Google Docs - Persuasive Speech

The start of Term 3 signals the beginning of Integrated Curriculum for the Secondary Three students, which I recall is into the second year. We have met up during numerous PD-IC sessions to improve on the scheme and the girls have had many lessons to prepare them for the performance task, which is to create a talk show to persuade a designated target audience to live healthily. Learning how to write persuasively is therefore an essential skill to teach and we got the groups to create samples of persuasive speech as practice.

Here's a sample:

One thing I could have done differently, if I had the time, would be to get each group to give comments.

Google Sites - Mid-Year Staff and ICT Seminar

Preparing for the Staff and ICT Seminar in late May and June was both exciting and exhausting as we planned to use a different platform this year - Google Sites.

We planned to show the teachers the capabilities of what Google Sites could do by modelling its use in the seminar itself.

Coordinating with the various key personnel was not easy as they each had different time lines and piecing and putting all the information into one site took me and the trainers, especially Jean, a great deal of time. But finally the site was done and we conducted the seminar, which aimed to develop the staff to create eLearning packages via Google Sites than on iMedia so that more collaborative elements like Google Docs and Web 2.0 tools could be employed to engage the girls.

Here's the link to the seminar site.

Google Sites - S2 Cluster Sharing

Usha, my HOD for the English Language department, asked me to conduct a workshop during the cluster sharing day. So I decided to put together some of the things I have done previously in another school context to show the possibilities as I have yet to design lessons that uses Google Docs for those stated lesson objectives.

Here's the link to the Google Site I created via ICONnect, because I wanted to show the teachers that they could already be using what the Ministry has provided to create engaging learning experiences for the students. The bonus is you get to archive what the students have done!

Mindmeister - Math Lesson on Population and Exponential Graphs

Looked through the Internet to find a possible equation to explain population growth and designed a lesson that required the girls to look at world population figures over the decades and make predictions on population growth. Fundamentally, I wanted to girls to realize the function that best decribed the growth is an exponential one.

The lesson went quite smoothly and Wan was at one corner filming my every move but the important visitors had not turned up. I was starting to worry they would not get to see the girls in action.

Just as I got them to work on Mindmeister to think about the consequences of population growth and how the data and information help policy makers make important decisions, DSP came in with a throng of other officials. My mind went blank but apparently the girls did not. They actively discussed and penned down their thoughts into the mindmap and here's their work:

BK said the lesson went well. I think I could have done better and begged him to not let me have to go through such an event again.

Mindmeister

CGS subscribes to Mindmeister and every staff and student has an account which allows them to create unlimited number of mindmaps. How cool is that, right?

Today I got the girls to map out their responses to a piece of situational writing to try out the platform as there is going to a visit by a very important person from the Ministry and Boon Keng, my supervisor, has asked me to present a lesson for observation. I have my reservations but since this becomes my main lesson observation for the year, why not right?

The girls seemed to know how to use the platform really well. This attests to the experiences they must have received in the previous 2 years.

Voxopop - Picture Discussion

To prepare the girls for their Oral Examination, I created a Voxopop group, entitled the Green Puma, as I received a green Puma watch from my wife. The girls saw that connection and made endless remarks about it ;p

This portal allows users to record directly and even comment via audio recording. Pretty cool!

Using 360 Panorama

As the girls were learning Box and Whisker plots, I borrowed some very long pieces of sari from Vas (whom is the first colleague I got to know and get along very well with) who recorded the heights of her girls and then made them go to the parade square to stand in increasing heights and then made use of the sari to mark out the first, second and third quartiles.

I decided to carry out the same activity with C3 and this was what they did. I enjoyed the experience of using the app 360 Panorama in my iPhone 4 to take in the entire scene.