To make learning very effective it is not only necessary to utilize the factors and techniques that facilitate learning, the teacher are to create certain conditions in the class-room that may improve learning.
These conditions are providing teaching aids, creating rivalry and co-operation, giving the knowledge of progress and success, praising or reprimanding and guiding learning.
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Visual Aids
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Visual aids make learning concrete and meaningful. You may describe the physical features of the Indo- Gangetic plain, but motion pictures, filmstrips, maps, charts, diagrams; pictures would make your verbal description concrete.
An additional meaning is attached to verbal instruction when teaching aids are used. These are simply supplementary devices and not the sup planters of what the teacher can do. The following are the uses of teaching aids:
Uses
(1) There is a belief that some students are eye-minded, some auditory-minded and some verbal-minded. Those who are verbal-minded can be easily taught through verbal instructions but for the rest visual aids are necessary.
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Whether the above belief is sound or not, whether pupils can be so sharply differentiated or not is not the question. The fact is that the more organs are used in learning, the more effective the learning sensory becomes.
The abstract notions become easy to understand when they are presented through motion pictures or T.V. or such other teaching aids.
(2) Instructional aides provide substitutes to objects and situations that cannot be presented in the class-room. The science exhibition that is held at a far-off place cannot be brought into the science room but through a T.V. programme the whole of it can be viewed in a short period.
(3) Much of school learning involves symbols and abstractions. Language is conceptual. Arithmetic is even more conceptual. It means that the teacher who is teaching language or arithmetic will have to present varied experiences so that correct concepts may be formed. Instructional aides supply such vivid experiences.
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Caution
Teaching aids are aids only. They are not to be so enthusiastically used that effort on the part of the learner is ignored. When a T.V. programme is viewed, precast and telecast work has to be done. The teacher has to connect the programme with the class work he has done previously or will do in the immediate future.