Learning Never Stops at Charis!
Charis International School welcomed back all students and parents on the 20th of April, the first day of the third term for this school year. The school has continued to deliver both online and e-Learning by using a variety of electronic and network platforms for all teachers and students to participate in the school’s online courses.
Since the beginning of the new term, teaching has been carried out in an orderly manner, and everything has been running smoothly. Teachers are monitoring student attendance based on the students’ participation in each respective class in both synchronous learning; for example, Zoom and Google Meet; and asynchronous learning such as Google Classroom.
Learning never stops at Charis. During the term two break, a unique online activity project called the ‘10 G.I.L.A. Days Challenge’ was conducted for our secondary students from Year 7 to Year 10. G.I.L.A., which stands for Growing in Leadership Action, was a leadership growth project ran by the Leaderonomics Club coaches and facilitators. The students would receive a G.I.L.A. character lesson every day, which came with an activity and a challenge that gave students the chance to gain corresponding points when they completed them. These tasks would be submitted to the project leaders on an online platform in the form of a poster, a photo, an essay, or even a video.
Some of the tasks required the participation of parents. It was great to see videos and pictures of students working together with their parents in fulfilling the work assigned to them. It was definitely an excellent way to cultivate a parent-child relationship through these activities. Hence, this extracurricular activity has become quite popular among parents.
Dr Debra Sim, the school principal, said that teachers are also learning with students in exploring various e-platforms. They are continually investigating and experimenting on how to facilitate students’ learning in the best way possible and how to involve parents as home-school tutors or even co-teachers. “I will emphasise again that technology is a tool and that teachers must be skillful in using this tool of technology to accomplish what they want through good instructional designs.
Otherwise, a powerful tool in the hands of an unskilled teacher will end up doing more harm than good”, Dr Sim reiterated.
