Turning a Corner

Sitting at the traffic lights last night on my way home from work I looked at this and suddently felt "Yes we have turned a corner". After 9 years at my school here in Hong Kong I finally feel that I've had an impact, I'm making a difference and that learning is turning a corner because of this. As this photo suggests a little colour is appearing in our grayscale world.

What has given me this optimistic view? Working with a faculty yesterday on moving from their well favoured booklets to developing an online learning course. As our Year 7 students now all have their own laptops we're looking at ways of them utilising these with our new online Learning Environment WISdom (moodle based). I think what sold the idea to this lovely (yet very traditional) teacher was that we could cut down on her marking! Over the course of the year she teaches all 180+ Y7 students the same material, from her booklet we could make 8 of the 10 activities self marking - and give the students immediate feedback on their progress. Now what teacher wouldn't see this as a win?

Another positive from this is that the Head of Faculty is going to give us admin support! As this teacher isn't up to speed on making a Quiz, the Faculty tech will do this for her! Win!

Trying Out The Mobility - Where can this take us?

Alan and I are thinking about IEA Award and blogging

The above was sent from my iPhone today whilst Alan and I were working on supporting students of the IEA Award. The chain of thoughts that this has set of has left us now both in overdrive. Imagine a group of students on an excursion contributing photographic evidence to a common blog.

What could we do with that? More importantly how do we get buy-in from other faculty areas? How do we prove what we suspect is possible?
The Quest
Our idea is to hold a cross-foundation Quest. Use game-based theory to get students involved in using mobile blogging technologies. The backstory to the Quest is that you have gone into an old secondhand bookshop in Hong Kong where you find a diary belonging to a resistance fighter from WW2. Unfortunately it is very damaged and you need to use the clues provided in the diary to find out the missing pieces. Students then need to send a photo of themselves at the place in Hong Kong to the Quest blog. Bonus points in the quest can be achieved through uploading other media to the shared online folder.
What's Next?
Where we go now with this is organising the technicalities. Once we have completed the quest we need to put together a presentation about what happened, interview with students that participated and highlight the 21st Century Skills the students have used/learnt. We can then use this video at a staff meeting to show teachers from other faculties what is possible with mobile blogging, ease of use, links to curriculum etc.

Mobile at Last

Let's see if this works

Lee-Anne