Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Frogs...

                As we had our discussion about the role of media in teaching and learning, we stumbled upon the impacts of instructional media as well.  Some experts believed that the more senses that is used and is tapped by the instructional media, the better the avenue for learning becomes.  It is really helpful if the learner experiences the material like it was real.
                I had my high school years at Saint Agnes’ Academy, Legazpi City.  A typical biology class would normally dissect a frog to get to know the different organs and their corresponding positions inside a frog’s body but in our biology class then, we haven’t got the chance to even hold a real frog.  Our school then was against the dissection of frogs so we had a virtual dissection instead.  There was this program that we used wherein we could manipulate tools like the scalpel or scissors in the process of dissection via the mouse of the computer.  The program is just like a game where the first step was to catch a frog from the swamp and pinning it in the tray.  All commands and actions were done through just clicking the buttons on the monitor.  Through the program, the dissection process was well controlled and there was little room for human error, unless the wrong buttons were clicked.  There was this option of showing the labels of everything on the screen, including the body parts and organs of the frog.  The dissection was made easier because of the way of manipulation.  The media that we used was new and in fact was informative.  The disadvantage that I saw was that we did not experience the real thing.  It would have been more exciting if we did take a hold on a real frog, but since there was that advocacy of the school towards the preservation of the life of the frogs, it was not made possible for us.  The dissection that we did was two dimensional only but I know that the knowledge and experienced that we gained from the activity were nothing less than the ones that we could have gained if we have had the real dissection of a frog.

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