Reflection: Week 7(Lesson on 13th Sept)

Phew... the value of reflection can only be fully harnessed when the reflected event is still vivid in your mind, i.e. ASAP after the lesson!!! It's so tough going through all 4 weeks' reflections in a day... Sorry, Dr Tan, I guess it defeated the purpose of you having us reflect upon our learning. But this is so far, my earliest entry after a lesson... just 4 days after.

The start of this lesson was used to address the issues faced during E-learning week. Think Dr Tan did help to clear certain doubts we had about E-learning not being able to serve its purpose. Kudos to him for being frank in saying this year's E-learning week is worse than last year simply because it failed to build on last year's inauguration. And the fact that even our own tutors are slow in adjusting to use E-learning modes of teaching effectively. Enough of E-learning...

The Demo group of the day introduced the use of Windows MovieMaker to make videos for classroom use. It is surely useful especially if specific video contents are not available online. One very good suggestion proposed by the team and then rounded to become more SCLA based is to have students taking a demo video on the right way do a titration or any other experimental technique. And then having the class to critique on it. However, the time-consuming nature of taking and editing such films and the need to have motivated students who are willing to spend additional time doing such filming are all possible limitations to movie-making being widely implemented in classroom lessons.

As for the lesson proper, we were first introduced to the major major project called SCLP. I was totally blown away by last year's winning SCLP for a NIE-wide competition. It was so well-designed, every slide... and the fact it used only Powerpoint mainly to come up with a creditable game is really amazing! With great graphics from Initial D and well-thought gameplan, it really absorbed me into the case scenarios of the game. Quite wonderfully done! From what I understand, SCLP is going to be a package that showcase effective usage of ICT tools for student-centred learning purposes for specific topics. For a Chem n Math class like ours, I believe the packages we can come up with would surely bring a new wave of ICT craze into the respective schools we're going into, provided we are allowed to share the SCLPs we have come up with, at least within the class. That will be rather cool.

THe process itself is long and arduous given the time constraints and the juggling of multiple projects and presentations, but we're gonna come out stronger and better equipped, not just with a few more white hairs and hopefully no obvious wrinkles, but also the ability to enlarge our capacity to take the burdens that comes with teaching and the SCLPs that will at least spice up a few lessons.

Ultimately, I believe it is Dr Tan and NIE's wish that all of us can use this as a starting point for more creative efforts in coming up with more SCLPs along the way despite our busy schedule as full-fledged teachers...