We’ve come to the end of the ICT course and I will miss it quite a bit as it was one of the few courses in NIE that could engage me fully (and I’m not just talking about the assignments).
The walkabout sessions were very fruitful and I’m glad to have had a chance to partake in our classmates’ projects (as well as their makan 🙂 because their discoveries also opened new doors/made new inroads into education and ICT for me.
For Session 11, Jo-Ann, Frank and Terence’s group as well as Anjali, Andrew and Shah’s group had the most memorable presentations for me, partly because the subject matter they touched on were relevant to my teaching subjects, and partly because they best demonstrated engaged learning using ICT.
Session 12 was when my group had its presentation, and you can view our finished product here. My take-away from our presentation was Dr Tan’s comments about Wordle – in our haste, perhaps we didn’t realise that Wordle itself could be used as a tool for teaching students.
How we could enable this was through running a compiled list of student responses through Wordle and examining which were the keywords that came out the most. From here, students would be able to tell if they were on track or could improve in terms of, say, their character analysis.
(We can’t update our pages anymore, but I thought I’d note this down here, sort of as a means of filing this bit of information away as future reference.)
Anyway… Is this the end then?
Maybe not.
George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch that “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending” (832). Or if you’d prefer a pop culture reference, Semisonic sings in “Closing Time” that “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”.
(Or if you want really mind-boggling stuff: The Smashing Pumpkins “The End is the Beginning is the End”. Is the Beginning? Is the End?! Lol.)
I started this blog earlier saying that I wanted to see what it would grow into, and I think I’m starting to see where it’s headed: like Dr Tan, I think I might want to use this space to blog about education.
I’m not too firm about my decision yet because I’m always worried about the boundaries between what is ‘safe’ and what isn’t, in terms of discussing work and the organisation.
But one thing for sure is this: like most of my life, I always find out what to do as I go along, so if anything, this is the approach I’m going to adopt for now.
With that, it’s goodnight, not goodbye.
Oh wait – I still have an essay to write. Damn. Er, oops, I mean: Yay!
