Hey dear readers, I know it’s been awhile since I’ve been blogging and life’s been keeping me pretty busy as of late. I know it’s probably pretty depressing to hear the news every day now about the coronavirus and many of our lives and plans have been disrupted because of it. But let’s try to keep a positive view on what’s to come ahead. Speaking of which, one of the things that I found recently that might be pretty helpful is to spend this quality time to really get to learn some new things that I’d otherwise find hard when I’m busy.
One of the things I’ve been watching recently is the series called: Seven Worlds, One Planet which is a BBC Earth documentary that highlights the wildlife in the 7 different continents. It’s one of those epic documentaries that really shows us how incredible nature can be and how small we are in this world when compared to it. After watching this documentaries, I found that we sometimes get so caught up with what’s on mainstream media and forget how much we’ve missed out on in learning about the world that we already live in.
From an educational standpoint, I wish that we can utilise these tough times to push our kids to really think about the broader view of what there is out there in the world. Documentaries itself can shed light on information that we previously relied upon teachers to tell us in schools, but why do we do that? I think lots of quality content is out there available for us to learn from and do our own research after using the internet to verify the validity. Take for example, I was researching about the Orang utan situation in Borneo, where the last few thousand species exist today. Thinking about when I grew up seeing them every week at the zoo, this really disheartens me and it makes me think about how we play a part as a society in preserving this nature and good earth. Let’s all think about this and I hope that this piece can serve as a simple guide for parents to take action during this time of crisis, to get your students actively learning (instead of gaming or on social media) about new issues and reading up on relevant topics to build an informed citizen of the world tomorrow!
Ps: I’ve just finished up my masters in edtech and have returned back to Shenzhen lately to take on my new role as an edtech director at an international school. Will share more on some things I’ve recently discovered in the world of edtech and how I hope it can help to support our learning, particularly in this time of epidemic.
亲爱的读者，我知道我已经有一段时期没写博客，生活一直让我最近很忙。我知道现在每天听到有关疫情的消息可能会令人沮丧，所以我想反思及写写我们在这时刻里能做的一些有用的事。让我们对即将发生的事情保持正面看法！说到这些，我最近发现的一件很有用的事情就是花这段宝贵的时间来真正学习一些新的东西，而这些东西本来在我忙碌时会很难找到。
我最近看过的一件事是名为“七个世界，一个星球”的系列，这是BBC地球纪录片，着重介绍了7个不同大洲的野生动物。这是一部史诗般的纪录片，真正向我们展示了自然界有多么不可思议，与之相比，我们在这个世界上有多渺小。观看了这些纪录片之后，我发现我们有时会赶上主流媒体的眼光，而忘记了我们在了解我们已经生活的世界时错过了多少。
从教育的角度来看，我希望我们可以利用这些艰难的时期来促使我们的孩子真正思考世界上存在的事物的更广阔的视野。纪录片本身可以揭示我们以前在学校中依靠老师告诉我们的信息，但是为什么要这样做呢？我认为有很多高质量的内容可供我们学习，并在使用互联网验证有效性之后进行自己的研究。举个例子，我正在研究婆罗洲的猩猩状况，今天那里存在着最后几千种。想起我长大后每周在动物园见到它们的过程，这确实让我感到不安，这让我思考了我们如何在维护这个自然和美好地球的社会中发挥作用。让我们一起思考一下，我希望这本书可以作为父母在危机时期采取行动的简单指南，让您的学生积极学习（而不是游戏或社交媒体）新问题并继续研究/阅读。相关主题，以打造明天的世界级公民！
附言：我刚刚完成了edtech的硕士学位，最近又回到深圳，担任国际学校的edtech主管一职。在我最近在edtech领域中学到蛮多的新知识和技巧。我将分享更多信息，以及我希望它如何能帮助支持我们的学习，尤其是在这段被困在家的时间。
