Last Friday I spent the day with the fantastic staff at Chun Tok School in Hammer Hill Kowloon. This is a special needs school for hearing impaired kids. I think that these kids are getting every opportunity to learn from the staff who are a really caring, dedicated lot. This was true right from the Principal, who extended me a very warm welcome right down to the kids themselves who smiled and seemed to enjoy the contact with a visitor.
Having worked with hearing impaired students in the UK previously, I do find it a real challenge getting and maintaining the attention of this group. At least with normally hearing kids you can use change in tone to get kids back on task. In a world which is increasingly reminding teachers, especially male ones, that you should never touch kids, it makes it doubly difficult to try to get the attention of kids who have English as a second (or third) language.
Chris Morrison is the hardworking and dedicated NET (Native English Teacher) in the school and Chris sees that getting the students to write online is a great way to get the kids to see the value in writing in English. I wanted to take it further and try to share a vision with the other staff members (Hong Kong born and educated teachers of English) of these kids writing for an audience of English speaking kids outside of Hong Kong. To do this I firstly shared a presentation with them about the importance of writing online. The presentation borrowed ideas and slides from some teachers who have a real vision for connecting kids globally. These teachers included Michael Walker, Kim Cofino and Suzie Vesper.
In the presentation I covered some examples giving the difference between blogs and wikis so that the staff could collectively decide what best met their needs. I think that this worked well as the teachers really enjoyed looking at the examples and getting a good understanding of how each was being used in classrooms in Hong Kong and around the world.
Fortunately, I had come across a blog posting in my Google Reader recently about Graeme Wegner in Adelaide who was seeking some comments about the writing that his students have done about “Ten Things Unique about Australia”. I was hoping that this might be a good topic to engage the young writers we were going to work with when we set up student blogs.
I was under no illusions as to the task of trying to get a message across about blogging and the possibilities that this might have for some young Chinese speaking kids with hearing impairment. Then set up blogs for classes and kids using the tools on Edublogs and finally to try to get kids to blog and to comment on other blogs all in the course of a single day. Such is the nature of living life as a consultant. As you will see from other posts on this blog, Hong Kong is a long way behind many, if not most, other countries when it comes to effectively using ICT for learning. As Chris said to me throughout the day,

I could get funding to get the most obscure and unqualified people to come into the school to conduct workshops on “teaching English through poetry, dance or drama” but when it comes to running workshops on using ICT for learning English it is very difficult to get approval.

Having recently reflected a lot on the ideas of Christiansen in “Disrupting Class”, one can only hope that the message gets trough soon.
Well, we did get some blogs set up for classes and even managed to get some RSS feeds into Google Reader for the teachers. They could very quickly monitor the posts of their kids in one space which worked really well.
The issue that we had was with making it clear to the kids that they had to REFLECT on the posts of the kids in Adelaide prior to responding. Most were just writing a “Hello! I live in Hong Kong and I like your blog” style of post which does not go far. I am sure that we can move on from this with a bit of response from the Aussie kids which I am hopeful of. The scene is now set!
The good news is that I get to go back and do another day with the school on November 28th. Although I have some new topics to do then like working on setting up video subtitling using Dot Sub and even doing video dubbing of news broadcasts into English using something similar to Know the News, I am hopeful that we will get time to visit the blogs and get some real “global exchange” going.

Photo: IMG_1985 by Wootang01