Second Day of the SFS Training(May 6, 2009)

The day started with a prayer (by Ma’am Mina) at exactly 8 o’clock in the morning and followed by the processing of feedback. I also announced that in behalf of the training team, I apologized for the speedy conduct of day 1 because the training proper started late. It was late because many participants were late. Of course we understood because many participants were coming very far away from Iligan City.

I instructed the participants to spend 15 minutes to plan on the assigned activity individually for their training session. I observed that the instruction made them feel overwhelmed. I was not able to anticipate that they were not doing their assignment. I was expecting that they already answered module 4 exercise 3 from step 1-7. Good thing that Ma’am Mona saved me and clarified all confusions felt by the participants. Again, I learned something from the experience. I must have asked the participants whether they have some questions or not or to ask loudly if things are clear or not before proceeding to the next activity.

Ma’am Mona’s clarifications of the Technology and Communication session structure consumed about 20 minutes of the budgeted time for the planning by group. I was so worried with the time but then being clarified was more important than proceeding into an activity without proper direction and sense of purpose.

During the group planning, I confidently shared my ideas and listened to the group discussions. I spend my time with the group who is assigned to module 6 Spreadsheet while Ma’am Rhea facilitated the group discussions in the group who is assigned in module 5 word processing.

In the afternoon, Ma’am Rhea flashed on LCD screen the specific assignments of participants in the session structure for word processing.

Participants from the 1st group were assigned as either a teacher, an observer or a timer.

During the Practice-demonstration, I observed that the participants were still working alone instead of by pair. I was really confused because Ma’am Mona had already clearly explained to them that they must work collaboratively. Then I found out that many of them are Non-TLE teachers and they are interested to learn basic computer skills. That is why they prefer to work alone than in group.

I also observed that one teacher assigned to practice-demo on exploration-activity gave a detailed instruction on how to execute challenge 1-4. I was a bit hesitant to process it during the feedback but I was thankful that Ma’am Mona corrected the strategy shown by this teacher. I was focus more on the checklist if desired behavior during the conduct of the practice-demonstration were seen or not.

I was glad that the group 2 assigned to practice-demo the spreadsheet was able to perform better than the group 1 assigned to demo the word processing.
After the demonstration of each teacher in the group 2, we noticed that they were doing something else not related to the practice demo like surfing the net. Ma’am Rhea and I decided to announce that all of them must have a gradebook and a flyer as their output for that day. Then I also announced that they must listen when other fellow participant is sharing her/his experiences to pay respect and aside from that they will also learn things that are beneficial when they go back to their stations. I think that announcement helped a lot during the conduct of the training.

Feedback was good and debriefing follows up to about 7 in evening.