students want to do tasks that are closely related to what happen outside of their school. They want to learn lessons that are applicable in their lives as human, not students.

• Existing knowledge is activated. Before learning process starts, teachers should know whether students have schema or background knowledge. It is good to plan a lesson that activates previous knowledge.

• New knowledge is demonstrated. If students have not known or seen something that teachers are going to teach, teachers must demonstrate it first. Students will be motivated to learn when they see real-life demonstration.

• New knowledge is applied by the learner. Once students have seen the demonstration, it is time for them to act like the demonstration.

• New knowledge is integrated into the learners’ world. After all of the above is completed, learning process is fully facilitated when the lessons have relationships with their world – home, supermarket, park, etc. Students will make use of what they have learned outside classroom.

Research_icon

Stage 1
To identify the elements and principles of design

Stage 2
To develop a design tool kit

Stage 3
To evaluate the design tool kit

Stage 4
To study the effectiveness of the design tool kit in the learning process

The stages of my research are not final yet. But at least now I have the guideline of conducting the research. I will  need to do a lot of reading in order to construct my research questions to be research focus.

01_telephone_inv

I have called Ng to inform her about the design-guide book and what needs to be done in order to complete materials for the DISC workshop (design for interaction and students' collaboration). The DISC workshop is a two day workshop. There will be two different group of students aged from 10-11 yaers old.

We manage to get facilitators for the Tuesday workshop. For Wednesday, Ng has suggested not to use any facilitator. We will try to conduct the workshop in real class situation where it only involves teacher and students.

“Teaching design to youth is about unlocking a way of thinking. Design is no longer considered a superfluous subject, but rather a process that can be applied to any problem in order to ensure an appropriate, well-informed solution. Creative problem solving has proven itself an invaluable skill for leaders in all fields. The federal education law, No Child Left Behind, has required schools to increase classroom hours spent on math and reading significantly, often at the expense of other subjects, including design,” said Maria Emmighausen, a project manager for the AIGA’s K-12 initiatives.

“I argue that art and design education is for ‘all’ students, not just the talented few and it needs to be a core component of a student’s general education,” added Sproll. “Studying art and design not only provides all students with the opportunity to develop their creative selves and to enhance their creative problem-solving skills, but through the study of art and design students come to understand [that these disciplines are about] the expression of ideas, feeling and values.”

“We empower kids to use design as a planning tool for success. They break out of their passive roles and become active in the process of setting and achieving future goals in their education,” said Corey J. Willis, director of the school’s design education.

The kids of today “are extremely aware about design,” said Lamour. “But I don’t think schools know how to talk about design...My goal is not to create more graphic designers, but to give kids different ways to enter the learning process.”

Design Generation. Today’s kids are design savvy, but where do they get their design smarts?
Nancy Goulet

Originally published in Communication Arts January/February 2007
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The author of this website reported on the teachers' initiatives to adopt and implement ICT in an elementary school. Videos during the class sessions were also made available.

Learning and Teaching using ICT: Example materials
Year 3 - Art & Design - Poster advert - Why use ICT?

Below is the course outline from the Art & Design - Poster advert.

Poster advert

Objectives

•     To learn how to use a digital camera to capture an image

•     To learn how to transfer a digital photograph to a computer

•     To review, modify and evaluate work as it progresses

Prior learning

To benefit from this lesson, children should:

•           have looked at and discussed examples of:

      –    the work of graphic designers or artists such as Matthew Roby, by using the Internet, making visits to galleries, looking at posters;

      –    adverts, including posters, fliers, magazine adverts, TV or radio adverts;

•     have analysed critically different examples of graphic designs and discussed how the artists have exploited text and images;

•     have decided on a product to advertise in a poster, such as a book or video, and the purpose and audience for the advert;

•     have listed the ideas and types of media to use in their poster designs;

•     have produced their poster using a range of media.

Vocabulary

advert, image, digital, digital camera, open, save, image, graphic designer, artist, poster, purpose

Resources

•     data projector or interactive whiteboard linked to a laptop

•     ICT suite or set of laptops

•     presentation software (in this Example, PowerPoint)

•     graphics software that enables colour manipulation of selections (in this Example, Revelation Natural Art)

•     digital cameras

•     scanner and scanner software

•     posters/designs created previously

ICT skills needed by teachers

To teach this unit, teachers need to know how to:

•     use a digital camera and transfer photographs to a computer.

Preparation for this lesson

Prepare a set of help cards, or prompts and diagrams, to help children to remember what to do when they are transferring digital photographs to a computer.

Introduction

Begin by reviewing children’s completed adverts. Ask:

Q   What do you think and feel about this advert?

Q   How could you develop this work in the future?

Q   If you could create your image again, what would you do differently?

Encourage others to evaluate the work by commenting on the image in a positive way.

Remind children how to use the digital camera, including taking pictures and deleting images. For example, you could pretend that you have forgotten how to use it and ask children to give you instructions. Encourage them to come to the front to show what to press.

Main activity

Organise the class to work in groups so that each group has a digital camera. Give the groups time to practise taking photographs of the classroom, their friends, and various objects. Using one group as an example, show how to save a digital image from a disk or media card onto the computer as a JPEG file. Ask each group to practise this skill, saving one image each.

Now demonstrate how to place a design flat on a surface and use the digital camera to take a picture of the image. Transfer the photograph to the computer. Ask the groups to take digital pictures of their own design and save them on the computer as before. Remind children that they will need to remember where they have saved their work as the photographs will be needed in the next lesson.

Alternatively, children could scan their images and save their scanned image as a JPEG file.

Plenary

Bring the whole class together. View and review a selection of the digital images.

Next steps

Show children how to use the tools in image manipulation software (in this Example Revelation Natural Art) to change the size, colour, focus or shape of the image, to flip or rotate it, to use the brush tool, to fill an area, to undo or erase, to add details from other images using copy and paste, and to use special effects such as smearing, spraying, highlighting, softening and spraying.

Ask children to refine their images and experiment with adding text to them.

Use a selection of questions to encourage the children to think in a reflective manner:

Q   How did you feel as you worked on this image?

Q   Did you have a good starting point?

Q   What could have been better about your starting point?

Q   How could you develop your work in the future?

Q   If you could create your image again, what would you do differently?

Q   What are the similarities and differences between your original photograph and the end product?

Links to QCA schemes of work

The lesson links to:

QCA ICT Unit 2B: Creating pictures
QCA ICT Unit 3A: Combining text and graphics

Context of this lesson

This lesson is the third or fourth session in a series of six lessons.

Subject links

Links can be made in literacy to non-fiction writing for an audience. For example, children could be asked to write a review of their adverts.

Why use ICT?

The advantages of using ICT are as follows.

•     A digital camera can be used to record children’s compositions created using traditional materials. The photographs can be used for discussion and evaluation with the whole class.

•     Using image manipulation software, children can explore, draft and present pictorial information. They can experiment directly and quickly with different images. Their work can be saved, developed and refined later.

•     ICT allows teachers to project enlarged visual images and to model different compositions for whole-class demonstration, discussion and evaluation.

Data retrieved from http://primary-strategy.nen.gov.uk/ on 21/8/07