Stepping Stones

Widgets

noreply@blogger.com (khong) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:45:00 +0000

Personally, a blog would be a platform for students to extend their learning beyond the classroom walls. While browsing through the available widgets, I have chosen to add in a game above other possibilities (such as videos or polls). I will briefly explain my choice.

By putting in the game Hangman, I aim to allow students to play the game, and learn more vocabulary words. This would be interesting as they are playing a game and not merely reading passages and sentences. There is also an option in the game where students can find out more about the word and its meaning. They can also go online to see how the word can be used in various sentences.

In class, students can continue to build upon their learning by sharing to the class the words they have encountered. It will be more engaging for them because it deviates from the typical method where students read hardcopy books, since students are increasingly tech-savvy nowadays.

Blogs

noreply@blogger.com (khong) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 05:11:00 +0000

It is important to think about why blogs might be useful (and how) if I am to consider using it in future when I teach. A first perspective would be that students own the blogs. In this context, one of the affordances of using blogs is that the student may have a greater sense of ownership, and will be more responsible in posting, as well as more motivated to post their own thoughts because they own that space. Also, blogs allow an effective means for the teacher to keep track of the students' progress or if they have completed their tasks.

In another way, the teacher may be the one owning the blog. In this context, students may use the blog to retrieve information pertaining to the syllabi, but outside of class. THe affordance of using blogs in this sense would be that students will have a chance to deviate from the traditional classroom face to face setting, and they may be more engaged to surf the internet and learn new things from the teacher's blog. All in all, their learning process may be enhanced.

MASH

noreply@blogger.com (khong) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 04:17:00 +0000

Over the weekend, I learnt about multimedia design in two different ways. The first was a "traditional" text-based method, and the other was through a Microsoft Teaching Agent.

My experience with the Agent was rather pleasant, as the animations, being new, created more interest in the topic. However, the inability to 'stop the lesson' at certain junctures so that I can digest the material and process it meant that I had to either start the lesson again or that I had to 'forego what I had missed and move on'. In that sense, I believe the lesson objectives were not met.

Albeit a boring interface void of getures and animation, the text-based approach was, I felt, more suitable for me. I fully understood the main concepts in each of the two sections and not only that, before I moved on to the next part, I gave myself some time to process the information presented, and even did a mental conclusion of what I have learnt. I was also able to reread parts of the text that I did not understand when I went through it the first time.

Overall, I prefer the traditional method. Perhaps I am rather conservative, but I feel that different people do have different learning styles, and it is still relatively difficult to find an executive teaching style that befits all.

Pedagogical Approaches

noreply@blogger.com (khong) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:12:00 +0000

It was interesting to experience how the Jigsaw method works. While an expert team becomes specialised in one of the seven pedagogical approaches, the coming together of the home team means that everyone can contribute and benefit from each other. Knowing what 'knowledge-based inquiry' is all about, on my part, will be important as I will be given the opportunity to share what I've already learnt. This would be more engaging as it promotes "peer-supported learning". The one drawback is that it is time-consuming.

Engaged learning

noreply@blogger.com (khong) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:27:00 +0000

Learning in modern times has evolved from listening to a teacher's monologue into a realm where imagination has no limit. Technology has facilitated the students' minds to venture far out of the classroom space, and into places that they may not physically assess. As such, using technology to a teacher's advantage would be to captivate the students' attention, to have an online "active conversation" with the teacher, and to explore various areas of focus with guidance from the teacher.