Elissa Goh & Mohamad Khirsyaban

Elissa Goh is the Level Head/Humanities in New Town Secondary School. She overseesthe development of lower secondary Humanities subjects and manages the department’s outdoor learning classroom programme for all students.As the Chairperson of the school’s Environmental Education Committee, Elissa is an advocate of integrated and inquiry-based learning, and believes in using questions to drive deep learning. Her experience includesresearch on fieldwork and curriculum design and the facilitation of teacher training at various scales. A believer of professional development, Elissa is also a management committee member of the Geography Teachers’ Association Singapore and has worked with different stakeholders to pioneer initiatives and workshops for teachers and students.

Mohamad Khirsyaban is the Level Head / Science and the ICT Mentor for Humanities Department in New Town Secondary School. Through the years, he has harnessed the use of technology in and out of the classroom to complement students’ learning, including the use of online simulation games and mobile learning. He has shared his practices at various platforms including the International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology (iCTLT) in 2012. He strongly believes in the potential of technology in bridging the link between different subject disciplines which is his area of interest as a Science and Humanities educator.

As part of the Humanities department in New Town Secondary School, Elissa and Khirsyaban have used Learning-on-the-move (LOTM) technology as part of the fieldwork experience for Secondary 3 Geography students at Labrador Park. This trail was developed as an inquiry-based package for students to experience the coastal environment of Labrador Park through fieldwork techniques such as qualitative interviews, bipolar surveys and field sketching. This trail has been well-received by students and has been shared at key platforms including the MOE Excel Fest 2013 and the National ICT Sharing.
 

Presentation Title:

Designing and Implementing Mobile Learning Geography Lessons at New Town Secondary School

Synopsis:

Traditionally, geography fieldwork is conducted using paper and pen. This session shares how teachers employ mobile learning to promote self-directed learning and collaborative learning in upper secondary school students at Labrador Park. The case study demonstrates how authentic data collected on the field were communicated and shared by harnessing location and image recognition technology through the use of a rapid authoring tool called LOTM. 

The sharing will focus on how, through the integration of multimedia, students are able to assess on-site content knowledge and record their learning experiences instantaneously. Simultaneously, teachers are able to track the progress of students in real-time and monitor their learning.