Thinking C3: student-oriented

Well, let me think carefully about C3 and clarify what arguments I wanted to reveal in this section.

Ok, in Chapter 2, I already identified that one characteristic of effective PD is student-oriented.
Teachers are urgently develop his/herself to be able to improve her teaching for students learning. In other words, that the goal for teacher PD should be always for a better learning of students.

But, what was happening? It has been cited in many references that many traditional PD programs failed to meet this requirement. The argument was including lack of connection between the program and the teaching practices and the programs often seemed invisible with the authentic students' environment.
In addition to students' environment, which is becoming more digitised, it is advocated that technology should be integrated into the teaching. Due to the lack of familiaritation and understanding of teachers on ICT, then ICT PD programs are becoming common. However, previous studies indicated that many ICT programs emphasize into learning basic skills and lack of consideration how to orient the uses of the Internet to enrich the students learning. Given this complex problem, the question are: how the participants teachers uses the Internet for students' need and how my Internet PD Model took this characteristics of "stuent-oriented" in conducting the PD program I offered to Jack?

Yuuuuupp,
I already finished Draft 1, and I just need time to review it before bringing this document to SSS tomorrow.

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6.1.2 PD should be student-oriented

In Chapter 2, I already identified that one characteristic of effective PD is student-oriented. Teachers urgently need to develop his/herself to be able to improve her teaching for students learning. In other words, the goal of teacher PD should always be aimed for a better learning of students. But, what was happening? It has been cited in many references that many traditional PD programs failed to meet this requirement [Ref]. The argument was including lack of connection between the program and the teaching practices and the programs often seemed invisible with the authentic students' environment [Ref].

Furthermore, since students' environment is becoming more digitised, it has been advocated that technology should be integrated into the teaching. Due to the lack of familiarisation and understanding of teachers on ICT, then ICT PD programs have been conducted in almost every country [Ref]. However, previous studies indicated that many ICT programs emphasized into learning basic skills and lack of consideration how to orient the uses of the Internet to enrich the students learning. Given this complex problem, the questions are: how teachers in my study use the Internet for students' needs and how my Internet PD Model took this characteristic of "student-oriented" into consideration in conducting the PD program I offered to Jack?

In the first case, Ann used the Internet for her professional development which was student-oriented. Ann’s beliefs about learner and learning led her to use the Internet for her student’s learner. Her beliefs that every one is a learner and every learner is different, and that teachers have to make sure that every student is learning, led Ann to take advantages from the availability of the Internet to cater her students’ needs since the Internet can provide different learning resources to cater to different learning styles/ approaches. For example, Ann identified websites for her students consisting virtual manipulatives, visualisation of mathematical concepts, a variety of representations of mathematical concepts, and mathematical games. In several occasions, Ann gave opportunities to her students to do their own choices using the Internet, e.g. mathematical jokes. Such activity supported by the Internet, assisted Ann to get a real insight into her student’s understanding about particular concepts in mathematics.

In the second case study, the characteristic of student-oriented is another main consideration in deciding what I need to do in promoting the Internet for Jack’s professional development. The ethnographic approach was extremely relevant in achieving this aspect as indicated by the following critical events.

First, my role as a participant observer in Jack’s classroom enabled me to identify what students were learning, what they were interested in and struggled with. This observation led me to identify different online learning resources for students and organising them into blogs or e-mailing them to Jack. I was hoping that by doing this, the Internet would allow Jack to see the potential of the Internet to cater different needs of his students.

Second, the starting point in offering websites to Jack was based on my classroom observation. When I noticed that students were very heterogeneous and the teaching was limited in dealing with this issue, I searched websites that offering different level of difficulties and different representations, such as websites about time, measurement, and place value.

Third, my offer of blog for students was one of the examples of PD strategy that oriented to student. I found that students had lots of writing activities in the classroom and they seemed enjoy writing, then I though that using the technology in developing their literacy skill with blog would be a good tool, as the content of the blog could be commented by people around the world and students usually could get benefits such motivation or challenges to write ideas [ref]. Even though Jack was agreed to do it at the initial plan but this did not happen in my research due to possibly the contextual factors of Jack.

Fourth, through my presence in the classroom, I knew that the four Internet-connected computers were available in Jack’s classroom and students paid regularly for their maintenance. However, these technologies were rare being used by students for their learning. Therefore, I was continually searching opportunities to offer the uses of the Internet by students to gain richer learning. And at the same time, I was expecting that by doing that, Jack would be more interested to explore the potential of the Internet for his learning and teaching.

Despite of some positive signs as a result of highly consideration on the “student-oriented” such as attracting Jack to explore the Internet, I discovered many inhibitors in optimising the uses of the internet for students’ learning and this will be discussed using the zone theory.