Tagged: professional development

Flipping Mother Tongue oracy lessons with digital storytelling and social learning

This is my first attempt to share some of my ideas to flip teaching and learning. I picked oracy lesson because I have been using tools like VoiceThread for oracy teaching and assessment for a few years. I still believe there are a lot of room for improvement. I will continue to explore further and sharpen my flipping practices. I hope I can come up with a proposal for iCTLT 2014 based on this sharing 🙂

Singapore to set up Centre for Chinese Language

From MOE’s Press Releases,

Leveraging on Singapore’s unique bilingual environment for the teaching and learning of the Chinese Language (CL), a centre will be established to focus on the training and development of CL teachers. The National Institute of Education (NIE) will work with the Ministry of Education (MOE) to set up the Singapore Centre for Chinese language (SCCL) [新加坡华文教研中心] by mid 2009.

I can look forward to more professional development opportunities in Chinese language teaching.

Thoughts of Professional Development

From one of my favourite edublogs, Wesley Fryer’s Speed of Creativity:

…Today I had an opportunity to visit with about fifteen elementary teachers in a rural Oklahoma school…Less than one-third of the teachers in my presentation had high speed Internet access at their home currently, and none were acquainted with web 2.0 tools and websites…

As I looked at my school’s recent Internet usage survey, over 90% of my fellow school teachers had high speed Internet access at home. That is much higher than the figure of the rural Oklahoma school. However very few teachers in my school were acquainted with web 2.0 tools and websites based on my observation and conversation with them.

I am sure some of the teachers have Friendster or Facebook accounts. I am also certain some of them have personal blogs. The problem is, only a handful of teachers are bringing the web technology into the classrooms. Why do I say that?

There is a blog module in the school LMS. The good and bad news: Children are posting videos, journals and jokes, but in a rather haphazard manner without teachers’ moderation. The really bad news: Only a few teachers made use of it to teach (I must admit I am the only teacher in my school blogging ‘religiously’).

I am not blaming my fellow teachers. In fact I cannot blame them at all because they are really competent educators. I think this situation can be improved by developing the mindset and skillset of teachers in terms of education technology. In other words, a professional development workshop like what Wesley did would be extremely beneficial!

Question: Who is going to conduct the workshop?

I wanted to, but I guess I really more time and exposure to get myself ready to inform and convince teachers who are way more experienced than me. Perhaps someone from ETD would be a more suitable candidant.

Or should we get Wesley to fly to Singapore? 🙂