Teaching students through the use of PowerPoint has helped many teachers hold their students' attention. However, such a one-way communication technology cannot help make the students feel enthusiastic enough to study and understand complicated contents.
During the school vacation, Pattama and two of her teacher colleagues from the same school came to attend a conference in Bangkok in the hope of finding technological teaching aids.
"I've used PowerPoint to show figures when teaching mathematics and I think it helped my students understand the content more. But more complicated content, needs more attractive figures, and if possible there should be moveable graphics," Pattama said.
At the conference, she and her colleagues were introduced to an e-learning system, which had the solutions they were looking for.
"I used to attend many workshops about e-learning software, but I liked this one the most. It responds to my desire," she said.
The workshop presented the e-learning system produced by Chulalongkorn University Demonstration Elementary School. It has electronic maths, science and English lessons and is able to present the lessons with moveable graphics, interesting figures, pictures and even videos. Students could also practise exercises, do homework and take tests after studying. Teachers could follow up on students who had finished their homework, and also they could check their students' test results because they are collected as data in a computer server.
"A one-way communication is not enough to encourage students to pay attention to a lesson when they only watch a PowerPoint presentation. But this e-learning programme provides two-way communication, as students could watch and study a lesson and then they could do exercises and the homework. After they take a test, it's easier for me to check the test results. The computer automatically checks the answers for me.
"Students in the digital era are more familiar with technology. So, they will be more interested in e-learning lessons," said Pattama.
Former director of the school, Assoc Prof Ladda Pukiat, chairwoman of the e-learning project called Capacity Building and School Networking for Education Services (e-learning) in Thailand, said the project had started since 2006 when 150 teachers from 50 schools were trained to produce e-learning lessons for maths, science and English subjects of Grade 6 students.
Another prominent point of the programme is that it is much easier than producing a presentation by PowerPoint. Teachers only input texts, pictures and videos into the provided templates, which are already installed in the presentation gimmicks.
The lessons are available at the school's Electronic Learning and Information Network Centre and the 50 schools.
"We aim to encourage teachers from different schools and regions to share their multiple intelligence by helping create attractive content for the e-learning programme. We hope many more schools will use the programme as a teaching aid," Ladda said.
"We are conducting a study to see if Ordinary National Educational Test scores of students taught by the e-learning programme will rise by an average of five per cent in these three subjects. It will help prove whether the programme can be used effectively with our students."