VBS News Net: Aspired to learn knowledge, students from 3D vied with one another to hold responders in a team contest during the training session for mathematical thinking, their inner strength to studies was fully activated. This was the 'education cloud practice and revision' open class instructed by Mr Yan Xiaoliang at the school theatre which all VBS teachers observed in the afternoon of 18th October. 

Mr Yan conducted this class by using the software developed jointly by iFlyTek and Shenzhen Academy of Education Science, which included multiple functions such as cloud resources and electronic textbooks. The objective for this period was to summarise the key ideas and skills of the first four chapters via practising and revising, which Mr Yan designed the plan as 'building foundation, reinforcing concepts, and summaring information'. Students were actively engaged in the class by taking independent research and collaborative study. Different from the outcomes of traditional tutoring methods, the abundant stimulated students' nature - curiosity, sharing, eagerness to research using the abundant teaching resources on class.

Mr Yan did an extensive research on this teaching software for this class. He characterised the teaching software by three components. 

Preparation

1.The system has some default segments that are in line with the characteristics of each subject in making the teaching plan.

2.Materials: The card function can provide additional interest during the class for teachers to customise based on the subject characteristics, learning objectives and student characteristics.

3.Teaching procedures: the system generates the teaching flow chart which includes the interconnected lesson plan, files and procedures. 

4.Electronic textbook: this includes textbooks for all subjects, all levels and all publishers stored in high resolution pictures. 

5.Cloud resources: Videos, files, lesson plans, questions, pictures are available in the electronic textbooks which can be used according to the curriculum. 

6.Question bank: Word documents, exercise sheet and files are made by practice questions which are available from textbooks and can be sorted by question types, difficulty and different levels. 

Teaching

1.Functions such as clipping, focusing and whiteboard helps to highlight the main ideas and difficulty of the content. 

2.Mini applications such as timeline, voice recognition and tests raise the interest on lessons.

3.Students are actively engaged by the random questions rasied by the application 'answer the question', teachers can choose random answering, full class answering and live answering. The analysis on questions helps to acquire the answer feedback from the class.  

4.Cloud resources from textbook teaching provides abundant teaching resources. 

Others

1.Recording function enables teachers to reflect on teaching performance after the class themselves.

2.Applications from tool box such as drawing board enables teachers to different mathematical diagrams - axes, graph of a function etc. Lab for physics and chemistry can simulate the procedures to conduct experiments. 

3.Teachers can utilise the functions in the interactive teaching assistant via the shared platform by switching between their own laptop and interactive teaching assistant. 

Comparing to the traditional teaching tools and methods, the shared resources such as cloud class preparations, electronic textbooks, question bank found in the smart teaching assistant reduced the teachers' workload on class preparation and provided convenience for teachers upon tutoring.

This open class has given means for teachers to improve teaching quality, motivate students to learn and adopt technology means to enhance outcomes in education. This is another significant measure implemented by VBS on utilising digitised technology to promote the connection of teaching activities, IT resources and educational resources.

Photographer: Linda

Formatting: Judy

Translated by DC Lai