Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Teaching Learning Aids

A teaching aid is a tool used by teachers, facilitator, or tutors to

  • help learners improve reading and other skills
  • illustrate or reinforce a skill, fact, or idea, and
  • relieve anxiety, fears, or boredom, since many teaching aids are like game

Kinds of Teaching Learning Aid

Using music:

The use of music in the classroom can make the entire learning process more enjoyable and can stimulate "right" brain learning. Six years ago researchers reported that people scored better on a standard IQ test after listening to Mozart. Other tests soon followed: Rats raised on Mozart run through mazes faster and more accurately. People with Alzheimer's disease function more normally if they listen to Mozart and the music even reduces the severity of epileptic seizures.

Just think of all the times you have used music to help you study for tests, think clearly about something, relax from daily stress, etc. If you think about it, using music in the ESL EFL classroom is a pretty logical thing to do considering how helpful it can be to the learning process.

Using music to introduce an exercise is a great way to activate vocabulary and get students thinking in the right direction.

Chalkboard or whiteboard:
A chalkboard or whiteboard will help you demonstrate and instruct. The best recommendation, if you need to decide between the two would be the whiteboard—they are cleaner than chalkboards by far.

Pointer:
This wand-like supply for teachers has many purposes. A pointer can help you with pointing out certain areas like cities, rivers etc. on large, classroom maps, on overhead projectors and on your whiteboard or chalkboard.

Classroom maps:
Using classroom maps is a great thing to do. Often textbooks will have maps in them, but they will be smaller and harder for the children to read. Sometimes when you have the children look at a map in a book and ask them to find a certain area—not all the children will be able to find it right away and so they will miss out on the lesson while searching. Very seldom will a student raise his or her hand to ask where on the map the class is looking, either out of shyness or embarrassment.

Overhead projector:
To have an overhead projector for the classroom is a wonderful teaching aid, you can even use overhead projectors as a substitute for large, hanging classroom maps. The maps can come in eight and a half by eleven or eight by ten sizes that can be projected into much, much larger maps onto your whiteboard or onto a white canvas in the front of the room. These maps can often be drawn on by an erasable marker (the same you would use for a whiteboard). Thus, there would be no need to use a pointer or to have all those huge roll-up maps to deal with.

Computers
If it is within the budget of your school or learning institution, to have computers in the classroom or even just in a computer lab somewhere in the school is one of the best types of teaching aids you can offer your students. Technology is growing every day—and the more children learn about the basics of—and even excel in school-related educational software programs is almost a necessity these days.

There is also computer software for studying at home. Electronic methods of teaching that can be used in the home as tutorials for students who need help in one or more subjects. There are lots of them out there, so you may want to research which ones will best help the children in your class who have fallen behind. If the software is too costly for the parents, perhaps the school could have this software installed for after-school tutoring.

Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Anne_Clarke

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