– a Singaporean teacher's storeroom 🖖
was reading /. post on “How Should I Teach a Basic Programming Course?” and these 2 websites appeared in the comments:
the chance of me teaching programming is probably next to zero, but thought it’ll be good to store these 2 interesting links in the storeroom. who knows when it’ll come in useful 😉
Have neglected this storeroom and my choked up bloglines feeds for quite some time. Came upon two posts by Christopher D. Sessums@eduspaces.net. One post was him brainstorming on possible exams questions for his summer “Introduction to Ed Tech Course” (with many excellently practical questions), qn 10 was on “Serious Gaming” which used Neuromatrix, a new educational video game designed to teach neuroscience to 9-15 children. In his other post on a brief look of video/computer games, there’s a comprehensive review of Dodlinger’s (2007) literature review on elements that promoted learning.
As a gamer myself for over 15 years (until recent shifting of priorities to work n family), I would definitely love to engage students in games and learning CL as they play the games. Have not seen ed. games like Neuromatrix in Chinese yet. When will such games materialise, next 10 yrs perhaps? And in the meantime, any chance of learning CL while engaging in non-CL games? *hmm*
the US American system (Grade K-12):
Preschool 3-4 yrs old
Kindergarten (Grade K, 5 yrs old, most of the time taken at the local elementary school)
Elementary school (Grade 1-5, 6-11 yrs old)
Middle school (Grade 6-8, 12-14 yrs old)
High school (Grade 9-12, 15-18 yrs old)
(Note: compiled based on info from Yahoo! Answers)
the typical Singapore system:
Preschool 3-4 yrs old
Kindergarten (5-6 yrs old, equiv. Grade K-1)
Primary school (7-12 yrs old, equiv Grade 2-7)
Secondary school (13-16 yrs old, equiv Grade 8-11)
Junior college (17-18 yrs old, equiv Grade 12-13)
the China system:
Preschool 3-4 yrs old
Kindergarten (5-6 yrs old, equiv. Grade K-1)
Elementary school (7-12 yrs old, equiv Grade 2-7)
Middle school (13-15 yrs old, equiv Grade 8-10)
High school (16-18 yrs old, equiv Grade 11-13)
(Note: to be confirmed :P)
saw this post on /. which led to this article “Your laptop is lying to you” which writes about the indicators we see in our devices are actually manipulating us psychologically. partly agree with the laptop case (my Intel laptop provides ‘time remaining’ but my AMD laptop doesnt), and i believe the handphone case would hit most of us. check it out and see if your devices lied to you too 😉
nearly 1 month ago, 20th june marks the day that i’m officially graduated from my (1st) MA course and this is the envelope that flew all the way from singapore:
besides sharing the joy, here’s my research for sharing:
Title:
An Exploratory Study on a Metacognitive Approach to Teaching and Learning of Spontaneous Speaking in Chinese Language with Audioblogs
Keywords:
chinese language, speaking, audioblogs, metacognition, language learning, language teaching, educational technology, weblog, edublog, 华文, 口语教学,元认知,博客,信息科技,有声博客
Summary:
Language learning involves four areas, namely listening, speaking, reading
and writing. This study focuses on speaking, an area that is often neglected by
teachers for various reasons. In many Chinese Language classrooms, which are
teacher-centered by tradition, students have minimal opportunities to actively
participate in the negotiation of meaning during lesson. To develop students to
become independent learners of speaking in Chinese Language, a metacognitive
framework developed by Goh and Zhang (2002) was adopted in this study. Twenty-five
Secondary Two Express stream Chinese Language students, aged 13 to 14,
participated in this eight weeks study. Audioblogs was used as the mediating
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool through which the students
interacted as they developed their metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive
awareness. Through the use of scaffolding questions, the students carried out self-appraisals to evaluate and monitor their oral performances and planned for their
future speaking tasks. The students were also tasked to provide comments for peers’ oral performances. Seven usable sets of data were analysed and based on inferential
statistics, the treatment may have led the students to improve significantly in their
pretest-posttest oral performance scores. Through peer commenting and self-appraisal
activities in the audioblogs, the students developed greater metacognitive
knowledge and metacognitive awareness.
and here’s the thesis in PDF format. you may need to grab acrobat reader 8 or above to read the content.
and last but not least, i would like to thank the following friends once again, as without their help and encouragement, this research would not have been possible:
Dr Tan Seng Chee (my sup), Dr Christine Goh C.M., Mr. Lim Sing Gee, Mdm. Tan Hiok Keng, Mdm. Ho Fui Ling, Ms. Hoe Joe Hwee and Mr. Amos Goh Yoong Shin, Mr. Darren Anthonio Marino Nonis, Mr. John Ow Eu Gene, Ms. Jeanne Marie Ho Pau Yuen and Dr. Chua Guat Kheng. and last but not least yh2, yh3 and yh4 🙂