Staff Sharing on 28 April 2008

Louisa

My Learning Journey – Take the attitude of a student. Never be too big to ask questions. Never know too much.

Louisa used the word DIFFERENCE to share her teaching experience.

Dramatise – use of story. In order to introduce personal relief to the students, Louisa told the story of Mr. Loh Mah Ngee. Mr. Loh earns income and therefore income relief. Mr. Loh married his girl friend. Husband and wife both working, therefore double income relief. After having children, the Lohs could enjoy child relief.

Inspire – she encourages the students to work as a team and do not wait for people to take the lead.

Just for Fun & serious Fun – use of jokes/cartoons/video and games. Games include: tax pyramid (need to describe tax terms to fellow classmates), tic tax toe, collages, jigsaw, work maze (for tax terms students need to be familiar with), crossword puzzle (definitions). The games played are simple to make and easy to play.

Exercise – non-graded exercises were used in lectures. Students can discuss tutorial exercises answers with their friends for topics which are more difficult. Louisa felt that this is a non-intrusive way of learning.

Resource – for Tax 2. Tax 2 tutors had to repeat explanation of concepts many times. To reduce the repetition, Macromedia Captivate was used to illustrate step-by-step procedures.

Engage – In order to engage the students, multimedia presentation on tax content with games were used.

New perspectives – technical terms are sometimes difficult to grasp. Therefore, logic was used to explain formula/concepts to help the students understand.

Change/Explore – review and improve lecture slides. Louisa also explored different areas to improve the module especially with the LcL initiative:
1. Students to summarise and share tutorial &
2. Students to develop 2 tutorial questions.

Elan

Elan did a hands-on demo on Blackboard, tapping on the potential of the many features, some of which are underutilised. Elan showed staff how to use Blackboard/MeL for online receipt, marking, grading, return & archiving of projects/assignments & tracking of continuous assessment:

1. Receiving assignments online – including multimedia presentation, url links, digitized object images, etc.
2. Downloading documents from GradeBook.
3. Marking/commenting on the documents with comments or even voice clips.
4. Assigning marks/grade to students.
5. E-portfolio - Students can keep a portfolio to showcase the work done
6. Gradebook - Students can also check for their own grades for assignments submitted online
7. Use of Content Management to keep module contents.

If you need to find out any special feature, our ITIC guru would be more than pleased to assist you.