Spectrum - A Whole New Way of Learning in Bite-Size

Crescent Girls' School developed this portal, called Spectrum, that allows teachers to create engaging learning experiences which are packaged into small learning activities. Each learning activity allows students to access either a resource from the Internet, or a Google Doc link or even an image.

In one of the activities I created for my Secondary Two girls, I decided to use the theory of place-based learning which required the girls to go to several locations within the school, be immersed in that place and to describe the setting based on a given scenario. I could then evaluate students' responses via the platform and marked them.

If you are interested to learn more about Spectrum, email me at richard_koh@crescent.edu.sg :)

Microsoft Innovative Expert Educators Program 2015

It is a great honour to be on this journey again! I look forward to learning from all the expert educators! I enjoy using technology in education and always think about what ticks for my students. For example, while I am conducting my lessons, if students were to ask me what a stick insect looked like, because we might be going through a passage that mentioned it, I would quickly use the Internet to show them what the insect looks like in the real world. This adds immediacy and authenticity to the things students learn in class. Some of the tools I use frequently in class include O365 - OneDrive and OneNote, which I used to create a page for students to view all that they have done and learnt with me, SharePoint for its wonderful collaborative nature e.g. Word Online, Web 2.0 tools like Padlet, Linoit and Mindmeister. The variety of tools used allows me to give students the opportunity to develop different literacies - visual and media and most importantly, for the development of 21st century skills.

21st Century Skills Acquisition - Webinar at Stockholm

On 28th October 2014, I successfully carried out a webinar via Lync to teachers in Stockholm about how my school has been teaching 21st century skills through our holistic curriculum. Find out the details at this webpage.

Inspiring Teacher of English - Teaching Award 2014

Really honoured to be given this national award :) Find what Ms Indranee Rajah put up at her FaceBook page. I really like my initials placed on my armour :) The page that talks about the award :-) And the video made :)

Google Doc - Personification Riddles

I asked the girls to create a riddle that personified an object, which then their classmates had to guess.

Can you guess what those items are too?

Linoit - Describing Emotions

Description is not as easy as it seems; it is not simply about lumping adjectives and adverbs and voila, you are descriptive. One has to be effective and there are several techniques one can use to make that happen. In order for the class to contribute ideas to how certain emotions could be described more effectively, I created Linoit links for students to describe any given scenario of their choice to describe an assigned emotion.

I wanted to illustrate the intensity of adjectives used and that it is more than using an adjective to describe the emotion; rather, it is about saying what the person says, does or even thinks about.

Collating all these Linoits on OneNote allows everyone to access the works done and to get inspiration :-)

Mindmeister - Understanding Text Types

Students are mostly exposed to the narrative genre and hence, to get them ready to tackle comprehension questions pertaining to another text type, namely the expository, I created this jigsaw activity where students had to familiarise themselves with an assigned text type while in their expert groups and then returned to their home groups to explain their own text type. This would all be then captured in Mindmeister.

ICT in Education

My class was featured in this Hechinger Report about how ICT was used for learning.

SharePoint - Creating Effective Openings / Closings in Storywriting (AfL)

After getting the girls to analyse 5 story openings, and showed them the types of openings, the girls worked in pairs to create their own openings via SharePoint. This allowed for peer evaluation as a form of assessment for learning.

Microsoft Global Forum - Barcelona, Spain 2014

It was an honour to attend the Microsoft Global Forum in March 2014. Those 4 days in Barcelona gave me the chance of a lifetime to meet up with very dedicated educators who creatively thought of the use of technology to engage their students in acquisition of 21st century skills and deep learning!

Going to the hotel with my bosses ;-)

Setting up the display board for the judging. It was a very humbling experience to learn from so many expert educators during the forum!

Meeting up with Eva Pethrus, Microsoft, Sweden. She was such a hospitable host when I was invited to talk about 21st century skill teaching and learning in Stockholm in October 2013.

The wonderful team I worked with for the learnathon which we came in second runner-up eventually! Yay!

The wonderful people I spent time with! My bosses (Hsin Wei and Boon Keng) for being such nice mentors! Siyun and her many foodie experiences! Puay San and Lena for being so nice in guiding me along!

Going to the forum was really an eye-opener for me and I thanked Microsoft for this valuable learning experience!

Padlet - A Trigger on Writing Proposals

Proposals to the girls usually mean one thing - the ring and to have some fun with them, I asked them to put down the considerations they have if they were to accept someone's marriage proposal. Some of their responses were hilarious!

Microsoft Excel Online - Consolidating Students' Works and for Peer Feedback

Forming good rhetorical questions stimulate the reader's or audience's thinking process as they mull over the obvious answers to a particular situation being discussed or issue being raised. The girls had to craft their own rhetorical questions based on a given scenario and then gave one another feedback.

OneDrive and OneNote - Structuring for Collaborative Learning in Secondary Two Integrated Curriculum (English)

I used OneNote on OneDrive to archive the works that we have done as a class. The sections and pages present themselves very neatly for students to see at a glance what they have been learning for the various units.

As part of the Secondary 2 Integrated Curriculum, as a lead-in to the unit, students took on simulated roles from the world of Middle Earth (a fantasy world existing in J.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy). A simulated setting was given where they had to vote out one race as the school is re-structuring and want to retain only the best. To guide them in their brainstorming for reasons, groups were given a Padlet to list down their ideas. This then helped them with their arguments when the class decided on the race to be 'booted' out.

However, while I was creating this, I intentionally left out preparing the Padlet for 'The Other Creatures' as they were made to feel marginalised. This made for a very interesting class discussion as the group tried to find ways to log down their ideas and find good reasons to counteract the other races' arguments!

Microsoft Word or PowerPoint Online - Enabling Application by Creating Posters

The best way to assess if the girls have learnt the techniques of persuasion in posters and advertisements would be to get them to create one themselves. I consolidated their works via Microsoft Word and the girls created their own works either via OneDrive, SharePoint or Google Docs.

Clicking on the links allow me to access their works and project for all to see and to discuss.

I think most of the girls got the idea :-)

Padlet - Structuring Consolidation

After the girls have gone through the visual literacy unit, they watched an advertisement. I then asked them to apply what they have learnt about the following things and explain the effectiveness of the advertisement in persuading the audience its intended message: 1. Salience 2. Reading Path 3. Colours / Symbolism 4. Emotions 5. Diction 6. Purpose, Context, Audience

From the responses, the girls definitely showed more acute awareness the ways advertisements influence them to take certain actions or to feel a certain way.

Microsoft Excel Online - Analysing Posters

To expose the girls to ideas of conflict and propaganda, I showed them a few posters and asked them to analyse the diction (choice of words) or significance of the image(s) being used. Pretty interesting ideas coming from the girls :)

Vialogues - Looking at Advertisements

Surfaced 2 videos and shared them with my students via Vialogues and set them some questions to think about with respect to Symbolism, Diction and Emotions - aspects in which advertisements are usually created based on.

Like how I can insert questions at specific point in the video and check how the students responded to the poll.

This gives me an idea if the students know the aspects taught and also provides me with the trigger activity for the next lesson! Check one Vialogue out. I know there's any tool similar to it: http://ed.ted.com/videos Shall try it out when the opportunity arises :)

Starting the Year 2014

It has been 3 days and my oh my, how the school year commenced! Met up with my two Sec 2 classes, lovely bunch of students I have taught last year and looking forward to continue with the learning journey with them this year! Last year, I used SkyDrive OneNote with them. With O365, I am moving to SkyDrive Pro and looking at using it more extensively with them this year. I shall update this blog with my endeavours! Keep a look out!