cQuestGarden

Based on QuestGarden, cQuestGarden is designed as a platform combining online authoring tool, resource bank, hosting service and community of professional sharing that make the creation of quality WebQuest more efficiently. Skills of Webpage editing and uploading are no longer prerequisites for designing and hosting WebQuests. Above all, cQuestGarden provides guidelines for instructional design for every module of WebQuests. “c” of cQuestGarden stands for “Chinese”, denoting its aim of facilitating WebQuest implementation in the Chinese communities.

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2008 Chinese WebQuest Competition

Following the success of the competition in 2006, the competition is organized again in 2008. Besides the teachers in Hong Kong, the participants also include student-teachers in Hong Kong and Chinese teachers in other regions. Prof. Bernie Dodge has been invited for presenting prizes at the award ceremony and giving the keynote speech. The prize-winning WebQuests will be posted on the competition webpage for teachers’ reference.

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Keynote by Dr. Bernie Dodge in the IT Symposium 2008

Dr. Bernie Dodge, a professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University in California and an adjunct lecturer at CUHK, has been invited to be the keynote speaker in the IT Symposium 2008 at Pui Ching Middle School on the 3rd May, 2008. In the event, Dr. Dodge will give a keynote speech entitled “Decision-Making: A Necessary and Neglected Skill for 21st Century Learning.” Some decision-making techniques scaled down from the corporate world will be presented as ways to engage learners more deeply.

“Scaffolding Thinking Skills for Primary Students”—Primary School Teacher Workshop by Dr. Bernie Dodge

Dr. Bernie Dodge is going to conduct a workshop, “Scaffolding Thinking Skills for Primary Students”, targeting primary school teachers, in the Chinese University of Hong Kong on the 6th May, 2008. The workshop covers the use of graphical organizers and other tools to help young learners practise and internalize higher level thinking skills while using web-based information. The organizer types to be discussed include PMI charts and decision-trees to scaffold decision-making; semantic feature charts to aid analytical thinking; cause-and-effect diagrams to aid understanding of complex systems. Examples of the use of these organizers within WebQuests will be illustrated in the workshop. All teachers are welcome to enrol for the workshop via the EDB Training Calendar System.

“Finding Opportunities for Higher Level Thinking in the Curriculum”—Secondary School Teacher Workshop by Dr. Bernie Dodge

How can teachers create engaging lessons and exercises that require 21st century information skills while also addressing the acquisition of testable content knowledge? Dr. Bernie Dodge will give a workshop which will provide practice in analyzing what teachers teach and finding authentic problem situations which give their learners something more to do than merely memorizing facts and procedures. Dr. Dodge will introduce three strategies for curricular analysis including finding authentic problem situations, creating problems where none existed by changing the situation, or inventing opportunities for improvement in a situation. These strategies will be explained in the context of the WebQuest format and workshop participants will practise using the strategies on new content relevant to their own teaching. All teachers are welcome to enrol for the workshop via the EDB Training Calendar System.