Conference day

I am excited. I am inspired, very much so and I cant wait to have this happening in the school with all the students and teachers. I hope they could share the same excitement with me, if not more.

I also got the chance to meet Big heads from UK and big heads from Malaysia. One big head is Lord Sutherland. He told me he’s good friend of our former governor, Sir David Wilson! He gave a very interesting keynote speech and he used an analogy of buying tickets to illustrate that computer is already a part of life. He used to buy tickets by telephone order and yet he had to press few buttons before he got on to the right channel and could eventually end up with someone saying, ‘the waiting queue is very long at the moment…’. It might be 30 mins before he could really place an order. But now, everyone could do it by few clicks online. So why stick to the old way of doing things? What a nice analogy telling people that our students are living with the technology and we just have to teach them in the way they are learning.


There is a big team of Malaysian officials from the Ministry of Education. They are now planning to use the new platform in ALL the schools in Malaysia. They are talking about hundreds and thousands of schools! What an innovative attempt. So we people in Hong Kong should catch up. We have been boasting ourselves as the most forward looking people and we can lag behind, still using talk and chalk!


There are really lots of things to talk about the conference. Let me just drop in few lines from my notes. They are spoken by different people, some are educationalists, some are just teachers in the school. Each of them is enough for me to write a paper on it. Whoever is reading this blog, do ‘think’ after reading each line and apply that to our teaching and learning context in the schools. I hope you get as inspired as I am now!


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Using IT in school - Ordinary people doing extraordinary things? Or just ordinary people doing ordinary things?


A learning platform should be fun, interactive, cool, flexible and socially involved.


Schools should reflect what the society is. Schools should then help students to fit in society. We should equip them with 21st Century skills.


Education is an engine for change in society; education should prepare students for change.


Information technology is no longer an add-on. It is the way we live now! We should take the young folk’s hands and head them to the future.


WE should transform the school so the students can use the platform to interact with people.


Professional development therefore comes during and after CHANGES.


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A goal in education - independence in learning but abundance in culture. There should be something for everyone. Allow and promote creativity! Teachers have to teach with creativity and students could then develop their creativity.


Examples of creativity learning:


Ask students to do a project: What can you do with the content in your waste bin?


Use the idea of a card game, think of a way to learn periodic tables


Get a Physics teacher in and tell students how to take pics of ‘motion’- a blend of Physics and photography


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Learning and teaching should be done in a mixed mode- bit of lecturing and bit of technology


Intellectual abilities are developed through socially/ culturally authentic tasks. Learning through making!


Learners construct, rather than passively receive pre-digested knowledge and understanding. ( I love this very much! That points out straight away the difference between instructional teaching and student-centered learning)


Teachers are ironically, very good risk managers. They avoid too much risk too soon. ( So brave, dear! School is already a very safe place!)


Intranet and eclass are different from a good learning platform. It is sort of like separating learning from life. We have to make learning and life together for our students. We then need a platform which is our students’ home page, the very first page they browse. So it should include all the social networking sites, like Facebooks, twitter, youTube etc. We should adopt a ‘one shop for all’ model. It is more like a blurring of social network and learning network.


Engage is the word. We have to engage our students in learning. We should then grasp the good timing- when students are heavily involved online- to sustain the momentum and fine tune their direction.


OH, teachers, are you excited? Let’s work together to create a real learning scenario that would excite our students too!

If you want to know more about the conference, here it is:
http://www.frogtrade.com/index.phtml?d=1308460