SST's Pioneer Students' Blog

Recently, created this blog to start engaging our students-to-be:
SST's Pioneer Students: Your Journey Begins Here..

Indeed, initially, I thought I might be a bit bold. Hm... are we having overly high expectations of our students? Reason being getting the 12-year-old to explore and learn ICT skills on their own even without any face-to-face session!

Well, the kids nowadays are so IT-savvy, and nothing is difficult unless it's really something impossible. Well, if we, as teachers can explore on our own, why not the kids? Indeed, with their curious minds, coupled with their energy level, they have the upper hand!

On the other hand, it's really a new approach of getting students to acquire ICT skills - to leverage on web 2.0 tools and media. Yup, no longer are those days when we have an ICT trainer standing in front of 40 students and guide them through in the step-by-step navigation.

Well, well... the tasks were also crafted differently. It's no longer click here to do this, click here to do that. Well, the approach I believe, we should undertake is, purposeful learning. Purpose is tied to the subject/content learning outcome. ICT skills should not front the learning activity. It's about how to use selected features to accomplish the task.

To my pleasant surprise (and I'm also glad that), a handful of students responded within a week and demonstrated their ability to learn through exploration. While a couple of them were beginners to the blogging, they were able to come up with pretty decent blogs (including one even changed to some non-standard templates).

Certainly, GoogleMap was new to most of them. On the other hand, it was also obvious that GoogleMap posted no challenge to the netizens! From the pieces of work done, I believe some of us have to take our hats off them.

Am really excited to know what were the students' reactions when their posting was confirmed. There, discover pretty interesting thoughts and reactions!
Have shared the posts out via the GoogleReader:
http://www.google.com.sg/reader/shared/sst.lohkwaiyin