This presentation aims to share the experience of carrying out an eduLab project which involves the use of technology to support pre-writing processes to aid the development of ideas and coherence in writing during its first year of study in 2014. The eduLab project is an MOE-NIE initiative designed to surface and spread ground-up ICT-enriched pedagogical innovations. There are three primary schools involved in this eduLab project and teachers work closely with officers from the Educational Technology Division (ETD) in designing and implementing the study.
The innovation is intended to address a common weakness amongst pupils in developing links between ideas and in elaboration of ideas in writing. One key feature of this innovation is to involve pupils in acting out their story ideas in order for them to have the chance to process the ideas more deeply. This is guided by the notion of embodied cognition (Wilson, 2002) and the Situated Cognition Theory (Clancey, 1997), which relate physical interactions with the environment to the development of cognitive processes. In acting out their storyline, opportunities are created for pupils to elaborate their ideas and assess the flow of their storyline. Technology is integrated to facilitate pupils in capturing the images during the enactment stage and to subsequently allow pupils to assess the flow of images which best represents the group’s story and to add captions. During the writing stage, pupils make use of the captions as stems to allow them to develop the story, through adding details from the pre-writing discussion as well as experience from the enactment of scenes.
Led by ETD officers, a set of design principles is crafted to guide teachers in designing the learning activities, participation structures, and the social and cultural norms in the classroom (Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012). The design principles are refined following analysis made regarding how lessons are enacted by teachers and how pupils are responding to the innovation. From the team’s analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data, there is some evidence to suggest that students have benefited from the innovation.
