On 5th Feb 2013, I attended an open lesson at The Lok Sin Tong Leung Wong Wai Fong Memorial School (樂善堂梁黃蕙芳紀念學校). This was co-organized by the school and e-Class which was an education solution vendor.
For evey open lesson, it is like a show. Usually teachers will select more mature students from P.4 or above. But for this lesson, Mr. Tang, the demonstrator, was so confident and chose a P.2 class for demonstration purpose. The lesson was on Math and the topic was about multiplication.
Lesson was quite smooth. Mr. Tang used the digital whiteboard a lot. Whenever Mr. Tang asked a question, students raised their hands quickly to show that they knew the answer.
The lesson was conducted for more than 30 minutes and , finally, iPad got into the demonstration in a T&L activity. A paid apps, Math Runner, was used for game-based learning. Two students used one iPad and played the game in "1 vs 1" battle mode. The iPad was also used for consolidation. A PowerLesson quiz was setup to test the students' understanding of the topic. Feedback of the lesson was collected through the PowerLesson platform. Interactive statistical report was immediately generated and Mr. Tang was able to drill down to individual response.
Indeed this was a good demo on how to integrate a Learning Management System (LMS), digital whiteboard, iPad, traditional printed textbook, and learning analytics in a lesson. I observed that e-Class devoted a lot of resources to support this school. In this event, there were over 10 staff from e-Class to support it.
After the event, I met Mr. Wong, the IT Panel of this school. He was a really helpful and humble person. The relationship between WebOrganic and Mr. Wong was quite strong and there were quite a lot of interactions since our school programme launched in 2011.
I also met some co-workers from e-Class. I found that John Chan, a senior manager from e-Class, was a brother in Christ from my church. Our sons played together in the same room at church. Apart from e-Class, there are many LMS solutions in the market, like i-Class from a group of HKU students, Edmodo from Silicon Valley with 15 million users, etc. This event accelerated my understanding of the local market landscape for LMS. To conclude, the e-Class PowerLesson solution was quite user-friendly and mature. The open lesson demonstrated not only the LMS but also how it integrated into every day lesson. It was a good show!!!
On 12th Jan 2013, I attended an open lesson at The Hong Kong Institute Of Education Jockey Club Primary School (JCPS). This was the first parent event for JCPS in academic year 2012/13. This event was sponsored by Microsoft and got some media exposure.
Mr. Chu Tsz Wing (Chu Sir) was the teacher-in-charge of the event. He was a star teacher in local primary education and a Microsoft Valued Teacher (MVT). Chu Sir was a friend of our CEO, Erwin Wang, and he reserved a booth for us.
On that day, I just joined WebOrganic for a month. Due to the short notice before the event, things were not perfectly-prepared. Nic and I could only leverage existing materials on hand. We brought some colorful marketing materials in order to cover the whole booth. Luckily the effect was quite impressive and we attracted good traffic to our booth.
There were over 100 parents attending the open lesson. Most of them were parents of the P.4C class, which was the prestigious e-School bag (e-Bag) class. Students applied to join such class when they were in primary three. They needed to have good average grade for all subjects and be self-disciplined. This was like a social status for the smart students.
P.4C parents wanted to know how their students use the e-Bag for learning. Some participants were parents of JCPS's primary three students, and they would like to know more about e-Bag project. This was a carefully-crafted event to prepare the pipeline for next year's e-Bag project.
e-Bag was more than exclusive right for bringing a learning device to school. Instead, this was associated to a shift in pedagogy (teaching methodology). Primary school students started acquiring knowledge and skills according to their own pace (student-centric) through discussion, collaboration, problem solving, and creative inquiry.
In the open lesson, team work and collaboration were crystal clear. It was an English lesson taught by Ms. Koo. Each team distributed their tasks and finally merged each piece of their teammate's work. Students helped their teammates resolve problems that affect the team's overall progress. Originally, they are a team of best. At that moment, they are becoming a best team.
From Chu Sir's wrap-up presentation, he cited the 21 Century Skills and PISA figures. It was really impressive and I got answers to my many questions in e-Learning, especially for the latest situations of some leading schools. The pace of e-Learning has reached a speed that most parents can never catch up. Being a parent, parenting is increasingly challenging. How could we lead our children when they run so fast even in primary school stage? This area touched the limitation of many teachers and I believe society has an urgency to educate parents to become competent parents in new digital era. We need a culture that could make most parents successful in parenting.
