Electronic lesson banks save time for teachers
Teachers scribble on bulky notebooks the lessons they wish to impart days ahead; a common scenario passed on each year especially in public schools. However, the doors of ICT have significantly helped teachers in the United States. They no longer have to go through these grueling tasks because of a program called ‘electronic lesson bank’.
‘Electronic lesson bank’ is a depot of wide-range teaching resources using different storage facilities such as disks, database system, or Web to reduce the amount of time spent on preparing teaching materials.
It not only retains information used during the year but can be customized to develop new and updated materials each school calendar and be accessed by the rest of the faculty in future years. A case study conducted in a group of teachers proved the timesaving aspect of the program. The use of the ‘bank’ reduced the time taken for weekly planning and finding resources from an estimated 2-3 hours to less than one hour per week.
Certain schools in the US have started adopting the program by training some teaching staff in basic ICT skills to enable them to update schemes and policies in electronic format.
Moreover, there are already numerous Web sites dedicated to ‘lesson banking’ because of the significant number of teachers who adhere to the program. An example is the TeacherNet web site, which holds over 2,000 useful lesson plans and resources which can be used to draw up one’s own lesson plan.
‘Lesson banking’ in Web sites is also a good venue for teachers from different parts of the country to impart new and challenging materials and inspire other in creating more.
If you would like to share your lesson plans to the Smart Schools community, you can submit them by emailing smartschools@smart.com.ph.
Did you know?
Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program aims to be an ‘electronic lesson bank’ by providing tools in its website for teachers to upload, share lesson plans.
SOURCES:
“Electronic bank of literacy materials reduces weekly planning time”. TeacherNet Case Studies.
http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/casestudies/casestudy.cfm?&id=127
“Updating schemes of work electronically”. TeacherNet Case Studies.
http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/casestudies/casestudy.cfm?id=129
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