Embracing the new norm

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When I was a secondary school student in the early 2000s, Humanities lesson was a time of jolting down notes from the OHP. In upper secondary, there was the occasional pictures and videos but still mainly writing down notes from the PowerPoint slides.😅 Nevertheless, I enjoyed listening to the stories and liked the humanities.

Fast forward to the 2020s, the  education landscape has changed drastically and we as teachers too need to embrace the new norm to help our students learn better. I had the opportunity to attend 2 webinar and would like to share some of my insights.

SLS for active learning for DI (By Ms Jenny)

Ms Jenny shared about how SLS can be an effective platform to encourage active learning and enable differentiated instruction. Being a virtual classroom with lesson materials, activities available for anytime, anywhere, it allows students to take ownership of their learning and be more self directed. It also encourages student-student interaction as well as student-content interaction apart from the usual student-teacher interaction. Some key takeaways from the sharing was how various features of the SLS can be used to enhance learning:

-  Subgroup access to certain activities based on student ability,  allows self-pace learning, maximizing student progress.

- Thinking routines embedded in SLS such as 'see think wonder' helps students to make their thinking visible.

- Assessment tools in SLS, auto graded tools allows generation of heat map to analyse class overall performance thus enabling teachers to correct common misconceptions. 

- Interactive thinking tools which allows students to view and comment on their peer's work thus learning from one another.

In all, the sharing was insightful and the features shared will be helpful as we craft SLS package for our students. 

Lower Sec Geography syllabus implementation workshop (By CPDD)

In 2021, there will be a new syllabus for lower secondary geography and focus will be on Sustainability and resource management. Sustainability is very important in today's content and it is essential that we educate the younger generation about it.

One aspect that will inculcate in students empathy and care for the environment would be the response to geographical issue where they will look at an overseas case study and share how they would help to improve the situation. For GI, there is also new addition to the last stage 'reflection and take action' where schools can decide to share student's GI findings with the various ministries. This is a great move forward and sends a strong message to the students that they too can play a part in helping to improve our living environment. This makes learning of Geography even more relevant and real. 

In line with the move towards blended learning, various SLS packages was introduced to support student learning. This will go hand in hand with the introduction of PDLP in the coming year. Indeed, teaching and learning is changing so let us prepare and embrace the new norm 😆💪


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