Reflection on essential reading for week 12

This year, my school is trying to push students to revise what they have learnt in school by setting up an online assessment platform. After rearding an assigned English story book, students have to go online and answer 10 multiple-choice questions (eclass). By using this system, it is easy and convenient for teachers to monitor students' progress and get their results (statistic). However, teachers have to urge students to finish the online assessment on time. You know, students may have a lot of excuses, such as the computer doesn't work. Besides, only certain types of questions (M.C., Fill-in-blank, etc) are suitable. Open-end questions would be quite difficult for the system to gather data related to students' performance.

Reflection on essential reading for week 11

LMS, which refers to learning management systems, are being widely used in Hong Kong schools. The common ones are “E-class” in many primary or secondary schools and “Blackboard” in tertiary education. I could say these systems help facilitate teaching & learning among teachers and students. The writer of the article talked about some misconceptions related to LMS. He reinforced that learning had to be driven by the needs of students rather than the LMS design. He pointed out that it would be easier for learners to proceed life long learning when they were plugged into a community or a learning network, instead of having previous learning confined to a content locked LMS. In my opinion, the system can definitely provide a medium/ platform for learning. However, at the very first stage, teachers have to show students the real use of the system through well planned lessons with clear goals and objectives. Then, the teachers can integrate the learning into the real community groups through the system to encourage authentic and meaningful interactions. As time goes by, it is expected that learners can form their learning habits. Does any teacher have ideas on how to use LMS effectively?

Reflection on essential reading for week 10

Learner autonomy is regarded as a learner’s capacity for planning their self study, taking control of their own study progress, as well as writing critical reflection. The aim is for self-improving!

In the article, the writer mentioned that CALL courseware should be both technology and pedagogy based. The writer also introduced three approaches to learner autonomy: individual-cognitive, social-interactive and experimental-participatory. By modifying these three approaches, Tandem learning was implemented for helping students enhance their autonomy in learning. It’s about combining two groups of learners: L1 & L2. These two groups of learners would benefit from each other.

However, I think it’s quite difficult to do it in my school because teachers may find it very challenging to select these two groups of students. It needs a lot of human resources, especially for monitoring, assessing students’ progress, and evaluation. Do teachers have any similar experience?