Now that it is over...

ICET 2007 was a blast. Imagining more than a thousand people—teachers, researchers, IT people, business people—together in the same place for two days. I can imagine it to be a hot bed for information exchange between schools and businesses, MOE and businesses, schools and schools, and so on.

As for me, since I am only a trainee teacher with absolutely zilch contacts (plus I'm shy too), I spent most of the time sitting at the back of the hall with all my equipment balanced precariously on my lap and sometimes listening with a gaping mouth at the possibilities of the future.

The future is as exciting or as daunting as we make it out to be.

Now that it is over, what are you going to do?

Researcher Track 1D: Leishman

Wikis, Blogs, Aggregators and Office 2.0—Democratising the Student-Learning Process, by Mike Leishman



Mr Leishman showed us how wikis can be used in the classroom. I was first introduced to the use of wikis in the classroom by my ICT professor Dr Ashley Tan in NIE. We did practically everything on our class wiki page, and it worked really well. It includes an element of collaboration that blogs don't have.

I'm really curious about Scratch. It is a programming language that lets you create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art, and share it online as well. I'm downloading it right now. :)

Check out the cool links below.

Links

wikis
pbwiki
wikispaces

programming language
scratch

blogs
tumblr
blogger

aggregators (great for tracking students' blogs)
pageflakes
newsgator
(I like protopage)

office 2.0
zoho
google docs

Researcher Track 1D: Manu

Productive Failure, by Dr Manu Kapur

Dr Manu's research is about persistence vs performance success. Is there a hidden efficacy in un-scaffolded, ill-structured problem-solving processes?

He studied two groups of students chatting on MSN—one discussing ill-structured and the other well-structured physics questions. He found that although the performance of groups working on ill-structured questions seemed chaotic and ineffective, these groups later outperformed their peers on individual well-structured questions. This shows that it is beneficial to have tasks that develop persistence through failure.

Therefore, an implication of this finding is that we need to question the default pedagogical rush to scaffold ill-structured problem solving!! He says that it is possible to go backwards from complex to simple, instead of what we have been taught, to scaffold from simple to complex! Whoa... Quite against the grain.

He did a study at Clementi Town Secondary School. They implemented two cycles: the productive-failure cycle (no homework) and the lecture-practice cycle. For the productive-failure cycle, students had high engagement but low confidence (the vast majority could not solve the problem at all). At the final test, the students in the productive-failure cycle outperformed students the lecture-practice cycle on both well-structured items (which is remarkable cos they had no homework or practice at all!), and the ill-structured items.

We assume that students are ready to make optimal use of the structure that we design for them, but that is not always true. His study showed that students who went through the productive-failure cycle were actually better equipped to make use of the scaffolding provided for them. It means that sometimes short-term inefficiency may lead to long-term performance.

Order is important, but how it comes about is more important. Top-down order is efficient; bottom-up is more flexible and adaptable, that is, IF it emerges. Ha! Singapore emphasizes an efficiency-dominated pedagogy. Dr Manu proposes that we should have an innovation-dominated paradigm, rather than an effeciency-dominated one.

Dr Manu's study is really intresting. I wonder if productive failure works for the learning of language?

Last teabreak of the Conference

I've become soft. I'm actually tired from sitting here and listening all day. I'm ready for some hands-on activities!

School Track 3C: Tampines JC

Wiki TP by Tampines JC

Take a look at how TPJC students collaborate with each other on GP topics in a blog: http://wikitp.blogspot.com/.

In addition to the benefits of collaboration, it also creates an online resource for the students to refer to.

What a lot of work! Well done. Although I wonder if a wiki platform would be easier to manage, something like pbwiki or wikispaces or something?

Links
Discovery Rewind 2006

School Track 3C: Jurong JC

Facilitating Mathematic Discourse Using the Guided Collaborative Critique Framework in a Quasi-Synchronous Chat Environment, by Wee Juan Dee

This kinda went over my head. I think it is because it has been so long since I've thought about JC Maths!

School Track 3C: Beatty

Engaged Learning Using Podcasts and Interactive Whiteboard
by Beatty Secondary School

I have never touched an interactive whiteboard in my life. Do you think the interactive whiteboard will replace the regular whiteboard the way the whiteboard has replaced the chalkboard?

I worry about information overload. Then again, I once had the not-easy task of touching up a really bad photo of a whiteboard with very important information in very light ink on it, and I don't really want to do that again.

Innovative things that Beatty is doing

• Podcasts play while a powerpoint is being shown. I wonder how this is done? Technically speaking that is.. Is it bundled together? Can someone enlighten me?

Links
Chem Alive