By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)
Teaching aids or instructional media are a powerful tool for the teacher for his students’ learning. Broadly speaking, a teaching medium is any person, material or event that establishes conditions which enable the student to require knowledge, skill and attitude. In this sense, teachers, textbooks and the school environment are all instructional media. Since media are also defined as the graphic, photographic, electronic or mechanical means for arresting, processing and reconstituting visual or verbal information, instructional media play a key role in the design and use of systematic instruction.
When considering instructional media, one must distinguish between materials and equipment. The material itself can exist in several formats; for instance, still pictures are printed in a textbook. It may appear in a filmstrip or on a slide, an overhead transparency or a bulletin board. Here, the still picture is the material and the bulletin board on which to display it is the equipment. Hence, the material and the equipment together constitute the instructional medium. In other words, for example, the picture without a projector has limited use while the projector without a picture has no use.
A still picture is a two-dimensional visual representation of persons, places or things. Photographic prints are in common use, but sketches, cartoons, paintings, graphs and maps are widely used. Pictures can be used for individual study and small-group observation, for display on bulletin boards, flannel boards and felt boards, in exhibits, or for projection when student groups need to look at one picture at the same time. Thus, pictures may be drawn, printed or photographically processed, varying in size and colour. Also, they will be highly representational or abstract. It would be most efficient if a picture desirable for classroom use is in a book or pamphlet available to an entire class being asked to turn to the same page with one accord to see the picture.
As usual, still pictures have not only advantages but also disadvantages. For their advantages, pictures are inexpensive and widely available first of all. They provide common experiences for an entire group as well as visual details that will make it possible to study subjects which would otherwise be impossible. They can help to prevent and correct misconceptions. Also, they offer a stimulus to further study, reading or research, help focus attention and develop critical judgement. They are even manipulated easily. However, the sizes and distances of still pictures are often distorted. Lack of colour in some pictures limits proper interpretations and students do not always know how to `read´ pictures.
For the most effective use of still pictures, the teacher asks students to gather magazines from which pictures can be removed and have a class project of building a picture tile. The students arrange a set of pictures in such a way that they tell a story, which will test their ability to organize and communicate. The teacher shows an unusual picture to students — an object or place that they have never seen before, perhaps — as well as can use the discovery or directed discussion technique to encourage them to describe what they are looking at.
For creative writing and decoding visual information, he shows a picture or study print that has much visual information and makes students write to tell a story which describes the relationship of people in a picture and the way the environment in the picture is created.
In my teaching experience, still pictures are used in almost all textbooks, especially at the primary level. If they are used effectively and efficiently — particularly before explaining some subject matter, a teaching process will go well along the instructional period for certain. Of course, it is by far easier for students to learn any subject matter with teaching materials rather than without them at all. In the study of languages such as Myanmar and English, the still pictures help students concrete vocabulary learn by heart. Arts subjects like geography and economics usually make good use of still pictures. Science subjects like mathematics and chemistry are good use of still pictures, whereas learning other subjects like physics and biology sometimes could do with audio-visual aids such as animation that leads to students’ better understanding of scientific events — motion and mitosis versus meiosis, for example
As regards still pictures, I listened to the humour told by my Myanmar Teaching Method teacher Daw Aye Yu Yu Mon. She once said so. When she went bloc teaching or microteaching to a school as a well-trained teacher, she had to teach a Myanmar poem named `Meza Taung Chay´, which means the foot of Mt Meza in English. At that time, she asked her close friend, who excelled in painting, to draw the natural scene of this mountain as an instructional medium before her poem teaching. Thanks to her friend’s outstanding art, the picture of Meza became so beautiful that any viewer would like to go live over there at once. During her teaching of the poem, a student unexpectedly said to her, “Does that place exist in this country [Myanmar]? If so, I want to stay there, teacher.´´ She was absolutely frightened of her student›s words. The foot of Meza Mountain, where Latwe Thonedara, also the owner of this poem, was fined and sent by chronicles, was disgusting and tedious, especially due to several weather conditions. After all, my teacher got it into her head that her teaching medium was truly misleading
Motivated students will learn from any instructional medium if it is completely used and adapted to their needs. Within its physical limits, the medium can perform any educational task. Whether a student learns more from one medium than another is at least likely to depend both on how the medium is used and on what medium is used. Instructional media themselves look interesting to students for the simple reason that the students like to pay attention to whatever medium the teacher brings to the classroom. Therefore, instructional media are also the life of a teaching-learning activity.
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