Hey fellow geographers..

My laptop's still down.. Brought it to the NUS Toshiba care centre ( is that what's it called??) and they did not even get back to me since monday. Finally I gave up waiting for their call and called them earlier today. Sadly, my hard drive has crashed. Poor poor laptop of mine Luckily it's still under warranty. So its gonna take another couple of days to get it back, for them to change the entire hard disk.

Meantime, I'm at my friend's place catching up on the virtual world. Literally fell off the chair when I opened up my inbox.. So much has been happening. The desktop in my house hardly works. Its a super 18th century computer. Hangs non-stop everytime I go online. The Toshiba people better do a good job. Anyway, enough of my whining. My apologies to all for not catching up on your blogs. I promise to be super up-to-date once I get my IT life back into shape. For now, I'll just quickly summarise my thoughts on the podcasting and the microteaching session1.

Podcasting

Hmmm.. that's exactly what I told myself after last thursday's class. And truthfully, that's exactly what I still feel about it. Seriously, its a great thing and I am sure I'll pick it up soon. But seriously, I am pretty lost right now. I'm just so glad we're doing it in groups coz' I'm sure I'd have never be able to do it all by myself. And since the opportunity has been given to us, I really do wanna learn and make myself a little more tech-savvy. I absolutely feel IT captures the attention of pupils in a way that the whiteboard and OHP never could! Using podcast in classes would be completely new, coz' as said before, we are the first bunch of trainees to learn this new technology. But for now, I just wanna take it one step at a time and understand the whole apple/podcast world. Eventually, one day, I do hope I would be using it successfully in my classes:)

Microteaching Session1

Great job Chan Ying. Firstly, bravo for having the courage and will power to go first. I think I would have been stammering in nervousness...haha. But seriously, I though it was a superb idea to use those postcards. I've seen them many times before but never would I have thought of doing that. A+ for creativity Just a few aspects which I feel could have been slightly improved. Highlighting the objective at the start would have given the students a clearer picture of what they were going to do. Some of us were a little confused as where the lesson was bringing us to after sometime. In addition, providing some backgound knowledge on tourism (eg.: domestic/international tourism) would have also given the student a good headstart. Nevertheless, the lesson was very entertaining and I'm sure would manage to capture the ever-restless minds of the students.

I feel Chan Ying cleverly managed to control the little 'war' that broke out between Daphne and Ken. It was a great idea to make them work on their tiny piece of mahjong paper instead of issuing them with a new one. Chan Ying's microteaching lesson also reminded me of what my CT told me during my school experience. Her advice was to make our main practicum lesson (the one which would be assessed on) as interactive as possible to show pupil-to-pupil interaction and the teacher as a facilitator. This I feel was exactly portrayed in Chan Ying's lesson. So good work babe!

Well, gonna end off now. My friend's msn keeps beeping! Better let her take over before she makes a million enemies! Haha..

Regards,

Raksha