Dec 14 End-of-course Reflection

It was my great pleasure to have taken Paul's CALL course and I enjoyed every single session very much. The course is very practical and inspirational that has given me lots of impacts both on my teaching and professional development as a teacher. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to Paul for organizing such a wonderful course for us and trying his very best to promote e-learning. I would also like to write about my reflection after completed the course.

In terms of teaching and learning, the course has provided me with plenty of new ideas to try out with my P.6 students. I've tried to use Padlet for brainstorming ideas and vocabulary in writing, Actively Learn for interactive reading comprehension, Nearpod lessons on grammar, Quizlet for vocabulary building, Kahoot! and Quizlet Live for in-class competitions, EDpuzzle for interactive listening and many more. Although they were often short tasks that only took less than a lesson time, the impacts on my teaching and my students' learning were huge. One of the most positive effects was motivation. It is very obvious that students are more engaged and self-directed when learning with the interactive e-tools. They are more actively involved in the lessons as they are 100% participating. Another considerable benefit was collaboration. As teachers are worrying about how to enhance students' cooperation and cater for learners' diversity, e-learning is a fantastic way to achieve that. As students' work are instantly posted and shown to everybody in the class, less-able students can get the advantage of learning from the more-able ones. Teachers can also get to know who is leaving behind so that immediate support can be given. I believe in this way, teaching and learning can be more effective.

In terms of personal development as a teacher, the course has brought to me a lot of inspirations and self-reflections. After teaching for 4 years, I sometimes feel that I am running out of ideas in teaching. Things are becoming routine and my passion is losing under the huge workload. However, after taking the course, one very valuable inspiration that has rooted in my mind is that I, as a teacher, need to keep learning. I have heard a saying, "the day you stop learning is the day you stop teaching." I am blessed that I've learnt a lot of new things from this course, which enable me to have new ideas and gain a little passion to improve my teaching. On top of that, I even start to bring impacts on my fellow colleagues. I remember that I used Prezi instead of PowerPoint for teaching/ presentation in a lesson observation by my panel head and partners. Not only my students but also my colleagues were very much impressed. They even came to me and ask me how to make a Prezi presentation! From that moment onward, I knew I am starting to make things change.


Once again, thank you very much, Paul! :)

CALL 13_Dec 9 Reflection

First of all, I was very disappointed when I knew that I could not attend the last session of the CALL course due to my school duty. I just thought that I had missed a lot of important things...:( I really wish I was there!

Anyway, I was lucky that I could catch up the session content and get my blogfolio tasks done. I know that the session focused on connecting with students inside or outside class. When I studied the lesson plan, I knew that Paul had introduced Kahoot! and Quizlet Live, which I have used with my students before! What I can say about the two tools is that my students just LOVE them! Now, whenever I bought iPads into the classroom and they would ask me, "are we playing on Kahoot?" This platform is really powerful as it creates a real time competition among the students. Quizlet Live even brings it to another level as it requires students to team up and interact with one another to 'win' the competition. From my experience, the atmosphere of the lesson is heated up and students' engagement and motivation are highly boosted! It's just amazing!!!

For the first blogfolio task (Google Forms Questionnaire), it is very useful not only for teachers to collect information from students, but also in a way that students can create simple surveys or questionnaires for the use of interviewing activities. It is particularly practical for communicative speaking tasks and project learning.

For the second blogfolio task, which is a GoFormative quiz, I was stunned when I tried to create my quiz. It took me NO TIME to get it done. I just downloaded a picture and a comprehension worksheet from the textbook publisher website, made a few minor changes, clicked a few buttons and the quiz was done! I didn't even need to type the questions nor MC options. I will use this a lot for both in-class activities and as homework.

CALL 13_Dec 9 GoFormative Quiz

Here's my GoFormative Quiz on Primary Longman Elect 6B Ch.1 - Text Type (Riddles)
Please feel free to do it :)

Click me for link

CALL 13_Dec 9 Google Forms Questionnaire

It would be my great pleasure if you can respond to my Christmas Vacation Survey! Thank you very much =)

CALL 12_Dec 2 Reflection

Tonight, Paul invited Ms Zoe Chan to share their experience on a flipped classroom project with us. In their project, they've used a wide variety of e-learning tools, such as Adobe Spark Video, EDpuzzle, Padlet, Quizlet and many more. The presentation was very useful and insightful. In the short term, it gave me more ideas on how to get my term paper mini project done. ;p In the long term, I know more about how to manage a teaching unit using the flipped classroom concept, and how to utilize the use of different e-learning tools. I want to take this opportunity to thank Paul and Zoe for their sharing of this wonderful project :)

Talking back to the blogfolio task we did tonight, the Nearpod lesson, it is getting more and more popular in the education field. In my school, the panel is promoting Nearpod and actually held a workshop earlier before to let us familiarize ourselves with the various functions. Actually, Nearpod is a very good platform for teachers to start planning e-learning lessons as the interface is user-friendly on one hand. On the other hand, the built-in functions like MC quiz, drag and drop (fill in the blanks), draw it and open-ended questions enable teachers to plan lessons in a more interactive way. During the lesson, teachers can even view the immediate results of the students. I think this is one of the most powerful effects. The students' responses allow teachers to reflect on his/her teaching right on the spot and give feedback instantly. This will certainly make teaching and learning more effective. On top of that, Nearpod allows embedding other different mediums such as Youtube videos (although for free for just a limited time). This helps teachers to engage students in the lesson and arouse motivation. Last but not least, the two lesson modes- the teacher paced and student paced - create flexibility for the lesson to be used in lesson by teachers and students or after class by students themselves to promote independent learning.

I will use a Nearpod lesson to teach a grammar lesson on the Second Conditional next week. Hope I can share some of my thoughts and hands-on experience after the lesson! :)))

CALL 12_Dec 2 Nearpod Lesson

Please check out my new Nearpod lesson on Primary Longman Elect 6B Ch.1 - Beautiful Words!

Link is here!

CALL 11_Nov 25 Reflection

In this session, we have explored a number of tools which are useful for presentations. They are Padlet, Prezi, Powtoon, Adobe Page, Wix, Pinterest and TES Blendspace etc. We also did two tasks on Padlet and Prezi.
I've used Padlet for brainstorming ideas in a writing lesson with my students before. The results were amazing, in a way that can arouse students' motivation and promote collaborative learning. Besides brainstorming, Paul has introduced us to another use of Padlet, which is to present teaching materials of a unit. Since we have a server drive for teachers to store materials in our school, and I always use Google Drive to store my teaching materials, Padlet may not be such appealing to teachers like me. However, it can be very useful for students. Teachers can put the useful materials of the unit on Padlet, then give students the link and they can easily access worksheets, PowerPoint files or videos used easily at home. I think this can foster independent learning, especially for less able students.
I also like Prezi and Powtoon very much because they provide very cute and fancy layout for presentations. Primary students will surely like them. Also, the clear layout requires presenters to type in POINTS only but not clumsy sentences, which is helpful for teachers and students to develop better presentation skills.