Group members' RISAL accounts

Liu, Feifei (2011882300)
RISAL Account: Feifei


CHAN, Kwoon Kay:
Risal Account: kwoonkay


LEUNG Yiu Tong, Eric
Risal Account:  ieeric


JIANG Qian, Cissy
Risal Account: Cissy

Week 2 Task: Exploring challenges to and success factors for innovations in education

Week 2 Task: Exploring challenges to and success factors for innovations in education

Reflection by Liu, Feifei (2011882300)

With reference to Joyce Wycoff’s analysis of innovation in business domain, a reflection of innovation practice in education field is illustrated as below.

Firstly, innovation in education at its designing stage should involve consultation with different stakeholders in the field, which is to make sure that the culture and ownership of education field support the innovation. To be more specific, innovation in education is not just related to education organizations, instead, it is a societal issue which should involve and consider concerns of different stakeholders, such as government, schools, frontline teachers, parents and also students. Hence, before an innovation is designing, it should be made clear that who the innovation is for, where and how the innovation is going to be implemented. The innovation promoted should go in line with the target member’s development stage and objectives to improve its teaching and learning quality.

Additionally, once an educational organization accepts an innovation, they should be supported with sufficient resources and training programmes. As Wycoff (2004) said, “Innovations takes time, energy and money”. Resource is of vital importance in the context of Hong Kong, since for most of the teachers, who are the “doer” of innovation practice, are suffering such a heavy workload that they are lack of time and energy to conduct innovation, even though they have realized the advantages of it. Furthermore, the same as innovation in business, innovation in education “requires new way of thinking and new skills” (Wycoff, 2004). Therefore, before implementing an innovation, the people who are going to implement it should be trained with the ideas and skills needed.

To keep the innovation alive, a communication and management system shout be developed. The innovation actors like teachers and trainers should communicate frequently to evaluate the practice and make improvements accordingly, so as to make the innovation more suitable for a certain organization and students’ needs.

Take task-based learning, a pedagogical innovation as an example. To successfully implement it, the educational organization as a team including administration team and teachers should first understand and support the idea of task-based learning, in order to evaluate and decide whether the innovation is suitable for them or not. During the implementing process, teachers should be first trained by experts to master the skills needed for task-based learning. A continuous reflection meeting needs to be arranged for teachers to communicating their experiences, difficulties and suggestions for task-based learning implementation. 

Reference:

Wycoff, J. (2004). The big ten innovation killers and how to keep your innovation system alive and well. Retrieved on 29^th September, 2011  http://www.innovationnetwork.biz/library/BigTenInnovationKillers.htm

An Example of an Educational ICT and its Impact on Practice

Task: Make an example by your group of an educational ICT and its impact on practice (200 words)


Example:
By LEUNG Yiu Tong, Eric
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One of my friends, who is teaching in primary school, is using Wi-Fi together with Tablet PCs in his lessons.

The teacher asked all of his students to buy a tablet PC, and bring it back to school as a e-Schoolbag. Every day, the students bring their own computer to school, and the learning material will be sent from the teacher's tablet PC to theirs.

The learning activities are no longer limited to chalk and talk. Teachers sometime will send a question through the network, asking students to answer. Teacher will randomly choose a student and display his/her screen to the class and ask the classmates to comment. Sometimes, it could become a kind of competition, letting 2 or even 4 students to do some questions (like Maths questions) at the same time, and see who's the fastest. Another type of learning activities is something like a WebQuest. Teachers will provide some hyperlinks, and ask the students to look for information required by the questions (E.g. finding the temperature of the district).

The most important point in the set up is that students can bring the content home. For traditional use of PowerPoint slides, students can see the content but they cannot have it. They can have a hard copy but it could be difficult for them to keep and write their own notes on it. With the help of the e-SchoolBag, students can take notes on the lesson, and type them down on the teaching material they received from the teachers. This can facilitate the students' learning a lot, make the lesson much more interactive and raise their interest in learning.