CLOSE ENCOUNTER

We've reached the end of the journey of the ICMS Adoption Training (Phase 1). The last session was on the "World of Ethics and eMail" with respect to the use of online resources for educational purposes and also the proper way of doing citations. We've used American Psychological Associations (APA style) as the standard. In fact all training modules was designed to map against ISTE NETS (International Society of Educational Technology's National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers) which will be elaborated on in Phase 2 of the adoption training.

The whole 5 day sessions, starting from Induction to Basic ICT and Change Management; the objective, the flow of training, reasons for the need to change and what KPPAS are in for in this ICMS venture was revisited. Followed by Concepts of eLearning; Relationships of eLearning and ICMS; Theory of eLearning; "What they've got themselves into" and the need for change. I've highlighted that 'they are the CHOSEN ONE' (among all MOH nursing colleges), they are the 1st to be exposed and trained on this in the whole country, that they being honored to lead and venture on to the eLearning territory. The 'early adopter' among the 'mainstream majority'. The checbric mechanism instituted did its job of reminding these adult learners of the knowledge and skills that they acquiring.

The feedback form (the off form) indicated they've learned a lot. Some admitted that the training surpasses their initial impression and expectation (that they won't be getting much). Some says the 'eLearning Theory' session opened their eyes, some liked the 'What's in the Hat' session as it helped initiated their creative juice to flow. The rest liked 'Intro to Vista - (thus felt more comfortable with their new laptops), 'Interactive Teaching Aid' using spreadsheet and 'Snag the Grabber' and most of all the 'GO BLOG'!. Suhaimi was kind enough to share extras on pdf-ing skill.

I can't imagine how they are going to be if they were to do Authoring...in Phase 2. As usual all good things must come to an end....I shared my 'Did You Know" - KPPAS version with loud and sweet Yanni's instrumental  on Yusri's borrowed Altec Lansing speakers and woofer, as an 'icing on the cake' on this CLOSE ENCOUNTER (closing end).

We had a small but  memorable ceremony of 'prize giving' of an unannounced competition for the attendees in form of Best Blog and Best Presentation category. MohdTuah.blogspot.com by Mr Mohd Tuah won the best blog, followed by RoszanSapon's  by Mr Roszan and Tok Kau by Mr Zaidi. Best Presentation went to Ms Norul Hernani of the HELMINTS (the cacings), followed by Mr Jamarudi's "Abdominal Inspection" and Mr Norizam's "Apsepsis Hand Cleaning Procedure" was third. I wished i could get to see all but time was limited.

Everyone who attended were given a Certificate of Attendance and group photo (which arrived from HQ just in time - TQ the amoys) by Mr Yu the Acting Director of KPPAS. They are looking forward to the next Phase 2 session. You know what?, i've met and made friends with all them in just short 5 days....i think we are of the same wavelength. I revisted my Science knowledge learned and taught years ago in the 70's and 80's.  Again i'm proud of the team and things made easier by one reliable guy in Alor Setar by the name of Yusri.

 

Well we've done our part, and I think now its over to you SAM and RAZAK!  ;)

hamid

DAY of MUSCLES, HEARTS and HELMINTHS

Its P Day (Presentation Day) or rather D Day for ICMS Adoption Training. All attendees were excited and ready to show off their 'bright ideas' and new found 'skills'. We started with briefing of what we plan to do today i.e what we expect of them during presentation. This was followed with the issuance of the training feedback forms. For a while our Yusri was eager to get them to use our "Online Feedback Form' or passionately known as OFF. Unfortunately our 'OFF' application was 'off form', due to concurrent access by attendees thus slowed server response. As usual our plan B kicked into action with the distribution of analog version and that saved the day.

The presentation started with Mr Zaidi Ahmad who volunteered to present his Technology Integrated Lesson Plan (TILP) and Teaching Aids, bravo! Mr. Zaidi....that's the spirit. His presentation was on "A&P - Musculo-Skeletal Muscles".

Overall he showed that he understood our requirements in putting up with format but still need some thinking in the way he planned for his students participation. Good set induction video clip of Mr Universe. My comment was on his Teaching Aids slides where his 'navigational' buttons and links were everywhere! (bottom right; top left and in between - through out the slides).  Again its well done considering its his first attempt. I appreciate his openness to comments and eagerness to learn. This benefitted the rest whom quickly rectified their presentations.

Next came Mr Jamarudi or 'Mr J' to me. His presentation was on "Physical Abdominal Inspection"which is a nursing skill through a live demo, with the help of some interesting 'video clip' as set induction.  To me its a straight forward presentation but delivers a very 'classic' example in T&L that technology integration in minimal or come second in priority. My comment was 'NOTHING beats LIVE demo in classroom teaching". It is the "WHEN NOT" situation of technology integration. BUT live demo do come with its own shortcoming, that is when a student need the demonstration to be replayed or reenacted. Its like how can you replay a goal scoring action in a live football match that you missed? That's where the technology can help!

(Talking about football, forget EURO 2008, it was a HELL of havoc at the Macam-Macam Rasa Restaurant, in Alor Setar where we had dinner the night before. All eating stopped when KEDAH scored the third goal against Selangor at the Malaysian Football League Final 2008. "I was kind of hoping that the owner would announce that all food is on the house!". Hard luck Hamid! Again, technology helped at replaying the live action of scoring again and again from all angles to the joy of Kedahans.)

Back to P-Day....Presentations by Mr Razak, En Mat, Ms Yon or Norul and Mr Norizam, confirmed our observation that we did managed to deliver across the message about the need for Change in their way of T&L in KPPAS. Ms Norul made an astounding presentation entitled HELMINTS or commonly known 'parasitic worms' and successfully made everyone loose their appetite during the Lunch break. She even showed her pre and post training comparisons on quality of her teaching aids to the amazement of everyone. I'm impressed too! What a huge CHANGE for the better!

Overall it was a very GOOD day of training and making it worth all the efforts we put in. Well done team!

hamid

ELECTRONIC GRADING - CGPA

How time flies...and today its Saturday, the fourth day of the training. We are almost at the end of Phase 1 ICMS Adoption Training at Kolej Pembantu Perubatan Alor Setar (KPPAS). (BTW Saturday is a holiday in Kedah..so do Friday....just to show our bosses that we are working on weekends, ;)

We are on "Electronic Grading"....continuation of yesterday's skill set of using FORMULAS in spreadsheet (yeah, yeah, i know, by right it should be FORMULAE in English - but again its Microsoft, what can u say..perhaps just another term?), for Interactive teaching aids to VLOOKUP skills for "Electronic Grading".

My "P.Ramlee sound-a-like" Suhaimi of yesterday has turned into "S. Kadarisman sound-a-like" today. His voice is back to normal but the class starts to act ABNORMALY. The spreadsheet session starts to become a bit messy as attendees are getting confused. Lots of new terms to familiarize with and the workings of spreadsheet that they need to understand in order to make the VLookup funtionality works. But patience prevails as our "S. Kadarisman" kept 'rewinding' the show to get everyone able to complete the process successfully. His star rating was affected though and made worse by some misprints on the module's checbric.

Again our ever able assistant Yusri and Ms Azleen came to the rescue with 'lightning speed' to reprint and replace the misprints with 'on the spot' editorial work and have the affected pages replaced...of course with the creative supervision of 'yours truly'.

Again great work guys.


hamid
saturday, alor setar

CREATIVITY vs INTERACTIVITY

Creativity and Interactivity was the word of the day! Suhaimi who turned "P.Ramlee sound-a-like", the hero of Malay Film Production (MFP) of "P.Ramlee the Musical" WOWed the audience with his NEW 'husky' voice, singing tunes of instructions on how to use the spreadsheet to create in-ter-ac-tive teaching aids.

He joked, smiled, coaxed, charmed and cajoled the guys and the ladies to get them do the tasks he designed. One can see the raw enthusiasm that exuded from him while conducting training. It's difficult to say NO to his whims and fancies. It was NOT because he loves P. Ramlee so much, or him coming from Penang (Bukit Mertajam btw) like the great actor, but much due to his current health condition that add new flavor to his voice due to bad 'SORE THROAT'.

The 60% mic and PA systems on performance does not help either, and in fact forced him to exerts more on his wind pipe to maintain his P.Ramlee's huskiness.

Even the commanding Mdm Samsad felt weak and charmed by his sweet P. Ramlee's voice...and thus still endured 'HELL' to create 'Interactive Quiz of the Heart' using scripts and formulae on MS Exel 2007, EVEN when the exercise got NOTHING to do with her college Housekeeping job. Later she even helped served the finger licking good 'roti jala' with curry and 'kuah durian' special for "Suhaimi the P.Ramlee". Sore throat wasn't going to stop him enjoy two servings of "roti jala".

I salute this "P.Ramlee sound-a-like", and 'wannabe' for the commitment and dedication. Keep up the good work and stay healthy.

hamid
alor setar

Let's GO BLOG

As expected GO BLOG session conducted by Ms Azleen brought out a lot of excitement from our attendees. Some who knew the meaning of 'goblok' in Malay or bahasa Jawa, smile sheepishly, while those who knew nothing, was bewildered at those who found it 'funny'!.

Apparently some attendees already has their own blog, and even we were informed that MOH has provided blogging facility on their site. Most of them looked lost, and when asked why?, most admitted that they did not know how...and jokingly mentioned they are and need GO BLOG!

The session started a euphoria of activity and joy, especially when seeing their postings went live! Everyone has all sorts of blog title and most were quite funny. The session was aimed at creating the 'culture' on posting ideas, reflections and content online. This is a major move on our side towards Change Management. It forces everyone to have an email to start with and later update their postings regularly. It also meant to get all attendees to have their own blog site.

They were also shown how blog can be used in their Teaching and Learning (T&L) especially for student going for Clinical practice, so that they can use it for refelctions of their experiences. I'm proud to say that the session was the best at the moment. Even the ever 'busy' Mr Tham was awed and came out with his "thamdrive" blogspot site.

One thing we ourselves learnt from this exercise was that when naming the blog site, it need to be likened to naming a 'book title', as some of them assumed it was just a 'topic'. For example Pn. Ani named hers as "Kucing Ku" and she assumed that it was for just one posting title, when she actually wanted to write and reflect more of her work as a librarian and hobbies.

At least we are one bit more wiser so as to use 'book title' analogy for future training.

Our two helpful assistants Jazz and Yus even took the liberty to learn to create, use and teach the others. A real hands on experience..

So keep up the excitement and lets continue TO BLOG.


hamid
alor setar

Digital Lesson Plan - DLP

"IF YOU FAIL TO PLAN, YOU PLAN TO FAIL" was the session theme and tag line. Lesson planning is the crucial point towards an effective Teaching and Learning (T&L). Input from the "What's in the Hat" session yesterday, provides some view on the need for KPPAS instructors to be creative in the outlook in conducting classroom lessons. During which they successfully generated creative ideas of using common everyday items such as 'safety pin', 'paper clips', 'baby pacifier', 'nescafe sachet', 'comb', 'bath soap' etc. to initiate class teaching. Whoa! what a lively session!

The idea behind the introduction of Digital Lesson Plan was to introduce KPPAS staff to a common standards of writing lesson plan towards the preparation of migrating their teaching and learning content on to the LMS.

Digital Lesson Plan that we design was based on our successful past training experience and was endorsed by our former client, MOE. It consists of 18 subheadings that provide a complete coverage of teachers/instructors teaching planning activities.

It was also designed based on 5E principles of Constructivisim, which translate to Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate. KPPAS just need to adapt their current style of writing lesson plan and map it with this DLP format.

Attendees were also shown the APA style of citations. Some doubt and resistance is seen but it do provide them the opportunity and platform to consider integrating technology into their teaching plan.

The message is "Once you know how to integrate, you'll know how to integrate technology for the rest of your life".

Today they found that their current students are already on "YouTube". They know they need to catch up.

Still DLP is the key to the whole ICMS adoption effort.

All the best!

hamid
alor setar