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.