Innovative Teacher Award 2010

 "Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by 

which they exploit change as an opportunity."

~Peter F. Drucker

Alhamdulillah, I  received a fantastic news that I have qualified to the State Level of the Innovative Teacher Award 2010. The action research that I carried out this year, My Lit Project was chosen to represent Johor Bahru in the Secondary School Level category.  The need to assist my students in revising for their literary texts gave impetus to my innovation. The learning blog maximises the Web 2.0. technologies and contains digital notes, audio-visual stimuli and interactive activities that could foster and strengthen the students' understanding on the current literary texts. So far, I've managed to cover Latif Mohidin's In The Midst of Hardship, Vivien Alcock's QWERTYUIOP and Bibsy Soedharjo's He Had Such Quiet Eyes. Hope I could add more contents as time progresses.

I took the initiative to develop this blog because I used to have more than 40 students in one class (yes, it's true!) and it is a painstaking process to gauge their understanding. Besides, majority of my students have Internet access at home and they are IT-savvy as well. Since it  is geared towards autonomous learning, students take control of the learning process. Based from my students' feeback, they really enjoy watching the YouTube videos as they trigger their interests in engaging themselves with the literary texts. They can set their own learning pace and retake the interactive exercises as often as they like. Nonetheless, I still believe there's always room for improvement and I'm trying to oversee and tweak some of the finer details of the aforementioned innovation. The winner of the Innovative Teacher Award is yet to be announced but I'll just hope for the best.

For those who are finding information on how to conduct an action research, I would suggest you check out the Johor State Education Department's Action Research Portal. It is very resourceful as it provides guidelines  in conducting your action research. You can download the user-friendly template as well. You can also download some samples of award-winning action researches such as the WordWise Techniques by Pn. Rahmah Sayuti. Yes, I know action research may sound a bit tedious especially when we are hampered with a lot of clerical works.  Honestly speaking, I used to have such perception as well but when I saw how the students immensely benefited from the action researches I've conducted, it propelled my optimism in finding ways to make learning more enjoyable yet fulfilling for my students. It's all part of the process of learning, teaching and loving what you do.