Chinese Continuers Examination

The NSW Higher School Certificate - Suggested Ideas on how to prepare.

The HSC Chinese Continuers examination is a three hour exam that is made up of a 25% listening section, 20% speaking section,  40% reading and responding section and 15% creative writing section.  There is an assessment component that is examined internally in school and the HSC exam is prepared by BOSTES and all students enrolled in the course take the same exam.  You can find details of requirements and past examination papers at the BOSTES site. 

All HSC examinations are rigorous and challenging with the Chinese Continuers course being no exception.  If anything, the Chinese Continuers course has proved demanding for students and much dedication and time is needed to do well in the course.  Recently, I presented a workshop for teachers and students which included resources and suggested examination preparation and strategies.  

Although the presentation was prepared for a particular course, teachers and students may find some worthwhile ideas and strategies to use while preparing for their own courses and examinations.  

The Prezi for the workshop is below.  

             

Games Based Learning in the Languages Classroom

Below is a Prezi that I created to present some ideas and thoughts about using games based learning activities in the languages classroom.  Although this was created for language teachers, you could use these ideas for any subject area.  As the Prezi is basically an outline of my presentation and does not include the discussion around the content with the participants and myself, feel free to contact me to discuss any of the content. 

In an earlier blog entry I discussed some ideas on games in the classroom.  This entry is a recap on that but mainly about how teachers could in a sequential way, develop their own movement/language, paper and digital games.  All games have the same core elements, no matter which format you use to present or play your game.  With these core elements and understanding how they work, teachers can use games in their classrooms to deepen the learning of their students in a fun and engaging way.  

Like all teaching strategies and activities, its probably best practice not to not use games in every lesson, well you could, but that would be too much work and for the students, games may lose their fun factor.  Games based learning though, could be a part of your unit of work where games elements could be incorporated into learning activities or the final activity or assessment could be the a game that the students have developed.  Project based learning or problem based learning fits nicely here as students could work on a PBL based either on a game or make a game themselves.  As most of us would use a variety of strategies and activities in the classroom, GBL could be a valuable and useful additional tool.

Many teachers incorporate gamification into PBLs or classroom activities with a points, leader board, incentives or rewards.  Team work and collaboration is a big part of GBL and gamification and a great example of how you could use a learning management system to record and show progress is Classcraft.  I'm using Classcraft as a course LMS and the participants are enjoying the activity and engagement factors.  

The Prezi contains a link to a Dropbox file of the resources from the presentation.  The files' content includes;
1. Understanding the main parts of a game.
2. "Modding" or modifying a game -  a pre-requisite to making a game.
3. Making your own paper based game.
4. Creating your own basic digital or web based games.
5. Steps on how to create a board game.
6. Game links, resources and references.

If you are a teacher in NSW or if you are interested in furthering your knowledge in GBL, you may want to register and enrol in the Games Based Learning in the Languages Classroom online course they have at the AISNSW. 

Check out @Mr_van_W and his site https://mrvanw.com/ for more great stuff on GBL. 

Feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss anything in this post.