the last post was created on 0214, and today’s 0412. on 0214, the covid-19 situation was just budding, and now on 0412 the situation has escalated worldwide. on 0214, classroom teaching was still going on as per ‘normal’; on 0412, the new norm today (which began 4 days ago) is full home-based learning (or FHBL in short). so how has learning become, from one norm to another norm?
chanced upon NUS Prof. Ben Leong’s post in which he reflected on the his FIVE(5) years of journey before achieving success in conducting full online interactive teaching. epistemologically speaking, we know learning is slow and experiential, and i thank prof leong for sharing his (giant’s) experiences for the rest of us to learn from. these are some of the ideas/statements that resonated with me (with emphasis added):
- “the first principle of leadership is that ‘if we take care of our people, our people will take care of us.’ Similarly, ‘if the students know that the teacher cares, the students will learn.'”
- “My hypothesis for why online teaching has not been successful in the past is that teaching is an inherently social activity. Things are different today because we are now able to replicate many social interactions using available online tools.”
- “To make learning social, I have successfully adopted and deployed the following: (1) Interactive online teaching using Zoom; (2) Activity feeds; (3) In-platform messaging; (4) Forums – regular and video; (5) Gamification” (numbering added)
- “Students actually have to be taught how to be online students and to interact with the online platform because lessons can be conducted. However, once the protocols are established, it can become quite natural.”
- “… the natural approach to making online learning more social is to borrow features from social networks.”
- “Messaging apps like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger are the norm when the young people communicate with each other…These SMS-like interactions (in the LMS) provide for almost realtime and instantaneous feedback that is perhaps even more convenient than face-to-face meetings.”
- “We have online video clips in place of lectures and we even have a specialized forum to allow students to ask questions that are tagged to a specific point on the video timeline. This allows the teaching staff to understand the context of the questions and helps us identify the parts of a recorded video that might be wanting or not sufficiently clear.”
- Gamification, together with timely feedback, provides the students will a sense of progress and this helps to improve student motivation and engagement…….I have also emphasized that gamification is not some silver bullet that will magically make teaching better. Consider it an icing that can make a good cake even better. If a cake is bad, no amount of icing can make it a good cake.
teaching is an inherently social activity, and so is learning which inherently has a social aspect to it. that’s why many teachers, during this time, choose to adopt ‘live’ meeting/lesson via Zoom/Google Meet/any other conferencing tools to engage students. so two questions that may lead on from here: (1) how do we ‘distribute’ the screen time limit among the different subjects each day? (what we are struggling here is screen time WITH teachers; some children are glued to screens big and small in a day and may very well exceed that ‘limit’?); (2) what other means/channels have we put in place to support the social phenomenon? looking at the 5 items that contributed to the successful implementation, [2] activity feeds, [3] in-platform messaging, and [4] in-platform forums are probably missing in popular platforms teachers are currently using (incl. Google Classrooms).
students need to be taught how to be online students. these would include the various aspects of a student’s life, including but not limited to attending lesson, doing and handing up assignments, clarifying doubts with teachers, receiving feedback and seek further clarification for understanding. and some of the rules and routines i have improvised so far include:
- attending ‘live’ lesson:
- join lesson with real names known to the teacher
- use the teacher greeting students routine during f2f lessons to signify the start of the lesson (improvise and adapt the 行礼 bowing part)
- mute mics if they introduce disturbance to the air (or teacher can choose to mute all mics when the teacher is talking)
- whenever a question is initiated, a response is expected and students can feel free to unmute themselves to answer
- use the ‘raise’ hand /like function in Zoom to indicate completion of tasks, or simple acknowledgement to teacher’s query (hmm… how to raise hand in Meet?)
- doing and handing up assignments:
- where paper-n-pen work is essential, use Adobe Scan to take photos of written work, and submit it via assignment set in Google Classroom
- clarifying doubts
- instant messaging via WhatsApp with photos to support teacher’s understanding of queries as necessary
- receiving feedback and further clarifying
- read the comments provided by teacher, and WA as necessary (ownership of learning)
- teacher may proactively check on students’ understanding of feedback via WA too
i believe the list will expand and be refined as our experiences grow. oh btw, the above list applies to my secondary school students. if you are a K-6 primary school teacher, your list will likely to be different (: now, it’s time for me to go back to my lesson designing and preparation … …
#SGUnited #TogetherWeWillImprove #TogetherWeWillOvercome
(p.s. prof leong has published a note on fb yesterday to share his thoughts on the recent Zoom bombing event and the ongoing hbl)