Hey everyone! I am Hendra Senjaya, from Indonesia. Currently teaching CIE Cambridge, AS/A Level Business 9609.

What are your current challenges being a teacher/educator in your institution/city/country? How do they influence (or even restraint) your teaching?

For example, one of the biggest challenges for teachers here is the complexity of regulations and curriculum that change from time to time. Sometimes, just right before we settle down with a curriculum system or mode, the regulations change again. It is challenging since the time constraint to adapt and implement can be quite short. While the practices at the schools have been implemented differently for the past few years.

It creates such confusion, uncertainty, and unnecessary exhaustion for everyone. Which limits our students to actually focus on what are necessary to face the 21st century learning environment. Even working environment.

Please share your thoughts, and experiences here. Thank you!

In my opinion, students should train and equip themselves with analytical thinking process, due to the information that will flood them from various, and easy to access sources of information. They should be able to identify, sort, and summarize the information based on their needs and necessities.

The second skill, that perhaps students should instil and become more incumbent in their learning process is on how to integrate the use of AI responsibly and positively. Refusing or underestimating the use and integration of AI into their learning journey and working process, will make them an inept learners. Being able to process and integrate AI in producing a high quality of works professionally will enable them to compete in the future.

Play with Purpose by @Samia-mhad18

Hi Ms. Samia! Allow me to post some feedback about your submission on gamification category. The best element of your submission and activities with your students is simplicity. It was such a delightful view to see how you successfully blended the struggles/challenges that your students facing in learning English, with the fact how fast they learn and master with controlling video games. Nothing will speed up the enthusiasm and excitement for students to learn than the ability to control and decide they feel will bring them closer to a winning spot.

You also share the benefits or perhaps, the advantages of each apps you use with your students. The four apps you introduced and explained on the video are very helpful for other educators who might are looking for alternatives to insert or conduct gamification in their classes. So, thank you for that!

The activities are also being broken down into easy steps that everyone could implement right-away. Again, the simplicity element in gamification activity is sometimes easier said than done, however you have implemented it elegantly. I love the honesty your students shared about their experience after one term doing gamification with you. Also, on your video, you actually mentioned something that could be overlooked by educators when they are about to design a gamification: focus on one skill each month. This is actually very crucial since gamification at times (especially with older students) would bring in several expected skills or contexts or sub-topics into its session, in which might deter the valuable objective of the activity. Thank you for such reminder that it is important to achieve one skill from the gamification session than just throwing several for students to master which could make them unfocused.

I hope you will keep inspiring others to implement gamification activity in their classes, and I also hope you will keep creating interactive and fun learning sessions with your students. All the best, Ms Samia!

Kind regards,

Hendra

@Oojala-Tasneem Thank you for sharing your experiences. What are your suggestion for those who might be in the same situation as you are?

How much support do the school and government offer for teachers to overcome such challenges?

I am Hendra Senjaya, I am from Indonesia. Currently I am teaching CIE Cambridge AS/A Level Business 9609. I am teaching secondary students, and this year I am teaching the Grade 10 and Grade 12 students.

My favorite part of my job is when I could lead my students to explore the deeper understanding of concepts and applications in business environment. Not only to cover our textbook topics, but also the recently activities happening around us. Business environment is a fast-pacing evolving, and a dynamic realm where a lot of different elements in a society interconnected with one another.

When I'm not working, I enjoy watching movies, and playing computer games. At times, I will just browse the internet looking for various interesting topics whether it relates to my subject of teaching, or just to fulfil my personal interests.

Good day, Irina! This sounds great! Forum like this will allow teachers and educators around the world to build collaborative works outside our rigid or restricted syllabus or curriculum.

Which perhaps would continue beyond the timeline of this contest.

While the common objectives of gamification are application of concepts, and enhanced learning, what are your most current attempts/approaches in inserting gamification in your classes?

1. What are your biggest challenge(s) in inserting gamification in your daily or day-to-day sessions?
2. What were your biggest accomplishments in using gamification in your subject?
3. What are your suggestions/encouragement for other fellow educators that are interested in inserting gamification as one of their learning tools?
4. Were they cost-effective, or how much did it cost you to prepare?

I am a firm believer that students will learn more and deeper when they could experience or implement the concepts using a medium while having fun with their peers. Even the duration of the gamification segment is short, however the impact of their learning journey will instill the true application of the topics/concepts.

So, let's learn and share together here.

@BUSHR43f4bb18a0 said in What are your current (or future) challenges in teaching?:

@Hendra Many educators face similar challenges like limited resources, high expectations, and constantly changing curricula. The most important step is aligning goals between governments and schools. Without shared values and clear direction, progress in education will remain slow and uncertain. We must work together to ensure education remains accessible, fair, and focused on real growth.

Your sharing resonates the struggles from a lot of educators around the world. The differences of objectives and limitations from the stakeholders around the school could even hinder the progress of education that is much needed.

Sometimes education community is trapped in between two raging parties with their own agendas. Their shared values cannot be aligned with one another, be it for a political reason, or just simply a factual restrictions on the field.

It has prevented a fair access to education, fundings, or even training. In a vast country with a large number of provinces, with their own regional culture values, struggles, and needs; it has created an unequality to education. Even in just two neighboring municipalities, we could find a contrasting circumstances where the struggles to access a viable and fair quality education is hard to obtain.

What we could do to offer supports for our students amidst these circumstances is to seek assistance and encouragement from other fellow educators to find more ideas, engaging activities, or materials for assessment. Government do offer assistance, however, to some extent it could be a slow process, due to some other limitations they are facing. There should be more consortium of educators such as this forum where we could arm in arm helping and assisting each other, beyond our country borders and timezones.

@Shaista-Begum Totally agree, Ms. Shaista. In the world where things move fast, and busy schedules, it can be very challenging to communicate the struggles the school is experiencing to the parents. Our attempts to build consistent communication, and clear planning sometimes are being hindered by the inability to setup proper meeting/session between schools and parents.

These challenges that we are facing should be shared with the parents. It is a dual fronts in which the two parties should always be in a good sync and consistencies. This will help students to navigate better in either preparing them or helping them with their own challenges.

Which methods do you think will work best in communicating these with the parents?

Learning Through Play: Gamification in My Classroom by @Noor-Fatima

Good day Ms. Noor!

I'd like to provide some feedback regarding your gamification activities with your students. As someone who also loves gamification in education, your video is very inspiring. Perhaps in the future you could spend time to provide insights and suggestion to other educators who are interested in implementing gamification in education.

Your video showed that you not only have one gamification model/set but several ones, and for different subjects! That is such an exemplary example for others! As a lot of us have realized, students LOVE hand-on activities that endorse direct engagement, decision making, and collaborative discussion. In such way, they sometimes dont realize that they are learning and implementing at the same time.

These activities would make them to remember and understand better and deeper rather than just answering some questions from a textbook or on an assessment sheet. Their actions and decisions would be remembered and teach them the valuable concept.

We all could see the excitement from your students when they had to engage in a direct interactive activity in your lesson. With such simple tools or materials, you were able to deliver a really delightful sessions of fun learning! I am looking forward to talking and discussing with you about gamification in education. Surely you are one of an expert on this field. Keep it up, Ms. Noor!

Kind regards,

Hendra

We have learnt so much, and so many things/elements that have become our inspirations. We delve into various topics and discussions from across subjects from so many educators here. So which one has inspired you the most and stimulate/trigger you to implement something differently?

For me, I learnt so much about on how to design and implement gamification in my classes. Things could start small and partially, to scaffold the students' ability to process the true concept behind the gameplay.

The second thing is how we should also focus on the importance of balancing the uses of technology as simple as the internet with the activity that are 'offline'. It is not to disconnect people but to reconnect individuals to understand the root of mankind, which is empathy and compassion.

How about yours?

1. What are your experiences, insights, and suggestion on how our cultural values play significant impact on our parenting style, how parents perceive the future of their children's academics and achievements?

2. What are the biggest challenges in aligning educational concepts or pedagogy around you or at your workplace?

3. How strong these values influence the way your students see their future or layout their pathway into the career they dream about?

4. Do you have any successful stories in aligning these values with your efforts in guiding your students to have the appropriate field of study based on their interests and talents?

5. How far could you go, as their teachers, in giving the needed information and understanding to parents whose cultural values that dismiss the facts of their children's academics?

E.g. parents who insist their child to take biology or medical school while their child, even they're capable of doing so, has other interests or passion, perhaps in music, or entrepreneurship. Each time, there could be differences in assessing one's abilities and performances. While the parents have the rightfully place to make a decision, as teachers we sometimes hear more from their child when they share with us about their passions in life.

We live by our culture and its values, however, in education community, we sometimes have ourselves in a position where we should give appropriate feedback, that is not the same with the parents' plans or dreams.

I would resonate the same excitation Ms. Sobia. I've learnt a lot from this competition and its forum for the past few weeks. It has given me the opportunity and spark to engage in various topics and discussions, in which has enriched me as en educator.

Every topic I read has allowed me to re-evaluate our teaching community and my own growth and development as a teacher. Thank you UNESCO IITE and NetDragon for such a wonderful platform to not only showcase our activities, experiences and achievements but as well connecting us to one another. I've met some great and inspiring teachers here, and this motivates me deeper to give more to our students. I wish all participants the best of luck, each of us is a potential winner. Hopefully there will be more program such this and reach more educators to share their knowledge, experiences, and insights.

After all, we all are bound by one true nature: we love our students, and we always wish to be able to give out our best efforts in educating and preparing them for their future. I hope all of us could stay in touch for future correspondences or even collaborations.

Once again, all the best and good luck, everyone!

Totally agree, e-textbooks could help students by having lighter backpack, easier to access, and won't have books swapped by accident. However, there are some concerns with e-textbook. One is being to make students use their electronic devices, and to some extents this could be used as an excuse to keep hogging on their gadgets more often while they're not using it for learning purposes the entire time.

It is prone to distraction from other things that will be easily accessed such as social media apps, online streaming and video games. A simple message or pop-up will take their attention away. Lastly, e-textbooks are prone to copyright infringement due to either the price is still pretty steep so they will try to find the most affordable (or even free) version of it. Which could create a situation where we want to teach and instill the value of integrity to our students, while we know the prices of e-textbooks don't always come in an affordable price.

@Shaista-Begum said in Backseaters and frontseaters in a classroom setting:

Always at the back — "less attention" zone Right up front — closest to the teacherAvoid eye contact to not be picked Hand up before the question is finished.There’s always a group at the back trying not to get noticed.
There’s always a student at the front answering every question.
Teachers even anticipate it: “Let’s hear from someone besides the front row
Backseaters are often misunderstood. While some may be disengaged, many just prefer a quieter, less visible spot in class. The key isn't to force them to the front, but to engage them where they are and help them build confidence and responsibility.
Many backseaters feel disconnected or invisible.
They're less likely to volunteer, but they often have good thoughts.

Thank you Ms. Shaista for bringing this up. Yes, we have classrooms that have a seating arrangement which will allow students to freely choose and sit at the back. It doesn't always mean they will pay less attention to the class or planning to create noises with their peers. I've had students who are actually high achievers but they prefer to stay at the back of the class. There are several reasons of this, sometimes they don't want to become the center of attention by sitting close to teacher desk, or they prefer to have the back rows as their comfort zone.

For my classes, I always arrange them into clusters. There will be between 4 to 6 students in each cluster. This will give the illusion to the students that there is a detachment between their seating position to the whole group. So then it won't matter which side they will sit at, even if their cluster is actually at the front part of the classroom. However, the downside of this arrangement is it will only be very suitable for small to medium size of classroom, say between 15 to 24 students. Larger group would be challenging as the room might not be able to accommodate cluster seating.

Yes, schools are now open yoga practices for teachers, tho perhaps the most suitable one would be in the afternoon or early evening. I am sure yoga is also a good choice for students. It will teach them the concept of mindfulness, calm, and finding serenity in the middle of their busy schedules.

Canva has become a blessing for educators and students! It has helped a lot of users who used to struggle to create presentation files or multimedia presentation. However, Canva has evolved and it is now equipped with richer features. Learning Canva can be a bit overwhelming so people start to learn from others in forums or online environment.

I'd love to know if there are great sources to learn Canva so I could also share them with my colleagues and students.

Nap time should be introduced to schools. Letting our brains to totally rest, and to freshen up will definitely help the productivity and focus of students and even teachers. However, such idea is not yet suitable to most schools. Due to the long hours of studying and academic demands, even lunch or recess times have to be made as short as possible to allow more academic hours.

Empathy is one element that can be challenging to be taught in classes. At times, there are so many topics or chapters that are not relatable to the concept of empathy. It should be identified as one element to create a generation of young learners with compassion and empathy. Hence, schools should start paying more attention to collaborative projects in which students will perform several tasks and at the completion of such task, they will understand or even practice the importance of empathy.

We know that it is perhaps the most ideal project that every school dreams to have and to do. While with the hectic schedules, and responsibilities, such approach might be overlooked.

From what I've observed, resistance to technology from teachers could be caused by several factors, however the majority of them is because the learning curves. There are so many apps and software that teachers could use for their teaching session. From creating assessment, designing simple games, to creating or generating ideas for presentation files. However, there are so much to learn, and teachers already have enough on their plates, which then hinders the progress to learn this other aspect of teaching using technology.