Tag Archives: presentation

Global Issues Competition 2013

Cracked EarthToday saw the finals of the Global Issues Competition 2013 take place at International College Hong Kong. In its third year, the competition featured 60 competitors from 6 Pearl River Delta schools (GNIS, Harrow HK, ICHK, LPCUWC, RCHK and STC). With passionate presentations on issues ranging from the health of our oceans to gay rights, students showed a great level of maturity and knowledge of the world around them. A new feature this year was the use of a backchannel, allowing students to discuss presentations online as they unfolded, which they duly did. After the presentations, students worked together under the leadership of Sophia and Lukas to plan action on two of the issues discussed earlier. The day ended with a very moving, amusing and inspirational talk from Crossroads spokesperson David Begbie. Students and staff alike left inspired and ready to make meaningful change.

Thanks must go to our wonderful judges (Kevin Coniam, Pam Ryan, Vincent Chan and Roy White), to David Begbie for his wonderful talk, to ICHK for hosting and funding the event and to all the teachers who organised for their students to come along. Extra thanks to Mike Cline of GNIS for his support throughout the day.

Congratulations to all students for reaching the finals, and for having the courage to stand up and defend their ideas. Listed below are prize winners from the day, all of whom put in excellent performances.

Award Winner
Best Overall Junior Team RCHK “Rise Of The Corporations”
Sarika Mahbubani
Natalie Law
Hayley Wu
Audrey Foo
Best Overall Senior Team RCHK “Gay Rights”
Phipson Lee
Melvin Kan
Rachel Tsao
Cherry Wu
Most Eloquent Senior Student Cherry Wu, RCHK
Most Eloquent Junior Student Sarika Mahbubani, RCHK
Most Passionate Overall Student Gabrielle Armstrong-Scott, LPCUWC
Best Use of Backchannel Chance Thompson, ICHK
Leadership Award Sophia Jamal & Lukas Haugeberg, LPCUWC
Risk Taker Award Max Copley, Harrow Hong Kong
Anonymous Commenter Award Unknown

The following feedback was provided by the judges, and may be useful for those hoping to compete again next year:

  • Make connections obvious, don’t rely on your audience and the judges seeing things the same way as you do, and coming to the same conclusions.
  • Be aware of the judging criteria, and work to them.
  • Use media effectively (show graphs for longer, really explain them).
  • Be aware of the audience, and use materials that they will appreciate.
  • Questions asked and answered to count to the judging, so:
    • When asking questions, make sure you are polite. Avoid being flippant, trying to trip people up, etc.
    • When fielding questions, make your point as clearly and professionally as you can.

Learning Online

The aim of this unit is to equip students in Years 7, 8 and 9 with the skills needed to manage their own learning in an online world, including research, presentation, reflection and communication. The unit centers around student blogs, and the integration of other technologies.Whilst it is an ICT unit, it can easily be adapted to suite a wide range of subjects.

On completion of the project students should each have their own blog, in which they have collected and organised their work as well as a range of resources from around the Web. Ideally, students will have begun to understand what they can do online, and how this is constrained by copyright and educational fair use. Some of the following materials may be useful in the teaching of this unit:

  • Learning Online – general overview of the unit.
  • Assessment Rubric – a simple rubric to aid teachers and students in assessment.
  • Anatomy of a Blog – a visual guide to some key elements of a blog. Based on my demo blog.
  • Class Completion Record – a spreadsheet for tracking the progress of a number of classes.
  • Student Completion Record – a spreadsheet for use in one-on-one progress checks with students, which ideally will be carried out towards the end of the unit.
  • Unit Summary for Students – a summary document providing a recap of everything covered in the unit for students to use in their own time, to supplement their in-class learning.

I have just completed running this with 6 classes across Years 7, 8 and 9, and it has been generally successful. All students now have a blog with some content, and the majority have met most of the criteria. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I ran the unit over 6 weeks, and so some aspects receive less emphasis than they ideally would have. The students generally entered into the spirit of blogging, although some mistakenly linked the online nature of the work to informal writing. This lead to an emphasis being placed on writing in a style appropriate to the intended audience. There were only one or two instances of students writing inappropriately on their blogs, or those of their classmates. These actions generally seemed to be borne of naivety rather than malice. In order to moderate the blogs, I collected all the post and comment RSS feeds into a reader, and I periodically check to see what students have been writing.

Listed below are an exemplary piece of work from each of the year groups who participated in this project:

Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in teaching this unit: I am more than happy to help where I can. If you have taught this unit, I would love to hear how you got on.

TEDx Events

http://www.ted.com/pages/view?id=343

TED provides a consistently rich and varied source of inspiration for teachers and students (explaining why it is so heavily featured on this site). I have often thought how amazing it would be to attend a TED convention, and even more so to be invited to speak at one. TEDx, in some ways, allows this dream to become a reality, providing a way for organisations to hold their own, independent TED-style events.  Imagine a gala evening at a school, where parents, teachers and students are invited to talk on inspiring and creative areas in which they are interested in. I believe such an event would be not only stimulating, but also highly motivation for students.

Photo Game No. 01, 15/05/2009

This collection of 10 interesting photos can be used to stimulate students in a variety of ways. For instance, in small groups they can be asked to produce a story based around any 5 of the pictures, in any order, which can then be presented to the class (with the pictures in a multimedia presentation).

This is useful to get students working together as a group, using a short time to apply some pressure. This can also be use as an extension to an improv session based on PechaFlickr.

To get started, use the image gallery below, or download a ZIP file with all of the images.