Hong Kong Handheld & Mobile Learning Festival

I was lucky enough to be involved in the organisation of the Hong Kong Handheld & Mobile Learning Festival held at the University of Hong Kong last weekend. Over 100 attendees gave up their Saturday to listen and share their experiences on handheld learning.

Two of the presentations featured teachers from our school; Miss Hall presented on her use of iTouch within the classroom alongside Serena Fan from ISF Academy, while Mrs Bookless, Miss Adams and Miss Hitchcox discussed our work with Games Based Learning. It's great to see our teachers sharing and discussing their practice with wider audiences, not only does it help them develop as profession

als by being able to explain their work, it also gives them the opportunity to discuss and share with teachers working in similar ways.

Miss Hall and Miss Fan's presentation can be seen below;

iTouch in the Classroom

Other presentations included using Nintendo DS consoles in the Chinese languageclassroom, Activote in Early Years and GPS on field trips. Keynote presentations by Professor Cher Ping Lim (HKIEd) and the Library of Congress's Kathleen Ferenz gave the audience much to think about and confirmed my own opinion that the use of handheld and mobile devices is an important tool in empowering students to engage more closely with the learning process.

Later in the day I moderated a forum panel consisting of Dr Daniel Churchill (HKU), Gilbert Ho (Apple Asia) and Peter Woodhead (GSIS). The panel responded to a video presentation featuring Tim Rylands, Derek Robertson and Dawn Hallybone, European based influential voices in this field. The discussion was extremely stimulating and covered such topics as leadership, relevance and emerging technologies.

Hopefully one of the results of the day will be an increased sense of community among those who have an interest in this type of learning. Feedback from the day was certainly positive.

Many thanks to all those presenters who worked so hard to produce stimulating and engaging sessions and also all those who turned up to share and learn!

Moon Festival INSET

Whilst it's a long weekend for many this week, it's going to be a busy time in school as we host an INSET session on Friday. Focusing on preparing teachers to implement the ISTE Standards, the day will guide staff on how they can meet the five standards and performance indicators required;

1. Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity
2. Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments
3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning
4. Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility
5. Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership

We are lucky to be joined by Dr Daniel Churchill and Dr Bob Fox from Hong Kong University who will be speaking and running workshops. The day will consist of two keynote sessions and ten workshops, eight of which will be run by Kellett staff. It's excellent to see that we are able to provide professional development opportunities for our staff using our own expertise.

We will also be welcoming three colleagues from overseas FOBISSEA schools who will be joining the day and sharing their experiences.

The workshops range from subjects such as Google Apps and Docs, Data Handling in Maths, using Scratch, Twitter as a professional development tool, and using iTouch apps in the classroom.

As you can imagine, hosting an event like this has taken a large amount of organisation and I'm very grateful for the efforts of the ICT Team in making it happen, as well, of course, to all those involved in the workshops and keynotes.

It's The End of the Word As We Know it...

and I feel fine.

Microsoft Word that is. The staff from Google HK gave a fascinating insight into how various Google products can be used within the classroom during Saturday's session at HKU. We've already started experimenting with Google docs at Kellett and that work now needs to be expanded upon in the wider curriculum, especially at KS2 and KS3.

Apart from a good look at Google Docs there was a session looking at Google Earth and Maps, as well as Google Sites. All of these can be used throughout our curriculum and they obviously have serious implications for our pedagogy.

I'm currently sat here trying to think of a good reason to use Microsoft Word in the KS2/3 classroom... it's not easy.

Welcome to the cloud...

Google Docs.... rocks!

Well, that's what Google says!

It's a testament to the interest that the education community in HK has in looking at collaborative ways of working that this Saturday's Google Seminar at HKU is hugely oversubscribed. So much so that there is now a second venue to cope with the overspill!

Year 7 will start their work with Google Docs tomorrow so it will be a good chance to try out before learning from Google staff.

Below is a video from Google explaining the idea behind Google Docs.

Google Docs

Year 7 have been working on the creation of a PowerPoint presentation about themselves. Whilst the use of PowerPoint may not be exactly innovative, the challenge for students is to make their work visually interesting and give them the scaffold to talk to their peers about themselves for three minutes.

As I've mentioned before we've looked at some aspects of PowerPoint that people often mis-use; intrusive backgrounds, inappropriate animations etc and we're trying to avoid those mistakes.

Whilst the use of PowerPoint might be labelled as old fashioned, it does have its uses and is still a standard software package for presentations. When our presentations are finished we will be looking at alternatives to PowerPoint and comparing applications.

We are going to try something different and innovative during our presentations though. When each Presentation is completed all students will have the opportunity to peer assess their classmates via Google Docs. Hopefully, each presenter will then have 23 pieces of feedback to help them evaluate and if necessary, refine their work.

That's the theory anyway! Setting up Google Docs has taken a little time but we seem to be getting there. Check back to see how it goes.

Rather conveniently, I will be attending a session on using Google Docs in the classroom at Hong Kong University this Saturday. Hopefully, I will return with some good ideas on how we can use this excellent resource across the school.