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teaching home-based (online) learning

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)

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restful weekend

often we wish each other “have a restful weekend”, but more often than not, we teachers know at the back of our mind the many things that’s waiting for us to catch up with. so, how can one (possibly) achieve a restful state? it’s all in the mind we believe #thinkaboutit

came to us during the chit-chat this morning, and here’s the summary:

“Restful(ness) is in the state of mind”

cite as (Tan & Nonis, 2020)

have a restful weekend if you are reading this (:

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microsoft hup office 2020

it’s been almost a year since we last heard abt microsoft hup, or home user program in full. indeed, HUP is one of the main reasons how visitors from singapore landed in this storeroom (:

an email received this morning definitely sounds like good news for all MOE icon users who are almost certainly microsoft office 365 users:

email dated 18 Oct 2019 8:14AM

akan datang … but definitely good news for many, if not all (:

//update details’ out; check out email dated Oct 21, 9:02AM for the instructions to obtaining the free copies of Office 365 apps.

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class size, learning, and teaching

was at a chat the other day and was prompted the question “people says class size matters. what do you think?” and my response created on-the-fly goes somewhat like this:

the term of ‘class size’ concerns two main ideas: 1. classroom management, and 2. learning. the two ideas are inter-related, but often the first idea may become the focus, especially in a classroom where lessons are transmissionist (i.e., the teacher talks and ‘download’ knowledge to students who are (assumed to be) listening, and learning (is assumed) to take place by (passive) listening with the occasional IRE discourse). in such a case, class size matters if there are many ‘disruptive’ students; but it probably doesnt matter if the students are all students who are non-disruptive to the lesson delivery, and of course, the IRE discourse.

what if learning is a participatory, interactive, and social phenomenon? such learning would often be carried out in group settings. given a class of 40, how many groups should a teacher allow students to form? from a classroom management perspective, the fewer the groups may appear to be easier for managing and control. 40 divided by 8 gives 5 groups, and a teacher needs to only manage 5 groups. however, literature on collaborative learning would advise groups of 3-4 for more effective learning in groups. that would mean 10 groups, doubling the 5 earlier. assuming a teacher has designed and put in place processes and scaffolds to guide effective group work, the teacher’s work does not end here. the teacher now becomes the facilitator of learning. facilitation, a word often used, is difficult in practice as it may require a teacher to analyse the current state of learning, prompt questions, probe students’ thinking, provide alternate perspectives, all actions on-the-fly to effectively customised what s/he is going to say when s/he appears at each group. would class size matter? given that curriculum time is fixed, the amount of meaningful facilitation for deeper learning a teacher can provide to students would be divided by the number of groups. smaller number of groups means more quality time for each group of students. this applies to facilitation of online discourse for learning too. so, does class size matter?

transmissionist or participatory, a teacher will provide assignments for students to complete. given a class of 40, let’s start with transmissionist way of learning – each student is required to submit a 3-min oral performance recorded and uploaded to the LMS, a teacher would need to spend at least 120 mins just to listen to each audio clip, without considering the amount of time needed to assess, think, and provide meaningful feedback to each student/recording. if the class is made up of 30 students, the difference would be 30 mins of listening time. the same computation can apply to written assignments too. if learning is participatory – each student is required to write an online post, and thereafter reply to at least 2 peers’ posts to learn through interaction. the number of posts a class of 30 students, versus a class of 40 students, could be significantly different. so, does class size matter?

classroom students photo

so in conclusion, does class size matter? your perspective (and conception) of learning would determine the answer.

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