There are three stages in the Information Process. It is very important when you design a lesson or series of lessons that you try to include all 3 stages.

The first stage is to get the learners to gather information. They can do this by referring to books, the internet, newspapers etc. Or they can generate their own information through conducting experiments, or doing surveys. An important part of this stage is to get learners to think carefully about what information is required before they rush off to try to find it.

Often we are happy for our learners merely to gather information. But unless they actually do something with that information, they will not learn much. They need to process the information by working with it, analysing it, summarising it or making it their own in some way.

Finally they need to present the information to someone. It is exciting for the learners to have an audience which is not the teacher. Maybe another class? Maybe another learner on the other side of the world being contacted through email?

A simple example:

Gathering: Get your learners to measure their height (you can do this easily by marking certain heights on the wall and then getting them to decide which category they fall into eg category A: 100cm to 110cm; category B: 110 to 120cm; etc).


Processing: Get them all to put the categories and the number in each category on a spreadsheet. (A more advanced class could put in all the learners and their category, and then use the COUNTIF function to count the numbers of learners in each category). Let them choose an appropriate graph to indicate the numbers.


Presenting: Learners can use the graph tools to make the graph look beautiful, and can print it out or display it onscreen while explaining to the rest of the class what it shows.