ICT Integration for mathematics in Class III

Teaching and learning of Division as Repeated Subtraction through ICT integration for mathematics in grade III. 
23/9/2019

A new Approach to Primary Education shifted focus from “Teacher centered to Child centered learning”. The mathematics curriculum is designed to help students appreciate the value of mathematics and make connection to real-world experiences. There is now a greater emphasis on the need for the students to understand the mathematics they learn rather than to memorize rote procedure. When discussing mathematical ideas, we expect students to use the processes of problem solving, communication, reasoning, making connection and representation. There is an increased emphasis on problem solving in mathematics but Bhutanese students are academically challenged to solve various mathematical problems. These fallouts are attributable to many factors such as inappropriateness of curriculum standard to their cognitive abilities like logical reasoning, deterred linguistic development and ability especially in English, lack of reading habits and inadequate vocabularies and other subject teachers not applying Language across the curriculum. Hence, integrating of ICT in mathematics would certainly address some of the issues in finding difficulty with mathematics.

Basically, ICT integration into teaching and learning is found to be dependable on creativity and motivation of an individual teacher whereby a teacher has to maximize the impact of ICT by providing access to ICT resources for all the children and boost their learning and incorporating the use of ICT equipments in teaching. To my experience, ICT tools motivates and makes children interested in learning mathematics and improved their performance and achievement in the class.

The fourth lesson that I have integrated ICT was on “Division as Repeated Subtraction” for grade III in which two video clips were shown. During the lesson, children participated actively in watching the video clips on and carrying out the activities effectively. In essence, the video clips emphasized the connections among mathematical concepts and to connect abstractions to real-world setting. As a follow up activity, children were made to solve questions (provided worksheets) associated to the clips. Almost all the children were able to solve the questions correctly but to those few children who lacked the listening and comprehension skills were guided after going around the class. 

 

I have learnt that ICT integration helps to build on their prior knowledge and skills and it’s one of the fun ways of learning mathematics as they loved watching movies at home and they even requested me to show other clips related to mathematics. However, due to time constraints, I couldn’t show the related video clip but I have agreed to show other video clips in the next lesson for their better understanding. The lesson went effectively as the objectives of the lesson were fulfilled as children could get the clear concept of the lesson through ICT integration.

Thus, integrating ICT in teaching and learning helps to achieve the objectives of the lesson effectively, obtain active participation from the student and assist in teaching difficult concepts.