Media in Teaching
Prepared by H. Mustafa Qamal SH,M.Ed
SMA Pelangi Nusantara Principal
Teaching process should become the nice moment which is waited by the students, not the horrible time to be escaped. In order to make it valued for students, we need to develop students who can use the knowledge they have learnt in order to do things in society, rather than just remember the content they have learnt. But we have an additional challenge. We have to develop students who are thoughtful and adaptable. They should be able to use their knowledge to solve the problems they face in society rather than simply being defeated by them.
Global changes emphasis on developing a better understanding of media and information is echoed internationally. As societies become 'knowledge' or 'information' societies, so our ability to understand, select and manipulate information (our ability to read critically and be media literate) becomes vital to our productivity and power in society. Worldwide, then, schooling is moving away from the dissemination of information towards teaching methods that develop students’ skills in accessing, selecting and understanding information. Invariably, this requires a move away from didactic forms of teaching towards student-centered teaching and towards analyzing the media messages that dominate our lives. On the other hand most of educators still have been conservative in the range of media resources they have used. They have tended to stick with textbooks.
Before choosing media, we have to consider some points. That media should be good resource-based teaching:
• It should engage students’ interest and gets students thinking and talking.
• It should link learner experience with new and unfamiliar educational concepts.
• It should encourage active learning.
• It should use different resources to develop increasingly higher levels of learning.
• It should develop in-depth skills and knowledge within an integrated learning area
• It should develop other critical cross-field outcomes within all learning areas.
Popular Print Media
'Popular print media' is a term that describes a wide variety of media formats that include newspapers, magazines, billboards, and advertising flyers. Our focus will be magazines and newspapers, but even these are different enough to offer teachers a rich variety of potential teaching resources.
Both magazines and newspapers tell their stories' using similar formats (words, photographs, diagrams, graphics, cartoons, statistics, advertisements, letters from readers, horoscopes and puzzles), but they differ in important ways:
• In general, magazines are concerned with entertaining their readers, while newspapersfocus more on informing readers .
• Magazines contain many in-depth 'human interest' feature stories: stories aboutplaces or personalities. Newspapers, however, carry mainly short, 'hard news'stories with a few in-depth stories linked to the news and politics.
• Magazines make more use of photographs (color fully and prominently, and carry more colorful adverts. Newspapers carry photographs of recent events, diagrams, graphs, maps and tables of statistics, weather, financial and entertainment information, and political cartoons and editorials linked to the latest news.
Popular print media offer good opportunities for improving learners' reading and writing skills in particular.
Popular Electronic
Popular electronic media provide teachers with excellent resources for improving language skills, such as listening and speaking. Like newspapers and magazines, radio and television also provide a rich resource base for enriching the teaching of content knowledge in different learning areas.
Television and radio carry a variety of formats. Many are common to both, such as advertising and news, but the different nature of each medium tends to favor particular formats:
• Radio, for instance, is dominated by audio-based formats, such as music, talk shows and news.
• Television, however, is dominated by formats that are visually strong, such as drama, news and documentaries.
Computers and Internet
Computers have rapidly become a familiar part of our lives. In many cases, computers (and the Internet) are spoken of as a new miracle cure to our educational problems.
Computer technologies are increasingly an essential component of any office or work environment. Even where we do not need to know how to use computers, it is useful to know how they work. For instance, cashiers at supermarkets ring up our purchases using computer technology; when we draw our money from ATMs we use computer technology; our microwave ovens measure their cooking time using computers: we live in a computerized world. In order to live socially useful lives, we need to become computer literate. Even where students don't actually learn to operate computers, they need to understand the role and functions of computers. In many ways it could be argued that computer literacy is becoming as important as the ability to read and write.
As computers become so widespread, so more and more of us will be directly employed in computer-related work. In this case, learning to operate computers is an important competency for all school students We can learn from computers. Computers function as a source of information, and can be used to expose students to topics and experiences beyond the classroom walls. Many people have argued that computers will replace teachers in classrooms because they can provide access to so much more information than any ordinary teacher can ever know. They can also be programmed to respond to every individual students' answers, so their teaching is also superior, at least in some ways, to that which most ordinary teachers could provide.
Textbooks
'We must abandon textbooks,' a teacher told us recently. 'They are old-fashioned, biased, and boring. But when we visit schools we see many teachers and learners who are dependent on textbooks. Their work plans are copied directly from the textbook's contents pages. The notes they ask learners to copy from the chalkboard are summaries of textbook chapters. Often they read to their classes directly from the textbook.
Textbooks are very useful educational resources. But they must be used well. In order to make the best use of textbooks within a media-rich teaching style, we need to understand how textbooks differ from the popular media resources we will use in our classroom.
Textbooks are designed in order to help people learn. Generally they are only used in educational institutions, such as schools or universities. Popular media have a number of different purposes. Some, like advertising leaflets, are designed to persuade, while the main functions of newspapers, magazines and television are to entertain and inform. When we read a magazine or watch television or read a novel, we do so mainly for enjoyment. Sometimes we listen to the radio or watch television or read a newspaper to keep up-to-date about current affairs. This could be regarded as educative, but only in an informal sense.
Textbooks are selections of the content required to learn and teach a particular subject or learning area at a particular level of study. Good textbooks organize this information in a manner that encourages learning. So, event though so many modern and high-tech media which can be used in teaching, we are still need a good textbooks become our guide.
Implementation at SMA Pelangi Nusantara
In order to improve teaching method, enrich student knowledge and give comfortable and modern circumstances in learning process, our beloved school, SMA Pelangi Nusantara have already adopted multimedia and information technology. For some subjects teacher presents their module using laptop and projector. Materials are taken from any resources, for example electronic books, movies and any other interesting resources.
By using multimedia method, we hope our students feel comfortable, satisfy and recall for every point in transferring knowledge. Some benefits which we can take for these methods are the learning process become more attractive, interactive, and inspirative. Besides, our students feel proud and always high-tech updated.
Our school also has computer lab that has aim to prepare our students has basic ability in computer science. They can use this ability to compete in their future life at working arena. We hope SMA Pelangi Nusantara outcomes the well-prepared human resources.
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