Nowadays at restaurants or cafés, turn left or right and you’ll be sure to find someone fiddling with their smart phones. Look harder and you’ll see that children are doing the same. Most of the children watch YouTube anyways. But, with all these gadgets filling up our spare time, it’s bound to be bad right? Wrong! Sure, too much of something is bad. But we can turn it into something that can be useful to the children and students in school. Multimedia has come a long way since the older generation had left school. Nowadays, kindergartens and international schools use interactive multimedia to teach children. Still not convinced? I’ll tell you why you should be.
#1 Language skills
As a student or a teacher, presentations can either be nerve-wrecking or boring. But using multimedia as a tool for presentation can help students develop the confidence they require to boost language skills. As the only way to improve your language is to use it! Allow your students to pick a topic they like and present it in front of the class. They can conduct research prior to the presentation and put it in interactive formats available on Google Drive or even PowerPoint. With this opportunity, students can focus on their language delivery, content and organization while being creative in their own way.
#2 Choice
What do I mean by choice? Look, writing essays and reports weren’t everyone’s favourite homework task back in school. And with written work, students cannot expand their creativity with ‘given formats’ on how you should write your essay. However, students can use multimedia to showcase their content knowledge to a whole new level. This provides students the means to display their level of understanding through videos and pictures while being able to tackle the topic in a holistic manner. Whereas with written work, all the teacher sees are words. And occasionally, grammatical errors.
#3 Mobility
This, I’m sure everyone can agree on. Students, teachers, parents, board of governors. Did I mention students? Textbooks. Heaving 7 to 8 textbooks on top of exercise books to school every day was a chore. Heck, it was like exercising if your classroom was on the top floor. With multimedia, all those books you let your students heave can be put into one tablet. Face it, we are a world on-the-go. Information is always at the tip of our fingers. By imploring school syllabus into tablets, learning can take place anywhere and anytime. And instead of asking your students to write an essay about Hang Tuah, how about watch a video and learn something from him.
#4 Individuality and Collaboration
Every student learns differently. Some are fast and others are slow. Some can read it off the book and remember while others take time. That’s how multimedia can help. Students who are more of visual learners can benefit best when the teacher shows visual aids in the form of videos or interactive materials. Same goes for auditory learners, they learn quick by ear. One round of listening and it’s already in their heads. Whereas not too long ago, whether you learn better visually or through audio, all we had were books. A lot of books.
Not to mention, Montessori had established peer learning or collaborative learning. This is where students teach other students. Students can start social sites which allow others to interact with them, learn and teach each other. This can be as small as school-based or even nation-wide as long as language barriers are dropped. Teachers, you can even go on Twitter to collaborate with other fellow teachers, learn the latest trends on teaching and integration.
#5 Flexibility
Now this technically goes hand in hand with mobility. Like you and your textbook, flexibility and mobility are practically married. As I was saying, back in the day, students were pretty much glued to their textbooks when they want to study. If there was a topic you would like to stretch further in class that wasn’t covered in the textbook, it was pretty much impossible.
Today however, it is very much the opposite. Through the internet, you can further your students’ knowledge through the help of multimedia. For example, research used to be done at home or at libraries because classrooms never had computers. Even if they did, it would be one computer shared among 30 students. Sharing is caring, but not in this case. With a tablet for each student, they can learn anytime, anywhere, by themselves.
At Mahkota Cheras Home Tuition, we encourage our students to learn with the aid of multimedia to make the learning process more enjoyable.
Get quotation from us below and our tutor will get in touch with you shortly.
