Lesson 8 Higher Thinking Skills Through IT-Based Projects

Lesson 8

Higher Thinking Skills Through IT-Based Projects

          Students’ performances also depends on the teacher’s way of handling the class. There are plenty of ways on effective classroom management for the students to acquire higher thinking skills. This is why it is very challenging for teachers to maintain students’ interest in studying while employing them to different challenging tasks.

          There are four (4) IT-based projects that will help develop higher thinking skills of the students.

1.    Resource-based Projects - in these projects, the students will be given a topic and the teacher will only be a facilitator of the students. A teacher can only be allowed to help if it is really necessary for an active learning process.

2.  Simple Creations - the students will be required to make their own poems, novels, blogs and other things that will be aided by software materials such as the Microsoft Writer, KidWork Deluxe and many more.

From it, the student’s creativity will be enhanced through designing. Creativity is said to be the combination of the three abilities, namely: Analyzing, Synthesizing, and Promoting.

3.  Guided Hypermedia Projects - this is the production of self-made multimedia. Examples of it are the video production, photo editing, and making of Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation.

4.  Web-Based Projects - students can be made to create and post webpages in a given topic.

          We students had plenty of experiences which involves IT-based projects to enhance higher thinking skills that our teachers made us do. Since grade school we were exposed to this already but it is limited only to lower scale of information technology like television. When I was on the fourth grade we were tasked to watch a news program and to make a narrative report about any news headline of our choice. Until today, we still experience the use of IT-based projects but of great advancement and of more complexity like making our own documentary, movie, edited photos, movie covers, power point presentations, prepared slides of different specimens in the laboratory and many more.

          As what I can think of based on my experiences, I can say that information technology evidently drove us higher in the field of education and generally in life. It is because through IT-based projects, students were indulged into a more creative and fun way of learning which maximized the function of the teacher from being the main source of information before (traditionally) to a facilitator of the teaching-and-learning process today.

          With the knowledge of implementing IT-based projects, there will be a lesser worry on how teachers would engage students to higher thinking skills. In this advanced world of ICT, teachers can easily apply lessons to different IT-based projects in order to further support the knowledge learned by the students and they will be given chances to formulate their genuine steps in order for them to come up with a certain project.