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!